Owain Rhys Phillips: Advance and Retreat: Sinn Féin and the “Compradorification” of the Revolutionary Party

A brief note on the nature of the Dublin legislature: On several occasions throughout this piece, the government in Dublin is referred to as “pseudo-independent,” indicating that the body that is constituted in Leinster House does not represent an independent government capable of representing the Irish people, even those within the twenty-six county state. Why do we take this view? In the first place, it is important to understand that the Dublin administration was not formed as an independent government by Sinn Féin in 1919 with a democratic mandate for Irish independence. The independent Irish government described above was dissolved in 1922 by collaborationist members of Sinn Féin who, with the backing of the British government in Westminster, would form the predecessor to the present Irish government.¹ The formation of this government at least partially drew its legitimacy from a British act of parliament intended to form an imperial dominion in the twenty-six counties.² The counterrevolutionary nature of this government, and why the British state considered its formation in its best interests, will be expanded on further later in this piece. However, the point demonstrated by this is that the Dublin government does not constitute a successor to the government that established the Irish Republic in 1919, but the successor to a government formed by a faction of British aligned compradors within Sinn Féin in 1922.
However, this is not an argument formed in vulgar republican legitimism.³ The Dublin administration cannot be considered insufficiently independent on the basis of its formation alone. Rather, a proper analysis of its actions since reveals that, with a handful of notable exceptions, the government in Leinster House has acted in the interests of the capital-exporting bourgeoisie, as it was intended to by the British when they intervened to provoke its formation. Immediately following its formation, the government violently persecuted Republicans, engaging in extra-judicial killings and court-martial executions in order to prevent the establishment of a regime that was unfavorable to British interests in Ireland.⁴
Land reform enacted by the Dublin administration was limited and uneven, primarily enacted to bolster the Irish agricultural economy and provide a firm foundation for the development of large agricultural cooperatives in areas with unproductive farmland. These cooperatives would develop into a cornerstone of the economy of the twenty-six county state and become some of the largest capital-exporting agribusiness companies in the world.⁵ During the Anglo-Irish Trade War, the twenty-six county state attempted to decouple at least somewhat from the British economy and empower its own national bourgeoisie.⁶ This involved a policy of trade tariffs being imposed on British goods and refusal to pay land annuities to Britain while still extracting punishing debt payments from small farmers.⁷ While some may argue that this represented a marked departure from the policy of previous administrations, the result of this policy was to strengthen large Irish agribusiness, at most representing a transition from the Dublin administration legislating in the interests of the established international bourgeoisie and instead seeking to empower the upstart Irish national bourgeoisie to export capital in their own right.
These policies proved largely unsuccessful in empowering indigenous agro-industry to exercise influence internationally in the short term, but did allow for a period of strengthening of the domestic agriculture industry that allowed the agricultural wing of the national bourgeoisie to capitalize on the opportunities provided to them by Ireland’s admittance to the European Economic Community in 1973 (a policy largely motivated by the interests of the large agriculture lobbies in Ireland), a prerequisite of which was the total abandonment of trade protectionism.⁸ Finally, in 1998 the Dublin administration ceded any claim to the occupied six counties of Ulster in their constitution in order to allow the Good Friday Agreement to be passed, an action that not only put the state at odds with the vast majority of Irish people but also encapsulates the collaborationist nature of the legislature.⁹
In making this change, the Dublin administration renounced their right to act as an organ of democratic representation for the Irish people, in order to formally begin the pacification process that the Good Friday Agreement encompassed and make Ireland, north and south, an all-the-more attractive location for foreign direct investment with little opportunity for organized opposition to monopoly capitalist interests.¹⁰ All of this is to say that the independence of the Dublin legislature is entirely nominal, created as a placeholder administration by the British state to ensure the continued exploitability of Irish economic resources by the international bourgeoisie, which then fostered the development of an indigenous monopoly capitalist class capable of exporting capital. There has in fact been no genuinely independent Irish government since 1922, as there has been no government in Ireland constituted by a democratic mandate to administer the affairs of the nation on behalf of the people of Ireland. Rather, there has been a legislature constituted in Dublin, formed on the basis of policy decided in the parliament of the colonial metropole in which less than 30% of the elected Irish representatives were present, that itself legislates in the interests of the international capital-exporting bourgeoisie. Such a legislature cannot be considered an independent one.

