Rewriting the ‘Politics of Irish Freedom’

Liam O’Ruairc

A spectre is haunting republican publications: the spectre of re-visionism. Gerry Adams’s most important book was published in 1986 under the title "The Politics of Irish Freedom". A revised and updated edition of this book was published in 1995 under the title "Free Ireland - Towards a Lasting Peace". A close reading of the text will reveal a number of important modifications. The most striking is probably that Chapter 7 of the first edition, entitled "The SDLP, Loyalists and Republicans", has entirely disappeared. In this chapter, Gerry Adams criticised the "collaborationist" SDLP, and illustrated his argument by pointing out various reactionary stances of the SDLP; like its opposition to the rent and rates strike or the struggle of the hunger strikers. It is remarkable that in the second edition of the book, such criticism of the SDLP was nowhere to be found. Gone are the characterisations of the SDLP as "a fully fledged Catholic partitionist party" and as a bunch of "Uncle Tom" type individuals (1986, pp.110-111). And also gone are the days where the main republican newspaper could still denounce John Hume as "a dangerous collaborator...not to be trusted" ("An Phoblacht/Republican News", 26 August 1982, p.2).

What could justify such textual modifications? How could John Hume suddenly be trusted? Was it because the SDLP had undergone a radical conversion? Or was it, to use the words of Francie Molloy, because Sinn Fein had since declared that it was "prepared to administer British rule in Ireland for the foreseeable future"? The publisher, Brandon Books, did not make those changes. Gerry Adams did. The SDLP is no longer to be presented as the collaborationist "Stoop Down Low Party", and its opposition to the hunger strikers or the rent and rates strike is now to be forgotten. Such rewriting is worrying. Now history is rewritten with the SDLP not being "collaborators". And parallel to this, in many republican quarters, individuals such as Anthony McIntyre are being branded as the "new Vincent McKenna", or "pro-Unionist" in the case of Tommy Gorman (for dialoguing with Malachi O’Doherty) rather than genuine republicans who just happen to have some strategic differences with the Sinn Fein leadership.

What are we to expect now? Histories of the 1980 hunger strike where Tommy Mc Kearney and Brendan Hughes did not play any part? That Tommy Gorman never escaped from The Maidstone ? This seems a bit incredible. But 15 years ago, no one would have believed that one-day Sinn Fein policy would be to "administer British rule in Ireland for the foreseeable future"...