With Sinn Fein seemingly positioned to enter government in Dublin, former Department of Foreign Affairs head and Ireland’s former US ambassador, Sean Donlon – a long time critic of the Provisional Movement – tells the Meath Archaeological and Historical Society and Meath Peace Group  that it is time for Sinn Fein to bury the IRA. With a general election looming will the Provos pay any heed?

Sean Donlon’s full paper:

‘From Sunningdale to the Good Friday Agreement’

I have been asked to speak about my recollections of the period from Sunningdale in 1973 to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. (As an Irish diplomat I spent much of the ’70s travelling in Northern Ireland, served in Washington from 1978 to 1981 and headed the Department of Foreign Affairs from 1981 to 1987 when I moved to the private sector. I returned to the public sector in 1994 at John Bruton’s invitation and worked with him while he was Taoiseach until 1997.)

My recollections of the ’70s in Northern Ireland are dominated by violence. For more than a quarter century the situation was marked by what Bertie Ahern recently described as “the ferocious trauma of the Troubles”. I will return to this aspect of the Troubles later but I’d like to begin by briefly referring to some earlier events.

The 60s had seen the beginning of what might be described as the winds of change in Northern Ireland. O’Neill and Lemass met twice in 1965 – at the initiative of O’Neill. The Campaign for Social Justice led by the McCloskeys in Dungannon in 1964 began to document and publicise anti-nationalist discrimination in housing, employment and electoral boundaries. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was set up in 1967. John Hume’s seminal articles in the Irish Times setting out a new nationalist agenda appeared in 1964. Instead of the traditional ‘you the Brits created the Irish Problem now solve it’ Hume set out a totally new approach. It was based on three principles viz. a rejection of violence, no change in the status of Northern Ireland without the consent of the majority and a recognition that unionism and nationalism were equally valid political positions. The Hume principles were to be eventually embraced by the main political parties in the Republic and to form the basis of the policies of successive US Administrations. They were also to become the foundation stones for the Sunningdale arrangements and the Good Friday Agreement.

By the end of the 60s the optimism of the earlier part of the decade had been replaced by unrest, street riots and fatalities. British troops were sent in in 1969 and a programme of reform was initiated. It was, however, too little too late. Security policy began to dominate and events such as the one-sided introduction of internment in August 1971 and Bloody Sunday in Derry a few months later eventually led to the abolition of Stormont and Direct Rule from London. In London the view that Dublin had nothing to do with Northern Ireland began to change and the 1972 Green Paper accepted that there was an All-Ireland dimension.

At the meeting in Sunningdale in December 1973 the Irish and British Governments, the Faulkner unionists, Hume’s SDLP and the Alliance Party reached agreement on a power-sharing government for Northern Ireland and a Council of Ireland. Within a matter of months, however, these arrangements, even when watered down to drop the Council of Ireland, were brought down by a combination of unionist opposition, an escalation of IRA violence and a failure of the new British Government led by Harold Wilson to back what Heath’s government had agreed at Sunningdale. One of the lessons we learned from Sunningdale was the importance of that Dublin and London singing from the same hymn sheet.

The fact that Ireland and the UK had joined the Common Market together in 1973 was also helpful. Irish officials and politicians were now meeting regularly in what might be called the neutral climate of Brussels.

A little known fact is that immediately after the fall of Sunningdale Wilson and his inner cabinet decided “to disengage entirely from Northern Ireland, severing all constitutional links between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK”. Officials were instructed to study the implications of this decision but neither the Northern Ireland parties nor the Irish Government were consulted. The report by the officials is now available in the National Archives in Kew and makes scary reading. Fortunately a small but well placed group of London officials persuaded Wilson that unilateral withdrawal would cause chaos which would not be confined to the island of Ireland.

Another unilateral British decision which had implications for Ireland was the decision to initiate and maintain contact with the IRA. The first secret meeting was held in County Donegal on 20 June 1972 and involved Gerry Adams and David O’Connell representing the IRA and Philip Woodfield representing the British Government. It is now known that for the duration of the Troubles direct or occasionally indirect contact between the two sides was always maintained, thereby giving the IRA credibility and grounds for believing the terrorism might eventually be rewarded. All this at a time when London was publicly shouting at Dublin to “do something about the IRA”.

