SF must not remain a prisoner of fantasy

Here is the government of Ireland writing in December 1927 to John Hearn, head of the American Friends of the Irish Republic, at an address in Westfield, Massachusetts. The letter is on notepaper headed "Dail Eireann - Government of the Republic of Ireland - Oifig an Uachtarain".

"At a meeting of Dail Eireann on the 10th inst. certain changes were made and decisions arrived at of which it is necessary to acquaint you immediately. President O'Connor who has been studying law has been called to the Bar, and intends to practise. In the circumstances, he felt it necessary to tender his resignation as President of the Republic, and the Dail, though deeply regretting the necessity, felt bound to accept the resignation . . . The Cabinet desires you to carry on as usual, and hopes to send you the communication you desire before Christmas. We send you the greetings of the Government of the Republic."

This is wonderfully absurd stuff, straight from the pages of Gogol or from the stock images of pathetic lunatics with Napoleon complexes, issuing demented edicts to non-existent subordinates. Even Gogol would have found it hard to invent the notion of the president of the Irish Republic, a largely forgotten man by the name of Art O'Connor, resigning to take up the more exalted position of a humble barrister.

But the letter is not a work of satire. It is signed by important figures in the genesis of Irish republicanism - Count Plunkett, Mary MacSwiney, Brian O'Higgins and others.

As the rump of the Second Dail and the remaining leadership of Sinn Fein after the departure of Eamon de Valera to form Fianna Fail, these people really did believe that they were the legitimate government of Ireland. And until very recently, Sinn Fein and the IRA went on believing in this fantasy.

When, in 1939, the tiny rump of the Second Dail formally passed its powers to the IRA army council, the line of apostolic succession passed to an ever more secretive elite. And throughout its vicious campaign in Northern Ireland, the IRA, in its own mind, continued to draw its legitimacy from this weird delusion.

For those outside the republican movement, and, indeed, for some within its ranks, it was impossible to believe that anyone took this stuff seriously. But it was, and to an extent remains, the official creed of the republican movement.

The "Green Book" which the contemporary IRA gives to its new recruits informs them "that war is morally justified and that the Army is the direct representative of the 1918 Dail Eireann Parliament, and that as such they are the legal and lawful government of the Irish Republic, which has the moral right to pass laws for, and to claim jurisdiction over the territory, airspace, mineral resources, means of production, distribution and exchange, and all its people regardless of creed and loyalty".

This mania was underpinned by an elitism which had always been a part of Sinn Fein's self-image. It goes right back to Arthur Griffith's notion that Ireland was not a society, or even a people, but a concept: "When we say we love Ireland we do not mean by Ireland the peasants in the fields, the workers in the factories, the teachers in the schools, the professors in the colleges - we mean the soul into which we were born and which was born into us."

This is, as Griffith's language suggests, a notion which owes more to a twisted theology than to rational democratic politics. As republican ideology became more and more isolated from the reality of Irish life, it embraced isolation itself as a spiritual virtue, the distinctive trait of religious martyrs. As the Sinn Fein president said in 1940: "Minorities are nearly always right; it was a very small minority that stood at the foot of the Cross, and a very large majority indeed that shouted: `Give us Barabbas'."

The historian Michael Laffan points out in his fine new book on Sinn Fein's history, The Resurrection of Ireland, that republicans made a reality of Bertolt Brecht's satiric call on the communist regime in East Germany to dissolve the people and elect a new one.

"Many Irish republicans would have understood and shared these sentiments; they were quite prepared to dissolve or ignore an unworthy, ungrateful people and to appoint another, which would be made in their own image."

Slowly and painfully, most republicans have got over these fantasies and stopped issuing grandiose edicts from a make-believe government, just as de Valera and his colleagues did in the mid-1920s. But all through the history of republicanism a significant number of its adherents has been psychologically unable to abandon its absurd pretensions.

Laffan quotes a letter to a colleague from a member of an IRA flying column in west Cork, written on the eve of the 1921 truce. "We'll all wake up some morning to find ourselves members of the civil population, with peace made and our occupation and our power gone. Then I'll go back to the poorhouse and I suppose you'll start selling collars again." How many members of the IRA army council now have similar feelings about returning to pig-smuggling from the epic heights of revolutionary dictatorship?

Instead of remaining the political prisoners of these fantasists, the Sinn Fein leadership must finally split from them.

Against the charges of risking the unity of the republican movement, the leadership should give the same answer which de Valera gave to a US critic when he began to crack down on the IRA in 1934.

"How can you imagine for one moment that I don't realise what division in the republican ranks means at a time like this? But is this need and desire for unity to be used as a means of trying to blackmail us into adopting a policy which we know could only lead our people to disaster?

"It has taken us 10 long years of patient effort to get the Irish nation on the march again after a devastating civil war. Are we to abandon all this in order to satisfy a group who have not given the slightest evidence of any ability to lead our people anywhere except back into the morass?"

He continued: "What is the use of talking any more to people who are too stupid or too pig-headed to see this? . . . We have undertaken a responsibility to the people at present living, to the future, and to the dead. We will not allow any group or any individuals to prevent us from carrying it out."