Learning from 1981
A Chara,
With the year 2000 fast approaching, it strikes me as absolutely essential that today's young people should be taught about the hunger-strikes of 1980-1981.
It was the hunger-strike experience which made such a huge impact on `my generation' of teenagers/school pupils, providing for us the political education of a lifetime in the same way that the Civil Rights campaign made a lasting impression on others 30 years ago.
For us, the sacrifice of the hunger-strikers, the suffering of their families, the election victories of Bobby Sands and Owen Carron in Fermanagh/South Tyrone are only a touch away. We have vivid memories of Maggie Thatcher's intransigence, the blanket and the dirty protests, the mass mobilisations, Cardinal O Fiach's visit to the H Blocks, the Relatives' Action Committees, the village and street rosaries and vigils, Youth Against H-Blocks. Indeed, we can easily recall the very suspension of normal living while our political prisoners fought valiantly against criminalisation in Armagh and Long Kesh.
For anyone under 25, however, the hunger-strikes as merely a part of history which will probably never be told properly to them unless we decide that it will be otherwise. If we accept that the era of struggle when Britain tried to criminalise our prisoners was a watershed, was monumental and absolutely a landmark for all of us, then we should embark on a well-thought-out programme of education for our young people, using the hunger-strikes as the basis for such a project.
There is a reading list available in Nor Meekly Serve My Time, co-edited and written by prisoners themselves, David Beresford's Ten Men Dead, The Diary of Bobby Sands, Gerry McGeough's Personal Recollections of the 1981 Bobby Sands Election Campaign and other publications. Their families and friends live among us, as do people who participated in the protest with whom the hunger-strikers shared cells and landings. There are videos and newspapers of the time.
I accept and respect totally the fact that much of historical significance has happened both before and after the hunger-strikes. The loss of one is as poignant as the loss of ten and there is an equivalence in death for everyone. But if young people are to understand what is happening around them politically today then they could do worse than study the hunger-strikes of 1980-1981 and their political legacy.
I have had the privilege in the latter half of the 1990s to address anniversary commemorations for Volunteers Francis Hughes, Kevin Lynch and Thomas McElwee in Bellaghy and Dungiven. As a member of the Tyrone National Graves Association I have been part of a committee that organises a commemoration for Martin Hurson every July. Perhaps, this has uniquely focused my mind on the lessons and story of the most recent hunger strikes.
Republicans remain correct to invoke the memory of 1916, but in my view - and for the sake of young people - 1981 should be similarly recalled. Are there any views out there on the concept of forming `1981 Societies' so that our young people are educated on this defining era of our struggle?
Barry Mc Elduff,
Sinn Féin Assembly Member,
West Tyrone.
Alternative strategy needed
I have argued against the current Sinn Féin strategy and for an alternative at some length in these pages. I did so because (I believe) the leadership strategy cannot achieve republican objectives nor advance republican politics.
Republicanism seeks good government in the interests of the common welfare through its principles of democracy, citizenship and internationalism., liberty, equality and fraternity. Republican strategy identifies as essential democratic self-determination in Ireland and the avoidance at all costs of sectarianism (in particular the Orange-Green division).
Nationalism places the key republican principle of citizenship with the category of nationality (which could lead to sectarianism, chauvinism and racism). Where republicanism welcomes nation and nationality as forms of community and identity, nationalism elevates them to principles of political organisation. This preference for the nation and nationality over a common citizenship leads to profoundly different political outcomes; eg. the difference between self-determination in Ireland (a republican approach giving every citizen democratic power) and national self-determination (a nationalist approach privileging only the members of the nation) is enormous; the allocation of rights and obligations on the basis of citizenship or of nationality leads to very different societies.
The leadership strategy is essentially nationalist. It seeks a pan-nationalist alliance with the SDLP and the 26-County state and parties, supported by the Irish-American establishment. Revealingly, it also sought the support of the U.S. and even Britain. Does it seek to apply the weight of this alliance aggainst British government in Ireland, or partition, or the 26-County state that props it up? No, it directs it solely against the unionists. There is little republicanism here and less likelihood of a republican outcome.
The consequences of this anti-republican direction can be seen everywhere: the co-option of Sinn Féin into the partition system; the acceptance of consent in the context of continuing British rule; the continual demoinising of Trimble and finger-pointing at unionists in An Phoblacht, in the absence of any critical discussion of republican strategy; the continual focus on nationalist/republican victimhood and a failure to imagine how the war looked from the other side; the collapse of the republican struggle into policing its own organisations, policing republicans opposed to the Sinn Féin strategy, policing nationalist/republican communities, etc - outside the context of the war, this is a very slippery slope.
There is more need than ever for republican politics. Originally, I believed there was a role for a refined and redirected armed component in a republican strategy. The moment has passed. There is no longer a base for it and objectives have been so reduced, there is no cause of war. But these republican principles of democracy, citizenship and internationalism, liberty, equality and fraternity, are still vital and necessary. The first step is to build a prepublican politics and a base for it.
Finbar Cullen
Maynooth.
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