The decade from the mid-70s was politically bleak in Northern Ireland and in Anglo-Irish relations. But far away in America a decision was taken which was to have very significant, long-term consequences for Northern Ireland. In August 1977 President Jimmy Carter issued a statement calling for “the establishment in Northern Ireland of a government which would command widespread acceptance and for a just solution which would involve the support of the Irish Government”. This was a dramatic change of US policy. As far back as 1880 leaders of Irish nationalism had been seeking US support for their objectives. Parnell visited Washington in 1880 and addressed the House of Representatives. Pearse lobbied in 1914 and de Valera spent two years 1919-21 in the US seeking recognition for Irish independence. The US stuck rigidly to its position that because of its special relationship with the UK, it would not intervene in matters they regarded as exclusively internal to the UK. Even President Kennedy could not be moved from this position before his Irish visit in 1963. Jimmy Carter was a surprising instrument of the change. He was one of the few US presidents for whom we could find no Irish roots and he had never been to Ireland before his election. Two things brought about the change: firstly, instead of asking for US support for our position we asked for the US to join with Ireland and the UK – two countries with which the US had special relationships – in finding a way forward in Northern Ireland. Secondly, Irish-American Democrat politicians supportive of Dublin’s position, Tip O’Neill, Ted Kennedy, Pat Moynihan and Hugh Carey, were now in prominent political positions in the US and were prepared to use their influence on the President’s policy on Ireland. Presidents after Carter notably Reagan, Clinton and currently Biden have continued this policy of engagement.

Back to the island of Ireland. As I said earlier things were politically bleak for the decade beginning in 1975. Thatcher’s handling of the hunger strikes in the early 80s and Haughey’s clumsy handling of the Falklands conflict in 1982 brought Anglo-Irish relations to yet another all-time low.

When Garret FitzGerald became Taoiseach in 1983, he set up the New Ireland Forum which focussed on analysing nationalist identity and defining principles for creating a new Ireland. When the Forum issued its report FitzGerald persuaded Thatcher to join with him in focussing on the Northern Ireland situation. A small group of British and Irish officials was tasked with negotiating an agreement. During the negotiations the IRA attempted to murder Thatcher at her Brighton Tory Party conference and there were public problems for FitzGerald when Thatcher appeared to reject everything in her “out, out, out” remarks. President Reagan was very helpful throughout and when an Anglo-Irish Treaty was finally signed in 1985 the US joined with the EU and other countries in giving it financial backing.

The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 is different from Sunningdale and the Good Friday Agreement in that it did not involve the Northern Ireland political parties. It did, however, significantly bind the two governments to a broadly common approach. It also gave the Irish Government an “intrusive” role in the processes of government in Northern Ireland and enabled an Irish Government office to be opened in Northern Ireland for the first time.

One last building block for the Good Friday Agreement was the signing of the Joint Framework Document between Dublin and London in 1995. This set out a shared understanding to assist prospective discussions and negotiations involving the two governments and the Northern Ireland parties.

I return now to a continuing feature of the Troubles in the 70s/80s/and 90s , namely the campaign of terror and violence and the major role played in it by the Republican Movement, Sinn Fein and the IRA. Sinn Fein is linked to the IRA by labyrinthine administrative structures and to quote its constitution “Sinn Fein is the political wing of the Republican Movement and supports in principle the legitimate struggle being waged by the IRA”. Martin McGuinness has put it succinctly “The IRA freedom fighters and the Sinn Fein freedom fighters are one and the same thing”. Gerry Adams has also put it simply when as Sinn Fein President he said “We support the IRA”.

During the 30 years of the Troubles there were 3,636 fatalities. That compares with 504 fatalities during the Easter Rising, 2,346 in the War of Independence and about 2,000 in the Civil War. 1,771 fatalities during the Troubles are directly attributed to the IRA and at least 636 of these were innocent, uninvolved citizens. The IRA killed five times more people than the British Army, the UDR and the RUC combined. Their campaign extended to Britain and the continent of Europe and in this jurisdiction they murdered a member of the Oireachtas, members of An Garda Siochana, of the Army (Oglaigh na hEireann) and of the Prison Service. They robbed our banks and post offices and kidnapped people including Ben Dunne, Don Tidey and Tiede Herrema.