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There is a truism in the Irish republican political tradition that is encapsulated in an 1898 quote from Fenian writer and militant Jerimiah O’Donovan Rossa.¹¹ He writes:

It is in that English Parliament [that] the chains for Ireland are forged,
and any Irish patriot who goes into that forge to free Ireland will
soon find himself welded into the agency of his country’s
subjection to England.¹²

While as social scientists we cannot take the above to be universally applicable purely based on the credentials of the source, there are few statements concerning the Irish struggle that have withstood the scrutiny of history more successfully. In this passage, O’Donovan Rossa identifies a key component of how Ireland was and is administered as a colonial possession—a process we will term “compradorification.” In the era the above passage was written, these nationalists turned compradors would have legislated within the Westminster Parliament, becoming part of the British administration in Ireland. However, in the century since, this analysis has become far more useful in understanding the role of the nationalists who enter the legislative institutions in Ireland, Stormont, and Leinster House, and become part of the British administration in Belfast, and the semicolonial comprador legislature in Dublin. This article will examine the process of compradorification in the abstract, seeking to understand how seemingly revolutionary nationalists can become administrators of colonial and semicolonial rule in Ireland by their membership of the northern and southern legislative institutions. This piece will investigate the process by which Sinn Féin, and particularly Provisional Sinn Féin, in the latter part of the 20th century was able to develop from perhaps the primary revolutionary organ for national liberation in Ireland, to the comprador “constitutional nationalist” party it became by the turn of the millennium. Finally, an analysis will be conducted of the concept of counterrevolutionary retreat and how compradorification can be viewed as a form of retreat that must be guarded against.
In order to understand the process of compradorification in Ireland, we have to first demonstrate that the legislative bodies on the island of Ireland’s sole purpose is the administration of colonial and semicolonial rule, and by design cannot be used in the process of national liberation. At the time O’Donovan Rossa was writing on the character of the Westminster Parliament, there was no legislature in Ireland, let alone an independent legislature. The weakness of the metropolitan parliament as a means of liberation for the colonized nation are somewhat self-explanatory. In brief, prior to the establishment of devolved and pseudo-independent legislatures in Ireland after 1920, a parliamentary strategy for Irish nationalism faced two insurmountable hurdles: the undemocratic nature of the Westminster Parliament and gradual integration into establishment politics. The Westminster Parliament would not establish a system of “one person, one vote” until 1928 (and not until 1968 in the occupied six counties of Ulster).¹³ Prior to this, a land qualification was required in order for women to exercise suffrage. It was only a decade prior that land qualification had been removed for men.¹⁴
At the time of O’Donovan Rossa’s writing, less than a quarter of Irish people had the right to vote, with the land qualification ensuring that those who did were largely wealthy landowners in a country where the majority of the population were tenant farmers.¹⁵ Fundamentally, this institution was incapable of representing the interests of the majority of the Irish population, as only representatives who were able to appeal to landed Irishmen would be successful in winning a seat. Should these nationalists somehow achieve this feat, they would be met by another barrier to their championing an Irish nationalist project: the proportion of seats allotted to Ireland. In the 1918 British General Election, the final one to include representatives from all thirty-two counties of Ireland, 105 seats out of 707 were contested by Irish representatives.¹⁶ Even if a parliamentary nationalist party had taken every Irish seat in the Westminster Parliament with an explicit mandate for national self-determination, the British parties could easily outvote them and prevent any legal path for the establishment of self-government. Assuming a party did intend on taking this route to independence, building a successful electoral party to take an absolute majority of Irish seats in parliament would be the work of decades.
This brings us to the second hurdle: incorporation. In order for a party to be successful electorally with the demographic that had the suffrage in this period (large landowners and the wealthy petty-bourgeois) it necessarily would have had to appeal to their interests. Father of Irish Republican political thought, Theobald Wolfe Tone, identified as early as the 1790s that the cause of an Irish republic with genuine economic sovereignty was largely not in the interests of the landowning class, no matter their religious background or national identification.¹⁷ In order then, to build this electoral majority you would necessarily have to temper whatever vision of an self-governing Ireland you did have until it was palatable to the classes that had the vote, by which point such an independence would be in-name-only. In the meantime, holding seats in the Westminster Parliament and voting on legislation that would affect the Irish people places these nationalists in the role of administrator of colonial rule in Ireland. Effectively, these nationalists come to do the job of the British administration for them, watering down any political ambition until it poses no risk to British capital and, in the meantime, implementing policy from London to be imposed on Ireland. In effect, O’Donovan Rossa has identified the process of “compradorification” in Ireland in this extract. He recognizes that there is no route to an Irish Republic through the Westminster Parliament and that those who attempt to build one this way will become colonial administrators, assisting the British in the occupation of their own country.
This may have been the case in O’Donovan Rossa’s time, but in the modern day the legislature has been devolved to Belfast and a pseudo-independent government established in Dublin. Do these bodies carry with them the same restrictions as the Westminster Parliament, and what role does partition play in their composition?
