A chara, – Stephen Collins writes that the republican movement “still adheres to the belief that the IRA army council is the true government of Ireland” (“Coalition leaders must confront those who would tear down the State”, Opinion & Analysis, August 26th).
I don’t believe that. I’ve written about it extensively and no republican has contradicted me. I wrote about it most recently in my book, Free Statism and the Good Old IRA.
In it, I said that the young people who joined the IRA post-1969 did not join because they were persuaded of the morality of armed struggle by the doctrinal notion that the Army Council of the IRA was, through tenuous lineage, the legitimate government of Ireland. They joined because of what they witnessed on the streets: RUC attacks on civil rights marchers and the pogroms of August 1969.
Their experience of discrimination, repression and dispossession was what led them to arms – in much the same way that Michael Collins, whom Stephen Collins praises, took up arms in 1916 from a sense that his country was unjustly governed.
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Older republicans – who viewed the 1970s as a continuum of traditional republican struggle – emphasised that the leadership was in direct succession to the Provisional Government of 1916, through the First Dáil of 1919, through the delegation of executive powers in 1938 by seven surviving republican delegates of the Second Dáil of 1921, and so on and so forth.
This claim, however cherished by some, played little or no part in the reasoning or persuasion of IRA recruits. Stephen Collins might be the only person who thinks it’s true.
It was clear to me that the vast majority of people in the 26 Counties, from participation in elections and the separate development of the South, considered the institutions of their state as legitimate and a functioning democracy. Whereas the nationalist community in the North in the degree of its alienation and mistreatment did not identify with the institutions there. – Yours, etc,
DANNY MORRISON,
Belfast.