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Lifting history’s lid on the Stickies
04 October 2009 Reviewed by Andrew Lynch
The Lost Revolution The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party
By Brian Hanley and Scott Millar
Penguin Ireland, €24
The petty quarrels of fringe political parties have always been a sitting duck for satirists . Monty Python’s Life of Brian probably captured it best in a scene where the idealistic young hero approaches a terrorist group and asks if they’re the Judean People’s Front. ‘‘Fuck off!" an irate John Cleese replies. ‘‘We’re the People’s Front of Judea."
Sadly, the bitter splits and delusional arguments that dominate this comprehensive history of the Official IRA and the Workers’ Party were anything but funny. Financed by bank robberies, money laundering and North Korean dollars, a tiny number of would-be revolutionaries set out to turn Ireland into a Celtic version of the Soviet Union.
They failed, of course, but Brian Hanley and Scott Millar’s excellent study shows how they made an impact on the political stage that was out of all proportion to their actual support.
The story begins and ends with Sean Garland, a fiery, charismatic Dubliner who was raised in one room in a tenement along with eight siblings. He joined the IRA at the age of 19 and spent a brief period as a republican secret agent within the British Army. On New Year’s Day in 1957 he took part in the disastrous attack on Brookeborough RUC barracks in Fermanagh, carrying the fatally wounded Sean South on his shoulders as he tried to flee the scene.
By the end of the 1960s,Garland was part of a faction within Sinn Féin which had undergone a sea change in their thinking. Instead of just shooting British soldiers in order to achieve a 32-county Ireland, they argued that republicans should embrace Marxist politics instead.
The outbreak of the Troubles split the party into two hostile groups, with the Provisionals carrying on the traditional nationalist struggle, while the Officials declared a new war against the capitalist classes.
Thanks to their habit of wearing badges with adhesive backing to commemorate the 1916 Rising, Garland and his colleagues soon acquired the rather scornful nickname ‘The Stickies’.
Despite their initial claims that they wanted to replace bullets with placards, the Official IRA started out trying to kill as many Brits as their Provo rivals before calling a ceasefire in 1972. Old habits die hard, however, and Hanley and Millar cite extensive evidence to show that the party’s military wing continued to engage in robberies, punishment beatings and various mafia-style activities until well into the 1980s.
Meanwhile, Official Sinn Féin set about establishing an electoral base in the south, changing their name to Sinn Fe¤ in the Workers’ Party (SFWP) and then simply the Workers’ Party. Although the whiff of sulphur never entirely left them, they built up a strong presence in working-class areas and succeeded in electing a handful of councillors and TDs.
Their policy platform was communist in all but name, while some of the party’s leading lights - such as former IRA prisoner Proinsias De Rossa - strayed so far from their nationalist roots that they ended up sounding like neo-unionists.
The Irish electorate is an instinctively cautious one that has little time for either left-wing or rightwing extremists. The Workers’ Party never secured more than 5 per cent of the vote in a national election and often got much less than that.
Even so, they managed to attract more than their fair share of publicity - partly because they attracted such talented politicians as ex-student leaders Pat Rabbitte and Eamon Gilmore, and partly because they had many powerful cheerleaders in the media.
Some of the book’s most intriguing details concern the Stickies’ influence in RTE where, for a time, they exerted a strong editorial control over Today Tonight (the forerunner of Prime Time).
The central figure in all these rows was producer Eoghan Harris, who started out as an orthodox Marxist and then outraged his comrades by announcing that socialism was dead and, even more shockingly, ‘‘entrepreneurs are not evil’’.
It was the start of an extraordinary ideological journey that would end with him supporting the invasion of Iraq, loudly defending Bertie Ahern on the Late Late Show during the 2007 general election and becoming a Taoiseach’s nominee to the Seanad.
While few of Harris’s colleagues went quite that far, the Workers’ Party eventually fell apart because its more ambitious members could see that holding on to their old-style socialist baggage would condemn them to permanent opposition. De Rossa and his followers created a new party, Democratic Left, that served in the Rainbow Coalition and then bowed to reality by merging with Labour.
The Workers’ Party still exists but in a much weakened form, while the 75-year-old Garland is resisting an attempt to extradite him to the US where he is wanted for questioning about a dollar counterfeiting operation.
The advance word on this book was that it would severely embarrass some people who are still active in politics today. In fact, while Hanley and Millar have uncovered extensive details of the Officials’ dubious activities, they largely absolve the Workers’ Party’s elected representatives of any direct responsibility.
A more damning allegation is that the whole affair was a monumental waste of time and energy, with starry-eyed radicals squabbling for decades over the imaginary details of a revolution that was never going to happen. Brian of Nazareth would have known how they felt.
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