As a result of the civil rights movement in Ulster, the franchise has been extended to all legal adults in both jurisdictions of Ireland who are citizens of either the United Kingdom or Ireland.¹⁸ However, the restrictions on political activity have taken on a different character. Where the electorate is no longer restricted, the realm of legal political activity now is. There are strict norms within which political actors on the island of Ireland have to confirm, or otherwise face their organizations being proscribed and the potential of lengthy prison sentences. Republicans that do not conform to the “constitutional” model of political change espoused by Sinn Féin and the SDLP [Social Democratic and Labour Party] have faced draconian legal action for particularly minor offenses,¹⁹ particularly when compared to the effective state sanction that loyalist paramilitary organizations receive in the occupied six counties.²⁰ The clear message from the administrations north and south is to embrace an electoral strategy for political change. However, even when political parties do abandon abstentionism and attempt to run for political office, they meet constant harassment if they do not also condone the state apparatuses that ensure the status quo.²¹
In 2022, the Irish Republican Socialist Party fielded candidates for election to the Belfast legislature. Despite this, their party offices have been raided multiple times by the Police Service of Northern Ireland.²² Members of the offshoot of Sinn Féin, Éirígí, which split from the party due to dissatisfaction over Sinn Féin’s endorsement of the PSNI [Police Service of Northern Ireland], have been arrested for taking photos of police officers and accused of acts of terrorism by journalists on Ireland’s national broadcaster.²³ The risk associated with terror charges in Ireland is compounded by the system of “Special Criminal Courts,” courts in which no jury is required in determining the guilt of the accused, which are disproportionately used against republican political prisoners.²⁴ Additionally, in the twenty-six counties administered from Dublin, mere membership of proscribed organizations can be punished with a prison sentence and the opinion of Garda [police] can be admitted as evidence, as though it were materially relevant to the case.²⁵ While this has always been the case in one form or another in Ireland, since the ascendancy of the counterrevolutionary faction within Sinn Féin, the lines that define acceptable political behavior have narrowed considerably. Even the acknowledgement of republican prisoners is beyond the pale for Sinn Féin in the present day, preferring to ignore the political charges on which people have been imprisoned and condemn republicans languishing in British and Irish prisons as common criminals (particularly ironic considering the similar charges faced and prison sentences served by many within the current leadership of Sinn Féin only a few decades ago).²⁶
Occupation and colonialism necessitates a higher level of political control than in most states, but the existence of revolutionary organs strong enough to resist state control provided spaces within which radical political work could be discussed and undertaken—not without danger, but with a greater level of security than is the case presently. The absence of such an organization, a role previously occupied by Sinn Féin, has meant that for republicans who are committed to a thirty-two county socialist republic, there is little room to maneuver without coming into contact with state security forces. As seen in the draconian powers wielded by administrations north and south, challenges to republican organizing are as pronounced, if not more so, as they ever have been in peacetime.
The dynamic of partition now also must be considered. As mentioned previously, in 1922 a new government for Ireland was formed by a British act of parliament that provided the counterrevolutionary wing of the original incarnation of Sinn Féin the right to form a parliament in Ireland. This privilege was afforded to this faction of Sinn Féin by virtue of their agreeing to the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, whereby two separate administrations would be formed in Dublin and Belfast to legislate on behalf of the interests of the monopoly capitalist class, with varying degrees of proximity to the British parliament in Westminster. When the six and twenty-six county states were formed, the intention was that a northern state with a built-in unionist majority be created to ensure the most industrialized region of the country remained within British control, with no economic barriers between the shipyards of Belfast and the industries that relied on them on the island of Britain. In addition, the more volatile and nationalist twenty-six county state was to be given dominion status, with unrest now becoming the responsibility of the Dublin administration; the Irish Free State being poorer and more economically agrarian, providing a steady flow of agricultural goods and cheap labor across the Irish Sea without the need for direct British intervention.²⁷
This necessarily adds an additional anti-democratic hurdle, in that a gerrymandered northern legislature exists. Where a single all-Ireland legislature would be able to produce a democratic majority and mandate for national liberation in a single election, the northern and southern legislatures have been designed to prevent a national democratic mandate being established. However, just as in the case of the Westminster Parliament, even if you managed to get an absolute majority in both the Belfast and Dublin administrations, with the singular purpose of demanding a referendum on the unification of Ireland, further barriers await you. In the text of the Good Friday Agreement, the document that creates the legal framework by which a referendum on a United Ireland can be held, provision is made so that this referendum can only be called by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland “if at any time it appears likely to him that a majority of those voting would express a wish that Northern Ireland should cease to be part of the United Kingdom.”²⁸ This in effect gives the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, an unelected British official, the say over whether a referendum on a United Ireland should be called. These obstructions make the task of any organization attempting to build an Irish Socialist Republic through parliamentary means effectively impossible. These legislative institutions, despite being on the island of Ireland, are no more in the control of the people of Ireland than the Westminster Parliament was. The only difference is that the constraints are more opaque and harder to work against.
