We live in a time when the Irish population are being herded towards taking a suitably state-sponsored outraged position on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Groomed for war by the pro-imperialist ruling class, those failing to show sufficient emotion are denounced with determined vehemence. Playing his part, the current Free State leader, Micheál Martin, hotly criticised Sinn Féin President, Mary Lou McDonald for her vacillation around the propaganda that saw NATO and western imperialism caught in a Manichean struggle with the ‘evil East’.
Speaking last January, Martin, playing the role of ventriloquist dummy for NATO, claimed that Sinn Féin “will never criticise Russia” attacking its “notable silence” over the Putin regime’s build-up of military forces on the Ukrainian border. Ultimately Martin succeeded in his role of exorcist, and within days Mary Lou, unable to swim against the tide of a sustained campaign by the western imperialist nations, had fallen into line.
The degeneration of a revolutionary movement into a parliamentary machine, ever apologising for its past, ever apologising for breaking with the dominant narrative is a deeply depressing process and it is a long time since Friedrich Engels spoke of, ‘Two hundred thousand men – and what men! People who have nothing to lose, two-thirds of whom are clothed in rags, genuine proletarians and sans culottes and, moreover, Irishmen, wild, headstrong, fanatical Gaels. One who has never seen Irishmen cannot know them. Give me two hundred thousand Irishmen and I will overthrow the entire British monarchy.’
In recent weeks, DUP Assembly member Joanne Bunting had sought permission to plant a tree in the grounds of Parliament Buildings at Stormont as part of the Queen’s Green Canopy project, a largely lacklustre initiative that encourages people across the UK to “Plant a Tree for the Jubilee”. In responding to this news, Ms McDonald said: “I think it is important that we are respectful of the identity of our citizens who are British… For those who will celebrate the jubilee, I wish them well and a good jubilee and for those of us that don’t I believe we are now big enough, bold enough, generous enough to acknowledge the identity of others.” She added: “Can I also extend to the British Queen a word of congratulations because 70 years is quite some record. That is what you call a lifetime of service.”
Leaving aside the acceptance of the notion that the monarchy is somehow a service, as the supposed guardian of the republican tradition, Mary Lou had nothing to say for the ideology that would seek to sweep this archaic institution from Irish shores.
But Sinn Féin is following a well-trodden path towards the post-republican mediocrity of the likes of Fianna Fail, doomed to live the long drawn out humiliation of ‘we have changed’ and ‘we made mistakes in the past,’ reciting endless platitudes about how differences can be solved through talking. It is unlikely however that such open-ended statements about dialogue are taken seriously, nor perhaps does the Sinn Féin leadership bother to ponder the veracity of such a viewpoint.
In China it has been said that, ‘The emperor burns down villages, but the people are forbidden to light candles’ and the republican struggle has been deemed to be beyond the pale at this time. As always, the state must retain the monopoly of violence forcing the Sinn Féin leadership to cease to stand on principle and play a game. Proving again and again that they have surrendered, their enemies still go through the motions of accusing them of being what they once were. But subserviently bowing down to power reaps no rewards and falling into line behind Mary Lou et al, will see the words and deeds of such republicans as Connolly, Sands, Farrell discarded in disarray in pursuit of a kind of respectability and the acceptance of those that are the sworn historical enemies of the Irish people.
How far the SF leadership has descended becomes painfully clear when we recall the words of James Connolly, which needs to be quoted at some length.
‘Believing as we do that there is nothing on earth more sacred than humanity, we deny all allegiance to this institution of royalty, and hence we can only regard the visit of the King as adding fresh fuel to the fire of hatred with which we regard the plundering institutions of which he is the representative. Let the capitalist and landlord class flock to exalt him; he is theirs; in him they see embodied the idea of caste and class; they glorify him and exalt his importance that they might familiarise the public mind with the conception of political inequality, knowing well that a people mentally poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain to that spirit of self-reliant democracy necessary for the attainment of social freedom. The mind accustomed to political kings can easily be reconciled to social kings – capitalist kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships and the docks…
‘What is monarchy? From whence does it derive its sanction? What has been its gift to humanity? Monarchy is a survival of the tyranny imposed by the hand of greed and treachery upon the human race in the darkest and most ignorant days of our history. It derives its only sanction from the sword of the marauder, and the helplessness of the producer, and its gifts to humanity are unknown, save as they can be measured in the pernicious examples of triumphant and shameless iniquities…
‘Fellow-workers, stand by the dignity of your class. All these parading royalties, all this insolent aristocracy, all these grovelling, dirt-eating capitalist traitors, all these are but signs of disease in any social state – diseases which a royal visit brings to a head and spews in all its nastiness before our horrified eyes. But as the recognition of the disease is the first stage towards its cure, so that we may rid our social state of its political and social diseases, we must recognise the elements of corruption.’
In the here and now, a once great movement, like many such movements before it, has been led by its leadership clique in prostrating itself before monarchy. But the likes of Mary Lou are not out of step with the class they represent. Unlike Connolly, who understood the necessity of the independent role of the proletariat in the struggle for Irish freedom, whenever a section of the national bourgeoisie joins the revolutionary movement, it cannot due to its class nature, carry this revolution through to its completion. While many such revolutionaries have led heroic struggles against the imperialists, they are ultimately ideologically and organisationally incapable of defeating imperialism and the bourgeoisie, proving incapable of carrying through a revolutionary transformation of society will ultimately either be overthrown by imperialist forces or become assimilated into the ruling class in league with imperialism.
But republicans have nothing to hide, as a clear-eyed view of history will always vindicate Ireland’s revolutionaries in the face of those that would oppress them. History will remember those that resisted imperialism, and cast from its eyes the crawling vermin of electoralism, that sought to re-direct the revolutionary path down the cul-de-sac of reaction.
And questions remain as to how Sinn Féin’s faithful feel about this revisionism of a long-held ideology? The abandonment of principle in the name of compromise, the pacification of a once-formidable revolutionary organisation and the casting into irrelevance of Ireland’s greatest revolutionaries leads inexorably to the reality that, you cannot befriend your unrepentant enemy and the supposed ‘correct way forward’ was one that was charted by republicanism’s enemies. Naturally then, British imperialism promotes such methods because they are ineffectual.