One Man's Terrorist by Daniel Finn

Author:Daniel Finn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

But this was a challenge that the British government expected to handle with comparative ease. Meanwhile, the security regime pushed the RUC and the Ulster Defence Regiment into the front-line of the struggle against the IRA. From London’s perspective, ‘Ulsterization’ had two obvious benefits. By granting the local police force a leading role, it drove home the message that republican violence was the product of a criminal conspiracy by terrorist ‘godfathers’ with no popular support. It also reduced the number of British soldiers being killed or injured by IRA attacks.

Republicans were ill-equipped to mount a political challenge to Britain’s new offensive. People’s Democracy contrasted the mood of the Catholic ghettoes at the beginning of 1976 with the heyday of civil resistance: ‘The bulk of the minority population are apathetic if not hostile. Let any organization, including Sinn Féin, call a demonstration now around some political demands and how many will turn up? Hardly any except their own members and a handful of dedicated activists.’7

Adams and his comrades understood this all too well, and Drumm’s speech at Bodenstown was their attempt at a response. PD welcomed it as ‘a major development in Provisional thinking, which opens the way for intense and fruitful discussion within the anti-imperialist movement’. They had observed with keen interest a ‘complex and at times confused debate going on within the Provisionals’, which now emerged into public view: ‘A section of the movement, particularly in Belfast, has gradually but definitely moved away from militarism and from exclusive concentration on the Northern question.’8

A new leadership team took shape around Adams that included young ex-prisoners such as Danny Morrison and Jim Gibney, with the northern Provo newspaper Republican News as its platform. In December 1977, the Irish police captured an IRA ‘staff report’ drafted by Adams and his associates which elaborated on their plans: ‘Sinn Féin should be radicalized (under Army direction) and should agitate about social and economic issues which attack the welfare of the people. SF should be directed to infiltrate other organizations to win support for, and sympathy to, the movement.’9 At Bodenstown in 1978, Sinn Féin’s Johnny Johnson took another step down the path opened up by Jimmy Drumm the previous year: ‘We promise the economically deprived, the poor and the oppressed our wholehearted support. We are not in this to exchange one set of capitalist rulers for another.’10 An observer from the British embassy noted a ‘growing Marxist feeling’ among the delegates at Sinn Féin’s 1978 Ard Fheis – ‘some of them even addressed each other as comrade!’ – and a palpable desire to strengthen the movement’s political interventions.11

At the beginning of 1979, the Dublin-based An Phoblacht and Republican News merged with Morrison as editor, symbolizing a shift in the movement’s centre of gravity. Morrison recruited several contributors from the left-wing scene, including PD’s John McGuffin and the cartoonist Brian Moore (‘Cormac’), and turned the paper into a lively mouthpiece for the Provos with a highly effective distribution system that by-passed commercial newsagents.12

Later that year,

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