The impossibility of a parliamentary road to an Irish Republic with genuine economic sovereignty has been a widely held belief amongst republicans since the mid-1800s, and was even codified in Sinn Féin’s official program in 1905.²⁹ This advancement in the revolutionary strategy of the republican movement was the product of the work of generations of militant nationalists. Deviation from this principle was the primary motivation behind the modern incarnation of Sinn Féin, Provisional Sinn Féin, splitting from Official Sinn Féin in 1970.³⁰ How was it then that this same party could become the standard bearer for “constitutional nationalism,” embrace the role of comprador administration wholeheartedly, and begin to persecute republicans who did not follow them in their retreat?³¹ This process is best understood when examined from the 1970 Official/Provisional split onwards. Prior to this split, Sinn Féin had held to a policy of abstentionism, refusing to take a seat in either the Belfast or Dublin legislatures due to a recognition of their character as colonial and semicolonial institutions that were not equipped to create an Irish Republic.³² However, during the late 1960s a movement had been growing within Sinn Féin for a reappraisal of the character of the southern legislature. While the Belfast government was considered at that time beyond the pale for republicans to endorse, a revisionist strain of republicans had begun considering the opportunities possible through electoralism in the twenty-six county state.³³
It could be argued that this turn was itself an overcorrection against the “purely military” strategy of the late fifties and early sixties—a product of a rightward turn in the party in the 1950s. The peripheralization of the organization and of Sinn Féin had resulted in a smaller, largely petty-bourgeois membership who lacked a unified political philosophy beyond continuity republicanism and the influence of catholic theology.³⁴ The result was a strategy largely devoid of a political component, producing deviations into “putschism” by the IRA and had yielded little gains for the movement as a whole.³⁵ The failure of this line revealed the dominant line of the movement at the time to be right-deviationist and erroneous. However, rather than a correct line emerging from this failure, line struggle was improperly handled and a reactionary, left-deviationist strategy instead came to the position of prominence. This analysis promoted the idea of abandoning abstentionism altogether, losing great ideological advances made by the movement, and instead seeking to win a socialist republic through the ballot box and rapprochement with the unionist community through working-class unity. This deviation was erroneous for several reasons—primarily the misunderstanding of the importance of abstentionism within the republican party program and an incorrect analysis of the nature of settler colonialism within Ireland preventing the construction of a genuinely cross-community socialist republican movement.³⁶
While couched in the language of revolutionary theory, this revisionist turn in the thinking of the party was in fact an example of opportunism. The counterrevolutionaries pushing this line may have worn the trappings of revolutionaries, but in fact wanted nothing more than to retreat from the gains achieved by previous generations of republicans and enmesh themselves into the colonial and semicolonial regimes that govern Ireland. By the time of the 1970 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, what amounted to an anti-democratic coup had taken place within the party, with several cumainn that favored the continuation of an abstentionist policy having their voting rights removed.³⁷ As a result of this manipulation and misguided analysis, the anti-abstentionist policy passed. This abandonment of revolutionary means and turn towards electoralism was in effect a form of retreat, abandoning the vantage point achieved through struggle so far and opting for a conciliatory strategy that may benefit the careerist individuals within the party, but not the masses within and without the movement who were effectively abandoned by this about course. It was recognized as such by a large number of the delegates in attendance who left the Ard Fheis to form the provisional, abstentionist Sinn Féin. From this position, Provisional Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA would go on to wage what was possibly the most successful period of armed struggle in Ireland since the War of Independence. Utilizing a twin strategy of political organizing and guerilla tactics, the provisional movement was able to achieve several of its key goals, including forcing the British to dissolve the Belfast administration and rule directly from London.³⁸
However, this split was improperly handled on an ideological basis once again, and while the Provisional movement did have a commitment to community activism, its strategy amounted to little more than a return to the “purely military” strategy of a decade previous, with an added, uncoordinated “community work” element. That is to say individual activists within the movement were involved in community work, but the lack of a coordinated strategy within the movement betrayed the fact that the primary means by which the Provisionals hoped to achieve a Republic was by physical force. With little ideological coordination to direct efforts outside of the realm of military strategy, the Provisional movement once again ventured into the territory of adventurism.³⁹ In 1975, secret talks were brokered between the Provisional IRA army council and representatives of the British government, where the Provisionals established their terms for ending military operations, including British withdrawal and the release of political prisoners.⁴⁰ One of the British demands to have these talks take place was that the Provisional IRA call a ceasefire.⁴¹ Talks dragged on for several months, with the IRA believing that it had brought the British to the verge of withdrawal.
The occupying forces took this as an opportunity to regroup, however, with peace talks intended as a distraction to allow the IRA to be militarily outmaneuvered. The ceasefire greatly exacerbated a growing rift within both the IRA and Sinn Féin between the old-guard; it coalesced around the organizers who had pushed the retention of abstentionist policy and the adventurist “purely-military” strategy, and a set of newer activists who questioned republican “home truths” on the basis that if the leadership had been misled on the ceasefire, it may also be misled about other aspects of the struggle.⁴² This rift gave opportunity for a left-deviationist line, previously eschewed by the provisional movement, to establish itself amongst younger sectors of the membership who had joined the movement in the late 1960s during the major outbreak of inter-communal violence.
