The "Progressives" and decommissioning

Hello,

in an article (An Phoblacht, n°8, 1966), Paddy Mac writes about a group within the Republican movement "the Progressives" and urges Republican to resist the demand for decommissioning from this group:

'On numerous occasions attempts have been made in the pages of AN PHOBLACHT to awaken Republicans, and especially IRA men, on the dangers to their organization from the designs of the so-called “Progressive” group who operate in leadership circles. Amongst other things warning was given of a plan to disarm the IRA, and eventually disband it altogether. The directorate who decides the policy of AN PHOBLACHT have refused permission to document my specific charges from files in our possession at least for the present; and perhaps they are wise in doing so. This places myself in the awkward position of being unable to say what I know and what I think other militant Republicans should know. However, I can at least say this much to all IRA men: If you now have arms, KEEP THEM, and don’t be fools enough to be talked into giving them up under any pretext whatever. Local army units always possessed the RIGHT to look after and protect their own arms; this right has been jealously guarded over the years; if it is relinquished now, YOU CAN SAY GOODBYE TO THE IRA.’

An Phoblacht/The Republic, n°8, 1966.

Do you think this group is related to what would be later named 'the Officials'? I have some doubt about it. All this article is a demand for resistance to any movement on arms and insists on the place of arms in Republican's identity.

Bonne journée à tous

Lili

The group which issued An Phoblacht in the 1960s was called the Committee for Revolutionary Action (CRA)/ Irish Revolutionary Forces

"This Cork-based group, which comprised a large number of left-wing former IRA members, produced an influential newsletter in the early to mid 1960s called An Phoblacht (The Republic). This paper openly criticised the Republican Movement for its lack of action on the north and for reneging on republican principles. There was considerable tension between the IRF and the IRA, which turned into raids and armed counter-raids. In 1963, for example, a group of eight armed IRF members raided the Cork Sinn Féin headquarters and warned the city's IRA leaders at gunpoint because of the IRA's seizure of the group's newsletter from the printer where it was being produced. The group also seized thousands of copies of the United Irishman, the Sinn Féin paper, as it arrived in the local railway station. Relations between the group and the IRA were strained for much of the 1960s with the IRF regularly criticising the politics of the Republican Movement and arguing for a socialist way forward."

One of its leaders was Jim Lane:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Lane

who subsequently went to the BICO and the IRSP/INLA

For more about the CRA/An Phoblacht group see also
Robert WHITE's biogrpahy of Ruairi O Bradaigh and MLR Smith Fighting FoR Ireland?

More about this group on:

http://cedarlounge.wordpress.com/2007/10/30/the-left-archive-the-cork-communist-organisation-a-split-from-the-ico-1972/#comments

This was what Fintan Lane (Jim's son) had to say:

Interesting…and bizarre to see this pamphlet surfacing. Anyway, a little bit of background information:

The ‘Cork Communist Organisation’ was made up largely, I believe, of the Saor Eire people (publishers of ‘People’s Voice’ etc.), who had earlier merged with the ICO. Their politics was a mixture of Marxist-Leninism (Maoism in this instance) and republicanism. My father - Jim Lane - was involved.

Anyhow, they eventually abandoned the ICO, partly because of the drift towards a ‘two-nationist’ position. Brian Girvin stayed with the ICO/BICO.

The CCO later morphed into the Cork Workers Club, which survived into the late 1970s as a real group and, afterwards, as a sort of publishing house. The bookshop in Nicholas Church Place remained open until the early 1980s, when it was actually an IRSP bookshop/office. It was a centre for the anti-H-Block campaign during the hunger strikes and was later used by the Release Nicky Kelly Campaign. In its early years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, public meetings were held upstairs at times. I remember once seeing a poster advertising an appearance there by Eamon McCann.

I ’staffed’ the bookshop for a while in the early 1980s, when it was open only on Saturday and some week nights. There were some regular customers, but, as time moved on, few people slinked in besides the affiliated. Its heyday really was at the end of the 1960s and early 1970s when it was the place to go in Cork to get left-wing and republican literature. It was a genuine backstreet bookshop and when other places opened, such as the bookshop in the Quay Co-op in the early 1980s, it effectively no longer had much of a purpose. It was too far off the beaten track. A strange place, in some ways. Internet shopping would have wiped it out, had it survived that long, because it primarily dealt in political material that mainstream shops wouldn’t sell.

