Fourthwrite.........
For a socialist republic
Fourthwrite 
.......................Issue No.
7
Republican Voices
Book launch in Saint Patrick’s Hall, Coalisland
Pauline Hadaway
Saint Patrick’s Hall, Coalisland provided the modest setting for the launch of Republican Voices, an important, new book, recording the recollections and ideas of six prominent republicans over the last thirty years of conflict in Ireland.
As a book launch, it was a rather humble affair. Hot, brown tea in paper cups and not a bottle of chilled Burgundy or a sun dried tomato about the place. With neither press releases, nor photo opportunities and a guest panel, who thankfully preferred ideas to sound bites, the evening was a triumph of substance over style.
As a sizeable number, including a good many young faces, settled into the hall, Patricia Campbell introduced three speakers, each of whom had made a contribution to the book. Former hunger striker, Tommy McKearney, historian Kevin Bean from Manchester, one of the editors, and Bernadette McAliskey who wrote the foreword.
Tommy McKearney welcomed us all to St Patrick’s Hall, offering apologies for what had been an eleventh hour change of venue, necessitated when the advertised venue, had pulled out at the last minute. McKearney reminded us of the hall’s venerable place in Irish history, when way back in Easter 1916, a group of local volunteers had gathered there intending to raise freedom’s flag in the North, only to be disappointed in somewhat similar circumstances. McKearney had a clear rapport with the audience and in a warmly received speech, punctuated by humour, he presented the key idea that was to be picked up by others: that the past may best be linked to the present through the continuity of ideas.
Kevin Bean spoke next, explaining the book’s purpose, not as a definitive history of the Republican movement, but as a contribution to a greater understanding of its meaning. As a historian, Bean felt that Republican Voices, unmediated and existing outside the ‘controlled thought of party politics’, provided a revealing source of historical raw material. Apart from an ‘historical obligation’ to record experience, Bean also felt a more pressing responsibility to inform current political analysis and debate, so long as history is “rewritten in the service of the present.” Pointing out that revisionism is “no longer confined to Dublin 4”, he hoped that we would be hearing more republican voices challenging the growing misrepresentation of their history.
Appropriately enough, Bernadette McAliskey followed with just such a challenge, requiring the audience to consider the very meaning of republicanism itself with a reminder that republican ideology reflects a diverse range of opinion and has a long history, predating Wolfe Tone by many centuries. Nevertheless, she stated, there are basic tenets which define it, principally, that all authority has a human source and where it is exercised over, or on behalf of, people without their direct consent, it becomes an infringement of those people’s rights and authority.
As for Irish Republicanism, McAliskey traced its inspiration to the French Revolution, with its principles of equality, fraternity and liberty, which, in the Irish context, demanded an extension of rights to all the people of Ireland, Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.
Then in the first of many asides, which cast light on current political tensions, McAliskey pointed out that, Irish Republicanism though often driven along that road historically, should not be defined by its commitment or otherwise to armed struggle. For unlike their North American cousins, the people of Ireland, were never invested with any innate ‘right to bear arms’. Furthermore, she said, the road of armed struggle had too often led republicanism into a harmful alliance with nationalism, with its natural tendency towards exclusion of, or outnumbering ‘the other’. Referring with distaste to the supposed strategy of winning national freedom through demographics, in other words by ‘outbreeding the enemy’, McAliskey reminded us that not only was the idea itself offensive, but women had remained without power for many a long century in spite of their demographic majority. For McAliskey the end of this particular road had tragically lead to the formal embrace of the Adams, Hume, Reynolds triumvirate, which like it or not, had in turn been endorsed by consent of republican people.
In a moving and passionate appeal, McAliskey asked the intently listening audience to consider how Irish Nationalism would define ‘the other’. Not surely our Protestant neighbours, she said, upon whom Irishness had been bestowed, whether they liked it or not. What place would others, such as immigrants, find within Irish nationalism and what she asked, of those who though Irish, failed to display the supposed virtues of Irishness, the “ne’er do wells”, the drug addicts, those at the bottom of the heap? What comfort could they expect to find?
In a resounding endorsement of the aim of Republican Voices to stand as a record of the truth, she reminded the audience that peace, like liberty, required eternal vigilance. Remembering how, in the early days of Civil Rights, she had not properly understood an elderly man’s warning, that “this will end in war”. In 15 years time when we become the old people who, she asked, will understand our warnings, unless our memories are recorded as testimony?
The meeting ended with some thoughtful questions from the floor, reflecting people’s genuine concern to discover the truth of their own experience. History misunderstood becomes myth and how will the next generation separate the two, where the present generation have failed? People, hungry for ideas and tired of strategy, talked about the need for more such meetings.