One particular idea that grew amongst these younger cadres was the “armalite and ballot box” strategy, an idea that a shift in strategy was needed so that neither military struggle nor electoralism should be written off, and instead both tactics could be used to achieve the same goal. This right-deviationist, opportunistic line was formed similarly to the anti-abstentionist deviation in the 1970 Ard Fheis, where party members who had witnessed the failures of the “purely-military” strategy took the opportunity to propel themselves into prominence and push erroneous strategies that had the potential to bring the party into the establishment and neutralize any threat it posed to the colonial and semicolonial regimes in Dublin and Belfast.⁴³ In this instance, the justification used did not feature the cross-community working class alliance arguments of the previous deviation, as a decade of sectarian conflict had writ-large the near impossibility of convincing the Protestant community of their common class interest with the Catholic community. Instead the argument was couched far more cynically, in the language of using any tools available to achieve the same goal.
Despite this difference, these arguments stem from the same right-deviationist, opportunistic line. While each deviation differs in rhetoric, both are retreats motivated by the same urge to give up the work of building socialist republic and reap the rewards of those who enter the colonial and semicolonial establishment. While a recognition of the missteps of the faction conveying the “purely-military” strategy, and a reappraisal of that line was necessary in order to develop the struggle for national liberation to a higher stage, the push for a dual strategy was in effect a retreat from the level of development the movement was already at, and a return to a previous stage of revolutionary development prior to the recognition of electoralism as a wasteful and dangerous dead end. This incorrect analysis was allowed to grow until in 1986, a core of revisionist republicans pushed through an anti-abstentionist amendment to the constitution at that year’s Ard Fheis, formalizing the dual strategy as Sinn Féin’s solution to British colonialism in Ireland.
While this resolution was adopted with the firm commitment to not enter the Belfast administration, it has since become clear that the revisionists were happy to gain legitimacy within the establishment by any means necessary.⁴⁴ The “dual strategy period” that followed was a process of backsliding on hard-learned lessons by Irish revolutionaries in order so that the formerly revolutionary movement could become an accepted part of the established colonial and semicolonial apparatus in Ireland. In short, to compradorify the revolutionary party.
Volunteers with the Provisional IRA and republican activists continued to work and die for the goal of a socialist republic that the leadership of Sinn Féin had all but abandoned. In fact, these soldiers and organizers were dying for the dream of a circle of party bureaucrats who had resolved that nothing was off the table if it allowed them to become administrators in the colonial and semicolonial legislatures in Ireland. These measures included The Good Friday Agreement, which copper fastened partition and established an anti-democratic, consociational electoral system, ensuring a firm sectarian divide persisted not just in the communities of the occupied six counties but also in its parliament.⁴⁵ In 2007, Sinn Féin again dropped a core principle of the republican tradition and agreed to appoint members to the policing board within the Belfast administration, becoming codirectors of the colonial police force in Ulster.⁴⁶
Since Sinn Féin has taken this position, the number of “random” stop and searches have risen rather than fallen, disproportionately targeting Catholics, especially children, for strip searches.⁴⁷ These retreats from the previously advanced state of the national revolution in Ireland are not just opportunistic and counterrevolutionary, they are fundamentally not Sinn Féin’s retreats to make. These positions were not territory won by the recent groups of higher ups within Sinn Féin, they were won by generations of republicans and the broader revolutionary masses who Sinn Féin until recently claimed to represent. It is by this process of retreat that Sinn Féin have been able to legitimize themselves in the eyes of the colonial and semicolonial establishments in Ireland. So much so that, at time of writing, Sinn Féin is the primary colonial administrator in the Belfast legislature and is poised to be the ruling party in Dublin’s semicolonial legislature at the next election in the twenty-six county state. Not only has the revolutionary line struggle completely failed, causing the party to become inherently counterrevolutionary, but the party has also been able to enmesh itself so thoroughly in the colonial and semicolonial structures that it will soon become one of the largest barriers to the establishment of a thirty-county socialist republic of Ireland.
Why would a revolutionary movement retreat and what is counterrevolutionary about the process of retreat? Firstly we have to establish our terms. When “advance” is used in this context, it is used to mean the revolutionary strategic and ideological advances made by material analysis and struggle by the revolutionary movement—that is to say, when revolutionary activity yields new information and strategic developments useful in further revolutionary activity. When “retreat” is used in this context, we specifically mean a counterrevolutionary retreat on ideological principles or from established correct strategy. In order for an action to be considered a retreat, a movement or party must abandon principles that have been proven in both material analysis and practical struggle. For example, the abandonment of the principle of abstentionism from the colonial and semicolonial parliaments in Ireland was an ideological retreat by Sinn Féin as the policy of absentionism was an example of an advance, proven to be a correct strategy by the efforts of generations of revolutionary republicans. To abandon this policy, and in doing so, discredit it due to Sinn Féin’s position as standard bearer for the republican movement at that time, was a significant retreat that seriously weakened the revolutionary movement in Ireland and its ability to work in the interests of the masses.