The ‘Internationalist’ bookshop in Shandon (Ballymacthomas to be precise) was set up by some Maoist students and was shortlived, as it was effectively sacked by locals stirred up by anti-communism. I suppose, unlike the group around the CWC in Nicholas Church Place, they didn’t have links with the local community, to any real degree. The CWC people were all working class and at least one member - Jerry Higgins - came from St Nicholas Ch. Place itself


The original Saor Eire was formed in Cork in the mid to late 1960s and its core was composed of former IRA members, some of whom (including my father) had left the IRA during the Border Campaign, when the Cork Brigade refused to sanction the continued involvement of Cork volunteers. This group picked up a few more ‘dissidents’ in the early 1960s, were known as the ‘Irish Revolutionary Forces’ and later became Saor Eire.

They initially produced a paper called An Phoblacht which was widely distributed among republicans and was popular among those angry at the political drift of the Republican Movement. Later they published a paper called People’s Voice.


It was critical of the Goulding leadership because:

1. It was taking no (military) action in the north and seemed hostile to a resumption of the ‘national liberation struggle’.

2. Because of the nature of its left-wing politics. People like Roy Johnston were associated with the Pro-Moscow communist movement and this was seen as problematic because of the ‘revisionist’ line being taken in Russia. The Goulding faction weren’t viewed as authentic revolutionaries; they were considered to be reformists dressed in left-wing garb. It was believed that they were leading the republican movement towards constitutionalism.

So, yes, their critique was an unusual mix and unlike that later articulated by the traditionalists Provos. That said, some of those who became Provos were quite sympathetic to the IRF/Saor Eire publications at the time, particularly An Phoblacht. One can only assume that these soon-to-be Provos welcomed any political attack that undermined Goulding and co.

I think Cork Saor Eire was really an admixture of Irish republicanism and the heady international revolutionism of the 1960s. The arrival of the Provos made them irrelevant, as it was clear that those unhappy with the republican leadership were far more willing to follow traditionalist politics than republicanism dipped in Maoism.

An Phoblacht (the Cork one) and People’s Voice are both, I believe, available in the National Library.




Saor Eire had contacts around Ireland, particularly among those republicans disaffected with the political drift of the Republican Movement. Members went north to ‘help out’ when the ‘troubles broke out at the end of the 1960s. In fact, despite their Maoism, they were probably more connected to the Republican tradition than the orthodox communist tradition.

So, then a second group, which was active around Dublin, emerged in the 1960s. My understanding is that they attempted to join up with Saor Eire, but this linkage never occurred because the Cork-based crew thought that the news boys were Guevarist in outlook and thought the ‘foci theory’ might be worth a go in Ireland. The Cork people, despite their own IRA background, thought the new lot had the balance wrong between militarism and political action. So, a merger never occurred.

The Dublin group, however, was later involved in bank robberies and other actions and it seems they adopted the moniker ‘Saor Eire Action Group’. They were later just known as Saor Eire. I don’t think they lasted more than a few years and I don’t know if they ever actually published anything.

The original Saor Eire in Cork, or the bulk of them, merged with the ICO…and the rest you know.

The conflation of the two Saor Eires (the original Cork one and the partly contemporaneous but later Dublin-based Saor Eire Action Group) occurred from the outset.

Indeed, I believe that the original Saor Eire members, while on friendly terms with the Dublin Saor Eire people, found their activities faintly embarrassing because there was a belief in the wider republican community that both groups were one and the same. Despite some interaction early on, this was never the case. The original Saor Eire seem to have viewed the ’spectacular’ - for the time - bank robberies of the Dublin people as a form of political adventurism, but were sometimes slagged, in a negative way, by republican friends who disapproved of this Wild West stuff in the south.

Perhaps the merger with the ICO around 1970 happened partly because the remnants of the Saor Eire group in Cork felt their organisation’s name had been irredeemably associated with ‘adventurism’. Certainly, at that stage, the Provo alternative was on the road and a left-wing political alternative to the Goulding leadership was lost.

Incidentally and importantly, the ICO, the CCO etc. weren’t just Maoists, they were admirers of Stalin.


I’m certain there was no formal connection between the Cork-based IRF/SE and the Dublin-based SE. There were friendly relations but never a merger. In the event, the Dublin bank-robbing outfit outlived the Cork group, which went off in another direction via the ICO.

That said, the Dublin-centred Saor Eire did pick up a few members in Cork, but not political types. The couple of people they picked up were militarists. One - Larry White - was reputedly involved in killing a comrade in Dublin; he was later shot dead off Cathedral Road one night in the mid 1970s by the Official IRA, which is another very interesting story. He had been harassing the sticks in the city. Anyhow, to avoid possible libel issues, I’ll not go into details on who was allegedly responsible for that. It’s a long time ago anyway.