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Sinn Feints

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

For one thing, a majority of Irish people vote for groups that have their roots in the party founded by Arthur Griffith.
Fine Gael, long the Republic’s second party, was formed in 1934 by the supporters of Griffith and Michael Collins, the main Irish signatories of the 1921 Treaty. Its leaders through the 1930s and 1940 were W.T. Cosgrave and Richard Mulcahy, who’d succeeded Collins as head of government and commander-in-chief of the Free State army respectively.
Cosgrave began his electoral career in 1909 as a Sinn Fein member of Dublin Corporation. He received a commuted death sentence for his role in the 1916 Rising and went on to win the important Kilkenny bye-election for Sinn Fein in 1917. Mulcahy was the IRA’s first chief of staff and architect with Collins of the war against Britain.
The largest fragment of the original Sinn Fein is Fianna Fail. Eamon de Valera formed it in 1926 as a constitutional regrouping of the guerilla army defeated in the Irish civil war. Within a few years of the conflict’s end, the anti-Treaty IRA declined from being a force of 25,000 to a fifth of that size. De Valera soon established his ascendancy within the anti-Treaty camp, creating a remarkably durable political party — one of the most successful in Europe or anywhere. It has spent two-thirds of its 77-year existence in government.
Fianna Fail’s coalition partner, the Progressive Democrats, emerged as a split from within its ranks, so it too has a direct connection to Sinn Fein. The Labor Party, founded in 1912, has always maintained a separate tradition, but married into the family when it merged with Democratic Left, a successor of Official Sinn Fein, which is where Labor’s current president and parliamentary leader began their careers.
In the Dail, only the Green Party can’t claim a connection back to Griffith but curiously is more evocative of some of the earlier Sinn Feins than any of the above, being home to its fair share of well-meaning cranks and idealistic eccentrics.
In his history of the party, Brian Feeney says there’s been at least five reincarnations of Sinn Fein. However, one might usefully divide the 100 years, and Feeney’s book, into three distinct epochs. First of all, there’s the historic Sinn Fein that created the new state and formed the basis of independent Ireland’s two main parties. Here the author gives a solid overview.
Feeney’s narrative flair is less in evidence in the middle section, which deals with the rejectionists who refused to recognize that state, even after de Valera dealt with the Treaty provisions that caused the civil war. At the end of a 43-period period, and numerous minor schisms, the republican movement finally split into the Official and the neo-traditionalist Provisional factions. Feeney devotes almost 200 of his 450 pages to the latter movement, from the beginning of its campaign of violence in 1970 to the point where it was competing on equal terms with the SDLP for the Catholic vote in Northern Ireland. (The book was published in Ireland last year.) And it’s a readable, albeit soft-focused account, drawing on a number of personal interviews.
In one important sense, Feeney is in the ideal position to write the book. He’s a disenchanted former SDLP councilor, one who’s sympathetic to the peace process Provisionals. More generally he understands Northern Catholic nationalism.
He argues that the younger, supposedly more hard-line leadership in the North didn’t really believe in aspects of republican dogma adhered to by the Southerners who’d founded the Provisional movement. “For them [the Northerners] the Republic existed as an independent Irish state. It was a reality, not a spiritual entity. It was run from Dublin and was an equal partner with Britain in the EU. They would have been delighted to be part of it.” He describes also the Provos’ easy abandonment of their 1980s leftism.
His closeness to the subject, though, is also a problem. His principal interest is the rise of Adams’s party, and he sifts out that for which he has a measured contempt. Thus, while he talks about tiny groups meeting in back rooms in the 1930s and ’40s, he simply ignores the revisionist leftist Officials after 1970 and the purist, dogmatist RSF still lurking in the wings. One might reasonably ask: is this history of parties called Sinn Fein or is it not?
And then there’s the issue of the relationship with unionism. A history teacher by profession, he’s good on the question in earlier chapters, showing how nationalists of all stripes simply underestimated and misunderstood unionism as a force. And in an aside, he adds that unionist ethnic attitudes were mirrored in Griffith’s own newspaper. But in the contemporary era, while maintaining a balanced tone, he doesn’t apply the same rigor and fails to ask searching questions.
He writes: “Unionists have found it impossible to deal with the complex consequences of Sinn Fein’s success at the ballot box compared to the simple response that the Armalite provoked.” Here he’s omitting certain elements from the equation.
Consider one of them. George Pataki and Rudy Giuliani, men happy to be photographed with Gerry Adams, both criticized the Clinton White House in 1999 for the conditional clemency granted to 16 members of FALN, the Puerto Rican terrorist group, who’d been in prison since the early 1980s. NYPD unions were enraged because policemen were among the six killed and 150 injured in the course of the FALN campaign — though none of the 16 were linked to any death or injury and had to renounce terrorism as part of the deal.
In the Republic of Ireland, the light prison sentences given to the IRA killers of Garda Gerry McCabe remain a sensitive subject. (The past deaths of policemen are just one reason why Fianna Fail couldn’t consider sharing power with Sinn Fein while it’s linked to a private army.) But in Northern Ireland, more than 300 policemen died during the Troubles. So, for Feeney to expect mainstream unionists to be as enthusiastic as he is about Sinn Fein’s electoral gains — at the SDLP’s expense — seems unreasonable.
His grasp of the South is at times shaky. He refers to it as the “Free State” up until the declaration of the Republic in 1948; that term had been officially abandoned a decade before. He believes that Frank Aiken left the IRA only when de Valera won the 1932 election. Aiken, the chief of staff who ended the civil war, was in fact a founder member of Fianna Fail and the minister of defense in the new administration.
Another founder, Sean Lemass, called Fianna Fail a “slightly constitutional” party. Such language was all part of the brilliant outmaneuvering and mopping up of the movement it left behind. A decisive break had been made in 1926.
By 2003, Sinn Fein has bent over backwards to accommodate people and has revised key dogmas, but it doesn’t believe that a dramatic crossing of the Rubicon is in its interests.
Obviously its strategy has worked in a narrow electoral sense within the Catholic community. Critics will argue, though, that the conditions have long been ripe for a clear break from paramilitarism and are indeed necessary to build broader confidence and to make political institutions work.
An explanation of the decades before 1970 may be useful in making a political argument, but ultimately it’s not necessary. And Feeney doesn’t have a compelling enough thesis to justify tacking a 250-page historical introduction onto a book that might have worked better as a concise history of the rise of the modern Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland.

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