This example provides us with the reason why a revolutionary movement may retreat: a failure to resist counterrevolutionary, opportunist elements pushing lines that demand the abandonment of known truths and established tactics. This act of retreat will not necessarily be presented by its proponents as a form of backsliding. From their perspective, it may be the process of challenging orthodoxies or attempting to produce new tactical or ideological developments that may aid the movement. This attitude may emerge from an ignorance of how previous lines were agreed upon and why certain positions are held to be true. Whatever the motivation, however, these ideas should be combatted firmly and quickly. As in the case of Sinn Féin, a lack of proper attention to ideological deviations allowed these incorrect ideas to spread amongst the membership until the movement entered into a process of retreat. Treating these deviations requires proper systems of education, forums within which the membership can discuss the revolutionary program guided by comrades with a good grasp of material conditions and the movement’s analysis, disciplinary action in the case of major missteps, etc. In the most serious cases, a rectification movement may need to be embarked upon—in short, systems that promote a proper approach to line struggle.
Ultimately, the failure to prevent the movement entering into retreat was in large part due to a failure of the revolutionary line to be properly asserted and the victory of the counterrevolutionary line, highlighting to modern republicans in Ireland the importance of a properly structured revolutionary party with the means to engage in line struggle and advance further the ideology by which we understand our situation and work to change it. It is the responsibility of the party and its entire membership to promote proper line struggle to prevent the retreat from advances born out of study and struggle. Those cadres who do not commit themselves to this process are themselves opening up the revolutionary party and movement to the possibility of retreat. The compradorification of Sinn Féin signifies the party’s inability to properly maintain its revolutionary character through this line struggle and a defeat of those cadres actively involved in pushing the revolutionary line.
In short, Sinn Féin’s retreat showed the party’s structural inability to defend the advances of the republican movement up until that point and the failures of its membership to engage in line struggle to defend and heighten those advances. Should any organization constitute itself on the basis of defending those advances and progressing the struggle for national liberation in Ireland, its first goal should be the establishment of structures within itself to promote properly performed line struggle and prevent the possibility of retreat. As modern revolutionaries we are inheritors not of orthodoxies, but of proven ideological and strategic advances. Should we not take up the work to defend these advances and to make further advances, we risk damage not only to our project but to the wider national liberation movement. In essence, to not engage in this line struggle to defend the advances we have proven to be correct and to combat erroneous or defeatist lines, is to allow counterrevolutionary lines to be pushed and for retreats to occur.
Ireland is a country divided between two political administrations: one colonial, one semicolonial. Through these administrations it is impossible to bring into being the Irish Republic declared in 1916. All that is possible through entering the Belfast and Dublin legislatures is winning the possibility to administer Ireland on behalf of the imperialist class. More than a century of revolutionary study and practice has proven this to be true. We can hold this to be a major advance in revolutionary theory as applied to the island of Ireland that we must not disregard. In the past, we can see when parties have reconsidered this theoretical advancement they have begun the process of retreat into counterrevolution, devolving from the standard bearer of the republican movement in Ireland to revisionist electoral party, striving to embrace the role of comprador administrator and enmeshing themselves into the colonial and semicolonial establishment, using the tools of the state to terrorize the people the movement was established to represent and liberate.
This process is inherently counterrevolutionary and should be opposed vigorously. The advancements that the revolutionary movement safeguard are the product of decades and centuries of study and action by the revolutionary masses. To retreat from these advances, to wash our hands of these major strides forward in favor of reappraisal of strategies that have been proven to be erroneous, to discard the product of the toil of our comrades for an easier, more appealing, unsuccessful alternative, is inherently counterrevolutionary and as a tendency must be challenged wherever it is found in the movement. In Ireland, this retreat has resulted in a major defeat for the revolutionary movement. What was previously the organ of national liberation now administers the police force that disproportionately targets revolutionary republicans.
This movement that was previously the people’s sole weapon against the colonial and semicolonial state is pursuing power in Dublin so it can work hand-in-hand with the imperialist powers that subjugate the Irish working class. Only an organization properly constituted to challenge erroneous deviations and incorrect lines within its membership will be able to rebuild the progress we have lost in the provisional project and advance the revolutionary movement further. The responsibility of every cadre is to take up the revolutionary line struggle within the party, to advance revolutionary positions and defend preexisting advances. The lessons that must be learned from the past fifty years of revolutionary struggle in Ireland, particularly concerning electoralism, are clear. We can cede no ground to the erroneous idea that liberation can come from within the colonial and semicolonial legislatures on this island, and we cannot allow the growth of positions within our movement that question the run counter to the established facts of our struggle. Correct ideas “come from social practice, and from it alone.”⁴⁸ A revolutionary movement that does not hold this statement to be true, does not put into effect measures to defend the advances brought about by social practice, and allows differing ideas to grow on the validity of established advances, makes itself vulnerable to backsliding, counterrevolutionary retreat and, in extreme cases, compradorification.

