Navigating the Zeitgeist by Helena Sheehan;

Author:Helena Sheehan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 2019-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

6

The Internationale

As some paths closed, others opened. I turned from one party, university, and thesis, to another party, university, and thesis. Indeed, there were a whole series of shifts in the contours of my life. Life in Sinn Féin/IRA had been somewhat turned in on itself. Once I left, I moved outward into Irish society and the wider world. I took part in campaigns for resources protection, against unemployment, for Chile solidarity, and against South African apartheid. I registered at Trinity College Dublin, where I resumed doctoral studies and university teaching. I became involved in trade union activity through the Association of Scientific, Technical and Managerial Staffs. I wrote for national newspapers. I socialized in different circles. I even donned an evening dress and dined and danced on one occasion at the press ball.

Of all the changes, what most shaped by life in these years was my joining the Communist Party of Ireland. The day after I resigned from Sinn Féin in 1975, I went to New Books in Parliament Street and asked Sean Nolan for an application to join the CPI. He smiled gently and gave it to me, but didn’t say much. I discovered that he rarely said much. The only party member I had previously met was Tom Redmond, the area secretary, and that only recently. Not long after I joined the party, so did Eoin Ó Murchú and others from Sinn Féin. There was some bitterness at this exodus, which overlapped with the IRSP split. Sean Garland spoke angrily of the variety of those who left as “the opportunists, the instant revolutionaries, the sectarian bigots” as well as “the cowards who fled, not to greener, but to safer, pastures.” The last phrase angered me most, because I didn’t know anyone who left out of cowardice. Some had lived with quite a high level of risk on the operational side.

Moreover, it wasn’t safer at all, but even more dangerous. On top of the INLA threats still hanging over Eoin, there was now an IRA one. Eamonn Smullen, who became Dublin O/C, informed Mick O’Riordan, general secretary of the CPI, that any action against Eoin would target him not as a member of the party, but as an ex-member of the IRA. While not taking elaborate security precautions, Eoin and others checked under cars for bombs and were watchful about being followed. I still locked the children in their room at night. Eoin was working as a sub-editor for the Irish Press and was often alone on dark streets late at night upon finishing a shift. He continued his polemical assault on the IRSP/INLA, but added Official SF/IRA to it, increasingly using CPI publications to do so. Several who left OSF/IRA and joined the CPI were attacked with guns, bars, and hatchets in a Dublin pub. The CPI confronted SF/IRA about these threats and attacks on their members. These were not safer pastures.

Moves toward left unity emerged, flourished, then floundered, for various reasons. In 1976, Left Alternative—comprising Official

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