Sir, - In your columns I have referred consistently to historical distortions, notably regarding recent events, to the degree to which I have been privy. Please, therefore, permit me to deal with Jim Cusack's report (January 28th) that Cathal Goulding, former Chief of Staff of the IRA, now barely gone to his eternal rest, was possibly involved with Seamus Costello in a highly secret military conspiracy in 1974.
This, however, was the year in which Costello was first suspended and then expelled from the Official IRA and Official Sinn Fein. This also was the year following the election of Costello to the office of the 1972-73 vice-presidency of the latter. At the 1973-74 Ard Fheis both Costello and I were elected to the Ard Comhairle, only to have our elections annulled in January 1974, on the claim, in my case, that the votes had been miscounted.
Later in 1974 this claim was retracted, but I was not re-elected for 1974-1975 because Sean Garland, at this latter Ard Fheis, had intimated that those not attending sufficient meetings of the Coisde Seasda during the past year should not be re-elected. It is pertinent to recall here that Vincent Browne (Magill, May 1982) referred to an earlier alleged association between Garland and Costello regarding their joint opposition to the Civil Rights objective. This was unknown to me and was a position I did not hold but the extreme contrary.
Uinseann Mac Eoin's monumental historical work The IRA in the Twilight Years - 1923 to 1948 has put on record my disgust at the conspiratorial secret society character of the IRA, and that my decision "to have done with" that organisation "has been strictly adhered to". It was on this basis, and the fact that I was supportive of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights struggle that, finally, I became vice-president of Official Sinn Fein for 1971-72, which supported that campaign for the democratisation of Stormont. This has only now been realised, but not as originally conceived without restriction. But then in February 1972 the Official IRA exploded the bomb at the Aldershot Barracks of the British Parachute Regiment, killing only working-class people, thus destroying the Civil Rights movement, and setting the precedent for the Provisional IRA's bombings, thereafter, in the UK.
This development came as a profound shock to me because, since my departure from the IRA in the Curragh Internment Camp in the autumn of 1941, my republicanism has been of the United Irishmen vintage, an organisation which disdained a secret society role, despite William Drennan's proposal. Such a role, adopted by the IRA, was in the Fenian tradition of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was finally instrumental in the overthrow of the Irish Republic ratified by universal suffrage in 1918.
The historical inconsistency of the Reporter's Guide to Ireland recently "unearthed" by John Horgan of UCC, with its peculiar media slant, forms the substance of Jim Cusack's valuable revelations, by suggesting a diable ex machina somewhere. The scenario of the guide was, inconsistently, in fact, the alleged reason for Seamus Costello's expulsions in 1974. Mr Cusack refers to the "unearthing" of the document. Was this from the university archives, or like the statue of Queen Victoria now gracing UCC precincts in imperial splendour, from the quondam President Alfred O'Rahilly's back garden? Although my background is well known to the UCC historical establishment (as late as November 1996 I spoke to the Philosophical Society there on "the unspoken Unionist and Loyalist case" published in 1997 in Justice Books No 7 and entitled Home Rule as Rome Rule), Mr Horgan did not avail of my willing and gratis consultancy. There is clearly a lot of real "unearthing" to be done, relative to Irish history, which has been buried alive. - Yours, etc., Derry Kelleher,
Greystones, Co Wicklow.