1. Michael Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916–1923, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 411; Peter Pyne, 1969, “The Third Sinn Féin Party: 1923–1926; I: Narrative Account,” Economic and Social Review 1, no .1 (1969).
2. Irish Free State Constitution Act: 1922 (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1922/1/pdfs/ukpga_19220001_en.pdf), 1.
3. “Irish Republican Legitimism” is a school of republican thought that holds that, for several reasons including the British act of parliament from which the 1922 government draws its legitimacy, the title of Dáil Éireann (Parliament of the Republic) was transferred to IRA army council. Depending on levels of adherence to this school of thought, adherents may consider the current legitimate government of the Republic to be Continuity IRA army council. While this ideological formation makes logical sense, it relies on a formulaic and dogmatic adherence to the structure of the constitution of the Irish Republic which at best makes it somewhat irrelevant to present conditions in Ireland and at worst resembles the arguments of Jacobite or Carlist legitimists.
4. C. S. Andrews, Dublin Made Me (Cork: Mercier Press, 1979), 269.
5. Iain Wallace, 1985, “Towards a Geography of Agribusiness,” Progress in Human Geography 9, no. 4 (1985): 491–514.
6. Kevin O’Rourke, “‘Burn Everything British But Their Coal’: The Anglo-Irish Economic War of the 1930s,” Journal of Economic History 51, no. 2 (1992): 57–366.
7. “Land annuities” were payments made by the Dublin administration to the British state as part of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. As part of the land redistribution undertaken by the British in the late 1800s/early 1900s, farmers who received land that had been redistributed were considered to be in debt to the British state and had to make regular payments. During the Anglo-Irish Treaty, it was agreed that this debt would not be written off and that the Dublin administration would make these payments, collecting from the debtors themselves and delivering these payments to the British government. During the trade war, the Dublin government refused to make these payments but continued to collect annuities from the debtors. (Kevin O’Rourke, 357–366).
8. E. Moxon Browne, “Ireland in the EEC,” The World Today 3, no. 10 (1975): 424–432.
9. Dáil Éireann, The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution of Ireland (Dublin: Irish Statute Book, 1998).
10. Republican Network for Unity, A Revolutionary Republican Analysis of the Irish Pacification Process (Belfast: Republican Network for Unity, 2013).
11. Fenian is a term used to refer to members and supporters of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a major republican fraternal organization that operated from the mid-1800s until after the Irish Civil War.
12. Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Rossa’s Recollections, 1838–1898: Memoirs of an Irish Revolutionary (Lanham: Lyons Press, 1898), 145.
13. Ray Strachey, The Women’s Movement in Great Britain: A Short Summary of its Rise, Methods and Victories (London: The National Council of Women of Great Britain, 1928), 3; Hansard, Electoral Law Act (Northern Ireland) 1968 (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/apni/1968/20?view=plain), 1.
14. Hansard, Representation of the People Act 1918, 1.
15. Chris Cook, The Routledge Companion to Britain in the 19th Century, 1815–1914 (London: Routledge, 2005), 68.
16. A. De Bromhead, A. Fernihough, E. Hargaden, “Representation of the People: Franchise Extension and The ‘Sinn Fein Election’ in Ireland, 1918,” The Journal of Economic History, vol. 80, no. 3 (2020): 886; J.M. McEwen, “The Coupon Election of 1918 and Unionist Members of Parliament,” Journal of Modern History, vol. 34, no. 3 (1962): 294–306.
17. T. W. Moody, R. B. McDowell, C. J. Woods, The Writings of Theobald Wolfe Tone, 1763–98: Volume II (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 107–120.
18. Fionbarra O’Dochartaigh, Ulster’s White Negroes: From Civil Rights to Insurrection (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1994).
19. Seamus McKinney, “Police Search Saoradh HQ in ‘Illegal Lottery’ Probe,” The Irish News, November 8, 2019, www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2019/11/08/news/police-search-saoradh-hq-in-illegal-lottery-probe-1759779/.
20. Jude Webber, “Northern Ireland: The Paramilitaries that ‘Never Go Away’,” Financial Times, April 3, 2023, www.ft.com/content/7e83e463-0c45-46a6-a6a0-12668cb65dc9.
21. “Abstentionism” in Irish Republicanism is used to refer to the policy by which Irish republicans abstain from taking their seats in colonial and comprador parliaments such as Westminster, Stormont, and Leinster House.