They washed out in a sea of blood the life’s work of the SDLP, the Civil Rights movement, and the Campaign for Social Justice. As Seamus Mallon has said “the violent republicanism of the IRA has inflicted more lethal damage on the concept of Irish unity than many decades of unionism ever could”. They have left a darkened stain on our nationalist history.

And there was no moral justification for the campaign. Church leaders asserted this from as early as 1971 and in 1974 a committee set up by the leaders of all the Christian churches on the island of Ireland concluded that “there is no justification in the present situation in Ireland for the existence of any paramilitary organisations and no justification for the use of violence to achieve political objectives”.

It is, of course, important to acknowledge that in recent times the IRA have discontinued their campaign of violence and they have joined with the other parties to the Good Friday Agreement in reaffirming “total and absolute commitment to exclusively democratic and peaceful means of resolving differences on political issues”. But the structures linking Sinn Fein and the IRA remain in place. And their ultimate loyalty appears to be to the “sovereign Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916” rather than to the Irish Constitution of 1937.

As Sinn Fein now aspire to take control of government in this jurisdiction it would be helpful if they further clarified their position:

Will they break their links with the IRA?

Will they use their influence to disband the IRA?

In almost every decade since the foundation of the State 100 years ago the Republican Movement has been active. It is time that we should definitively clarify for ourselves and for the world that violence has no place in our democracy. One way of achieving this would be to have the new Electoral Commission, which is responsible for registering political parties, require as a condition of registration that all political parties declare their fidelity to the Irish nation and loyalty to the State and undertake to faithfully observe the laws of the State and respect its democratic values. Alternatively or additionally members of the Dail and Seanad might be required to take an oath with similar wording which, incidentally, is the wording new Irish citizens are required to take.

Seán Donlon – October 2023

HUGH J. CURRAN

10/15/2023

“I and the public know/ What all schoolchildren learn/ Those to whom evil is done/ do evil in return.” — W. H. Auden |

Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – There were elements in Ireland whose anger against Britain overwhelmed any other sentiment. Three hundred years of settler colonialism, dispossession and denigration of language, culture, and religion, left a legacy of deep-seated resentment.  I was born in Donegal, part of the province of Ulster, and often heard my father’s smoldering resentment at the historical traumas still raw in Ulster up to the 1998 Peace Accord when the Easter Friday agreement allowed Indigenous Irish Nationalists to experience the same civil rights as British Loyalists.

I had rebelled at my father’s one-sided view of history, which considered one nation as the source of all evil as it pertained to Ireland. But after reading and reflecting on 17^th century Irish history that involved three invasions from England resulting in a 40% reduction of the native population and then a million Irish starving to death in the Great Hunger of the mid-19th century in a famine that could have been averted if not for the English policy of “laissez-faire”. I then read insightful books by Caroline Elkin on Britain’s colonialism in Kenya and Thomas Dalrymple on Britain in India and gradually came to a better understanding of my father’s perspective.

It was not until the late 19^th century that Prime Minister Gladstone helped to enact legislation to free the indigenous Irish from the onerous and exacting rents that had supported a landlord system which had seen the majority of the wealth of the country siphoned into British and Anglo-Irish hands.

Article continues after bonus IC video 
“Dublin in the rubble: Rare glimpses of Ireland’s Easter Uprising – BBC News” 

It was during the WWI postwar period that Britain enacted the Balfour Declaration which gave tacit approval to Zionism, thus allowing an influx of Jewish immigrants into Israel. In the Declaration only a couple of phrases were given over to acknowledging that the Indigenous Palestinians needed to be treated fairly. 

By 1930 the Jewish population was one third of the population of Israel but only owned 7% of the land. By 1935 Haifa had a majority Jewish population. In the early 1930s PM Ramsey McDonald admitted that Jewish settlements in Palestine was the purpose of the League of Nations Mandate. 

