January

LEGACY OF THE HUNGER STRIKES

Lessons Learned, Lessons Forgotten

Adams may have to concede defeat
By Malachi O'Doherty
Belfast Telegraph
6 Feb 2001

FIVE former hunger strikers rounded on the Sinn Fein leadership last week at an under-reported meeting in Conway Mill. The meeting was called to debate the legacy of the hunger strikes but it turned almost immediately into a debate on whether republican principles had been discarded by the Sinn Fein leadership.

Tommy McKearney, who fasted for 53 days as part of the 1980 hunger strike, attacked the ex-prisoners' group Coiste na n-Iarchimi for ignoring republican prisoners who are members of the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA. He said he did not necessarily agree with those prisoners, but that he would never deny that they were republicans. That won warm applause.

Coiste had been campaigning last week for the eradication of the criminal records of republican ex-prisoners so that they might find work without facing discrimination.

John Nixon, who also participated in the 1980 Maze hunger strike for the INLA, told of how he had considered running for a seat in local government in Armagh until he was visited by two men and told that if he did stand for that seat he would never stand again.

Brendan Hughes, who led that hunger strike, criticised Sinn Fein for doing nothing about the low wages paid to ex-prisoners by cowboy builders who expected their workers to draw the dole while working for them.

Exploitation, fraud, intimidation, corruption of the electoral process; it was a serious range of charges against the republican movement - and all came from former members and allies.

Marian Price appeared the most militant of the panel. She explained that republicans did not seek a mandate for "armed struggle" and never had done so. It was, therefore, no slight on the Real IRA to claim that they were anti-democratic.

Marian Price survived six months on hunger strike through force feeding in the early Seventies in an English prison with her sister Dolores and Gerry Kelly, demanding transfer to the Northern Ireland. They won their transfer, and the sisters were later given early release on health grounds.

Billy McKee was at the meeting but did not express an opinion or join the panel. The others appeared to construe his presence as moral support. McKee was one of the founder members of the Provisional IRA. He won special category status for paramilitary prisoners with his own hunger strike in 1972.

The moral clout of this assembly of near martyrs of the republican cause is probably enormous. They can not be dismissed as "ceasefire soldiers." They believe that Gerry Adams has betrayed the cause and they are angry.

Judging by the passion of many in the 200 strong audience, they represent a substantial disaffection from Sinn Fein and the peace process within the republican community.

"What was it for, I ask myself," said John Nixon.

They are right to fear that their "war" was for nothing. They are right to believe that Sinn Fein has rewritten history to make a victory out of republicans accepting what they had previously rejected.

Coiste na n-Iarchimi also seeks a history in which all IRA members were fine decent people who only did their best for their country.

I spoke to bomber Ella O'Dwyer last week for Sunday Sequence and that is certainly how she remembers it.

The question republicans are wrestling with among themselves is one of how history is to record the meaning of their campaign.

It is the same thing with which Sinn Fein is wrestling with unionists and the British. The decommissioning demand is a contest over versions of history more than anything. The IRA refusal to disarm is a refusal to accept that their weapons were less legitimate than those of the RUC..

The Republican Writers' Group, which organised the debate on the hunger strikes, argues that Adams has no moral authority to condemn, say the Omagh bomb, because the intellectual fingerprints of the Provisionals are all over it. They are right. (And note how, when a republican wants to tarnish Sinn Fein with the handiwork of RIRA he does it a lot more elegantly than any unionist can).

Most of the disaffected republicans do not want a resumption of "armed struggle" any more than the current leadership of the IRA and Sinn Fein do. But they need to talk to each other about whether there was any point in the war in the first place.

Gerry Adams might have to take old friends aside and say plainly to them what no one ever expects him to say to a unionist or a journalist, something along these lines: "Look, we lost. We never had a chance of winning. It was going to go on forever. We cashed in our chips with a bit of dignity. It was the best we were ever going to get".

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