22. Allison Morris, “Video: PSNI Officers Use Chainsaw to Remove Front Door of IRSP’s West Belfast Office During Raid,” Belfast Telegraph, September 8, 2021, www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/video-psni-officers-use-chainsaw-to-remove-front-door-of-irsps-west-belfast-office-during-raid/40830699.html.
23. BBC News, “Éirígí Press Officer Stephen Murney Cleared of Terrorism Charges,” February 24, 2014, www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-26328297; John McGuirk, “RTE To Pay €20,000 to Charity After Republican Party Éirígí is Wrongly Linked to Murder on Prime Time,” March 18, 2021, www.thejournal.ie/rte-eirigi-apology-5385501-Mar2021/.
24. An tSeirbhís Chúirteanna, “The Special Criminal Court,” www.courts.ie/special-criminal-court.
25. Ronan McGreevy, “Offenses Against the State Act: Is It Still Needed,” The Irish Times, June 21, 2023, www.irishtimes.com/politics/2023/06/21/offences-against-the-state-act-introduced-to-combat-the-ira-is-it-still-needed/.
26. Kevin Mullan, “Dissident Republican Group Claims ‘There are Dozens of Political Prisoners in the North’,” Derry Journal, February 22, 2024, www.derryjournal.com/news/politics/dissident-republican-group-claims-there-are-dozens-of-political-prisoners-in-the-north-4529597.
27. Irish Communist Organisation, The Economics of Partition (Dublin: Irish Communist Organisation, 1969).
28. Hansard, Northern Ireland Act 1998, www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/47/contents?view=plain, 1.
29. Brian Feeney, Sinn Fein: A Hundred Turbulent Years (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 2002), 33–34.
30. Peter Taylor, Provos: The IRA and Sinn Féin (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998), 67.
31. “Constitutional Nationalism” is a term used in Ireland to refer to political parties that pursue the reunification of the country through electoral means. After their abandonment of abstentionism and certainly post-Good Friday Agreement this term has been used to describe Sinn Féin.
32. Feeney, 168–170.
33. Brian Hanley, Scott Millar, The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers Party (London: Penguin, 2010), 145.
34. Pat Walsh, Irish Republicanism and Socialism: The Politics of the Republican Movement (Belfast: Athol Books, 1994), 41–42.
35. Hanley and Millar, 10-18; Mao Zedong, Five Golden Rays (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2017), 35.
36. Hanley and Millar, 256–257.
37. Feeney, 250–251. Ard Fheis means annual party conference. Cumann is an Irish word meaning association or club. Cumainn (plural) are the smallest formative unit of Sinn Féin, equivalent to a local party branch in English.
38. Patrick Mulroe, Bombs, Bullets and the Border: Policing Ireland’s Frontier (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2017), 129-131.
39. The noted lack of ideological co-ordination should not be taken to mean that little ideological development occurred. In fact, during the period of internment, ideological development was probably at its most accelerated. However, it tended in various directions with notable deviationist tendencies amongst genuine progress and a lack of endorsement or consideration of these proposals amongst the Sinn Féin leadership who remained outside of the internment camps lead to external ideological stagnation. For further information on this topic see Feargal Mac Ionnrachtaigh’s Language Resistance and Revival: Republican Prisoners and the Irish Language in the North of Ireland (London: Pluto, 2013) and Tommy McKearney’s The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament (London: Pluto, 2011).
40. Taylor, 140–143.
41. Richard English, Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA (London: Pan, 2003), 158.
42. Taylor, 197.
43. Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (London: Penguin, 2007), 144–147.
44. CAIN Web Service, “Text of the Motion on Abstentionism (Resolution 162) as presented to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, Dublin, (November 2, 1986),” https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/sf/resolution162.htm.
45. Consociationalism is method of structuring bourgeois parliamentary democracies whereby a government must be formed from a coalition of the largest parties representing distinct groups within a society. In Ulster, any Stormont government has to be formed by the largest party representing the “Unionist” community and the largest party representing the “Nationalist” community, effectively enshrining sectarianism into the democratic process of the territory. CYM Committee, “Removing the Veil,” Connolly Youth Movement, April 25, 2023, https://cym.ie/2023/04/25/removing-the-veil/.
46. Owen Bowcott, “Historic Vote Ends Sinn Féin’s Long Battle with the Police Force in Northern Ireland,” The Guardian, January 29, 2007, www.theguardian.com/politics/2007/jan/29/uk.northernireland.
47. Amnesty International, “Northern Ireland: PSNI Must Stop Strip Searching Children Immediately,” January 12, 2023, www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/northern-ireland-police-must-stop-strip-searching-children-immediately; Connla Young, “Over Twice as Many Catholic Children Strip Searched by PSNI,” The Irish News, June 27, 2023, www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2023/06/27/news/twice_as_many_catholic_children_strip_searched_by_psni-3385989/.
48. Mao Zedong, “Where do Correct Ideas Come From,” Five Essays on Philosophy (Utrecht: Foreign Languages Press, 2018), 187.