From Socialist Voice, January 2010

Books

Soldiers of folly

Barry Flynn, Soldiers of Folly: The IRA Border Campaign, 1956–1962 (Cork: Collins Press, 2009; ISBN 978-1-84889-016-9; €24.95)

The call to “physical force” struggle has been a long-standing tenet of Irish republican philosophy, to the extent that it has evolved, for some elements in the movement, into an article of unquestioned faith. One unhelpful consequence of this has been the construction in the minds of many republicans of a dichotomy between the “political” and the “military” side of the struggle for independence.
     For those falling in the latter camp of emphasis the physical-force struggle with British imperialism was, and to some still is, the principal mode of action over all others. To a degree, “politics”—narrowly construed—has thus played a junior role and has often been deprecated for leading to “compromise.” While other periods in the history of Irish republicanism readily demonstrate this, including, it must be said, our own era, such postures were clearly dominant within the movement of the late 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
     It is within this particular context that Barry Flynn’s book on the border campaign is set. For those unfamiliar with it, the border campaign, or Operation Harvest, was a guerrilla campaign carried out by the IRA against targets in the North during the late 1950s and early 60s. Flynn’s book is a detailed account of that campaign, providing a useful insight into the IRA’s strategic and military thinking at the time, the operations engaged in, and the response of the political establishment on both sides of the border.
     Although technically the book lacks a degree of scholarly finesse—excessive use of inappropriate metaphors and colloquial phraseology abounds—the story Flynn has to tell is an important one.
     Put simply, Operation Harvest was a failure. Despite numerous attacks on the security apparatus of the North, it did little to undermine the Unionist monolith or to threaten partition. Northern nationalists remained mere bystanders, displaying little appetite for revolt. In the South too the campaign mustered little support, apart from a short-lived outpouring of traditionalist sentiment over the death of Seán South and Feargal O’Hanlon. The political class on both sides of the border invoked internment, and by 1962 the campaign, without a modicum of popular support, fizzled out.
     As Flynn rightly notes, the legacy of the campaign was to directly lead to the debates of the 1960s as the unfortunate divide between the “political” and the “military” once again took hold, in time leading to the emergence of the Provisional campaign. While this of course is correct, I would respectfully suggest that implications do not stop there: the lessons of Operation Harvest retain a resonance for contemporary strands within the republican movement.
     In particular we have seen in recent times that there remains an element within the republican movement that still adheres to the maxims of armed struggle. As with Operation Harvest, there appears to be little in the way of a worked-out strategy underpinning such actions. At best the only evident logic at work is the old reassuring maxim that Irish men and women are entitled to resist British rule by force. It appears that for some elements the exercise of force has thus become the end rather than the means to any political or military goal.
     It could be suggested, however, that, as with Operation Harvest, this kind of thinking is misplaced. It appears to misunderstand the nature of the Six Counties as at present constituted and the nature of British involvement. Like the strategy underpinning Operation Harvest, it has little to say on the sizeable population of Irish unionist opinion; it appears to assume that these people can be coerced into a united Ireland.
     This interpretation is not to invoke any hostility to the ideals of the republican movement per se. We in the communist movement share republican ideals. We too would accept, like republicans, the lack of historical justification in the existence of the six-county statelet and the partition of the island.
     However, as communists can readily affirm from our own history, ideal and reality rarely coincide in politics: practical exigencies frequently constrain the desirable, and we have to deal with the political reality as it stands.
     Books like this one on the border campaign can help us move more closely towards such an understanding. Certainly they should be used to serve as a platform whereby dialogue can be opened with radical elements within modern republicanism to find a more sustainable method for social change on this island.
[NC]

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