Freedom For All Ireland
April 2010 Report by County Chair Victor Sackett
Earlier this month, the last loose end of the Good Friday Agreement was voted on by the NI Assembly at Stormont. The members voted in favour of the transfer of policing and justice powers from Westminster to Stormont. The support of and administration of policing was also the last republican principle that Provisional Sinn Fein (PSF) gave up in their transformation from a traditional republican party to a constitutional nationalist party.
From the Irish American perspective, the two main issues here are first, that six counties in Ireland are now fully normalized as a British province with its own colonial government administering British law and British rule on the streets by the crown forces and secondly, that PSF and the Provisional IRA, the largest and strongest opposition and resistance to British rule for 30 years in Ireland, is now its main supporter and enforcer. It goes without saying that the British are very pleased at this outcome because their lengthy battle with the Provisional republican movement is now over. Enforcing British rule and endorsing the RUC/PSNI in arresting former republican comrades represents the ultimate authority of and complete subservience to the newly recognized state. The Provisionals have now redefined republicans as those who support and defend the RUC/PSNI and publicly calls traitors those republicans who oppose British crown forces.
The stated intention of the GFA was to bring peace to Ireland. However, the common wisdom and undisputed fact acknowledged by every political party and statesman in Ireland has always been that the cause of conflict in Ireland is the British presence itself and the only means to a permanent peace is the British withdrawal. Removing the British prop of the unionist veto and establishing an All-Ireland democracy is the only viable way forward.
In the Sunday Business Post on January 31, regular columnist Tom McGuirk wrote, “Stormont may have new seating and the latest technology but underneath it all, the DUP still stand for what it has always stood for, political supremacy over the nationalist community.”
As reported in the March issue of Saoirse “Over the course of the last month, incidents across the Six Counties point to a level of intensity which the 26-County Justice Minister Dermot Ahern acknowledged was as dangerous a threat from Republicans as anything over the last 40 years”.
Former PSNI chief constable Sir Hugh Orde giving an assessment of the republican threat in a recent speech at Oxford in his new role as president of the Association of Chief Police Officers said, “To borrow a phrase from the past, we may be at an ‘acceptable level of violence’ – albeit at a far lower level than when the phrase was first coined.” What he means is that if the republicans cannot be persuaded to stop, then we must accept that the threat will remain – and violence will continue.
For most of the 20th century the national board of the AOH in America supported the 32 county Irish republic proclaimed in 1916 and declared and established in 1919. But since the mid 90’s they have lent support to a political party with it’s own agenda rather than continue to support the republic and republican principles of freedom and sovereignty. In an August 2006 article, Danny Morrisson, public relations writer for Provisional Sinn Fein in an expression of self-preservation of the party wrote, “The exigencies of survival meant that republicans (meaning Sinn Fein) could not allow themselves to be constrained by their principles.”
The preamble to the A.O.H. constitution states that we will “aid… the Irish people for complete and absolute independence, promoting peace and unity for all Ireland”. Maybe it’s time we re-evaluated our direction.
Padraig Pearse, giving the oration at republican O’Donovan Rossa’s grave said the following. “We of the Irish Volunteers, and you others who are associated with us in to-day’s task and duty, are bound together and must stand together henceforth in brotherly union for the achievement of the freedom of Ireland. And we know only one definition of freedom: it is Tone’s definition, it is Mitchel’s definition, it is Rossa’s definition. Let no man blaspheme the cause that the dead generations of Ireland served by giving it any other name and definition than their name and their definition.
Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.