David Ben-Gurion in 1934 stated: “The Palestinian Arabs will not be sacrificed so that Zionism might be realized. According to our conception of Zionism, we are neither desirous nor capable of building our future in Palestine at the expense of Arabs…”

With the onslaught of WWII and the tragedy of the holocaust, funds from Europe and an annual subsidy of $3 billion worth of weapons from the U.S. Israel population substantially increased. But this was not the case with the Palestinians. Their land continued to contract as dispossession became normalized.  The result was a further marginalization of the Indigenous Palestinians and their desperation as the Jewish leadership, in league with the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, found even more ways to expropriate Palestinian land.

As was the case in Ireland and the Americas in the 17^th and 18^thcenturies, the victims of land expropriation were blamed for resisting or fighting back. In Israel’s case any criticism concerning the dispossession of Palestinian land was seen as anti-Israel or anti-Semitic.  Peace groups, such as Gush Shalom, founded in 1993 by Uri Avnery, have decried the illegal taking of land by settlers in the West Bank. Gush Shalom does not believe in the “so called national consensus” which it considers to be based on misinformation. It wishes “to establish an independent and sovereign State of Palestine”. 

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister suggested in a 1918 book that the “fellahin [indigenous rural villagers] are descended from ancient Jewish and Samaritan farmers”, In more recent years, genetic studies have demonstrated that, at least paternally, “Jewish ethnic divisions” and the Palestinians are related to each other. Genetic studies on Jews have shown that Jews and Palestinians are closer to each other than the Jews are to their host countries. Given this genetic proximity to each other, one would think that fair dealing and genuine rapprochement would be honored and encouraged. 

The Israeli historian, Ihan Pappe, who explored Palestinian issues, wrote in “The Forgotten Palestinians”:  that “the policy towards the Palestinian minority was determined by a security minded group of decision makers and executed by Ben Gurion’s unfailingly ruthless advisors on Arab affairs, who were in favor of expelling as many Palestinians as possible and confining the rest within well-guarded enclaves”.

In the present time we are faced with the brutal attack by the extremist militant group, Hamas, who emerged from Gaza with incredible fury and slaughtered hundreds of Israeli people. These horrific acts have brought upon themselves, and hundreds of thousands of civilians, terrible consequences, as Israeli military forces, supported by American weapons, have caused death and injury to many innocent victims; 40% are estimated to be children. Did Hamas really consider the terrible retribution that would be exacted when they undertook their fool-hardy act? 

The historical causes of conflict in Gaza still have to be faced despite this atrocity. But this disproportionate bombing of civilians in response to Hamas horrific acts, do not take into account the children of Gaza, who have already been traumatized by ten Israeli military assaults between 2006 and 2023. In just one of these assaults in 2008 1,417 Palestinian and 13 Israeli deaths took place.  

Thousands are now suffering injury and death in Gaza. It was estimated that at least 500 children have died from Israeli air strikes on Gaza. This disproportionate response to Hamas may also have the purpose of compelling Palestinians to leave their ancestral land. Dispossession by whatever means is an ancient tactic, whether taking place in Ireland or in the expropriating of Indigenous land from Native Americans. 

In the 21^st century reconciliation groups have sprung up all over the U.S. and Canada to help redress and atone for the deep traumas caused by dispossession, as well as by the Residential school system. Israel still has time to change its policies and follow the recommendations of Gush Shalom: to “safeguard the security of both Israel and Palestine by mutual agreement and guarantees”

Filed Under: Colonialism, Featured, History, Ireland, Israel/ Palestine

As I write this a day-long, multi-pronged assault by air, sea and land is still ongoing in the skies, waterfronts and streets of Israel, launched with what appears to be complete and total secrecy and surprise and in the evident absence of intelligence leaks to Israel by the Islamic group Hamas. The violence today shows that the much vaunted Israeli intelligence agencies, and their American and European allies, were totally in the dark about Hamas’ plans.

And as I write this we are also awaiting the publication the next few days or so of a report from a retired British police chief centred on the story of how the IRA was effectively brought to its knees thanks to the efforts of a single, well-placed IRA agent who worked for the British intelligence apparatus in Northern Ireland, and through whose activity goodness knows how many other potential converts to the British cause were generated. The IRA and its weapons are gone and its political representatives recently accepted invitations to the coronation of a British monarch.