FSL Lyons gives me a mention in his Ireland Since the Famine (Fontana, 1973). At the time he wrote the book he was Professor of Modern History in the University of Kent. He subsequently became Provost of TCD, at the time when I was in the TCD Industry Office; I don't think he made the connection. The reference, on p769, as far as it goes, is accurate. He credits Goulding and Mac Giolla with seeking to '..turn the movement towards a less physical approach..' and enlisting the support of '..a Dublin intellectual Dr Roy Johnston, who later resigned, seemingly in protest against violence..'. He goes on to explain that '..this more sophisticated trend..' cut little ice in the North, where the Catholics were under the treat of '..Protestant pogrom..'. He goes on to date the emergence of what became the Provisional to interference in February 1969 by Donegal Fianna Fail activists who promised money and support for the creation of a Northern Command, separate from the Dublin leadership, perceived as a threat (they were actively engaged in exposing the role of Fianna Fail in Dublin speculative property developments; this aspect is also developed by Justin O'Brien).

Sean Mac Stiofain in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Gordon Cremonesi, 1975, has references to the present writer, and provides several anchor-points for comment; this deserves a separate file.

J Bowyer Bell published in 1979 a revised edition of his earlier (1970) The Secret Army, with the Academy Press, Dublin. He references the present writer on p345, in the context of the foundation of the Wolfe Tone Society, which he dates at October 1964; in fact it was July 25 in that year, taking over from Cathal Goulding's earlier 'Directory'. He credits us with wishing to pick up where O'Donnell and Gilmore left off, and organising seminars to pick up on the experience of the previous political generation. I get a further mention on p369, in the context of the process of projected Fianna Fail involvement in the post-August 1969 arming of active service units in the North: they would only help with finance if Johnston, Goulding and Costello were expelled and all talk of 'socialism' and political agitation in the South given up. This episode did not achieve its objective, and the attention of the Fianna Fail hawks later switched to support of the Provisional process. See also the note on his 1993 book below.

Mike Milotte in his Communism in Modern Ireland (Gill and Macmillan, 1984) give quite a creditable rendering of the emergance in the late 1940s of the Irish Workers League, correctly crediting myself and Justin Keating (p217) with being associated. His analysis of the differing attitudes to Partition north and sourth of the border within the IWL and CPNI is substantially correct.

Earlier on p24 he blames Greaves for adopting the so-called 'stages theory' which '..artificially separates the national struggle from the struggle for socialism..'. He links this with Stalin and attacks Greaves for allegedly wrongly attributing it to Connolly. This could be the origin of the 'stages theory' canard which has surfaced repeatedly as a pejorative concept in the current context.

Discussing the background to the NICRA and its relationship with the CPNI on p234ff Milotte correctly points out the weakness of the trade union link, and notes the failure of the 1965 trade union civil rights meeting to lead to any positive sequel, which lack he attributes to the rising influence of Paisley's Protestant demagogy. He notes the failure of the CPNI paper Unity to mention the inaugural meeting of the NICRA, despite the leading roles of Noel Harris, Derek Peters and Betty Sinclair.

Coming round to the question of the role of left-republicans in the Civil Rights context, he correctly attributes the initiative to Goulding and Mac Giolla, but he attributes the nature of the re-orientation on p265 to 'two newcomers to the republican ranks: Roy Johnston and Anthony Coughlan..'. This paragraph is quite misleading and has several falsehoods, typical of this genre of journalistic book dependent on secondary sources. Coughlan was never in the 'republican ranks' apart from his role for a time as Wolfe Tone Society secretary. I was never, as he alleges, a 'branch secretary in the CPGB'. The Connolly Association was in no way an 'Irish emigré offshoot' of the CPGB. On the next page he attributes the Wolfe Tone society to my initiative; in fact it had been Gouldings in 1963, and I helped to develop its independent constitution. Its newsletter Tuairisc had much input from Coughlan, and this indeed had much influence from the Greaves approach to Civil Rights imbibed earlier via the Connolly Association, but no way were the arguments '..identical to those of the Irish communists..' who were far from comfortable with the real issues in Ireland, preferring a cosy and largely sterile relationship with the 'international movement' and occasional trips East.

Milotte on p272ff attempts to analyse the fallout from the August 1969 pogroms, but misses the key issue: who master-minded the role of the B-Specials in Belfast when they counter-attacked in arms what hitherto had been an unarmed civil rights movement? What was the strategic thinking? Did they positively want the movement to regress to what became the Provisional mode of action, so that they could deal with it using their beloved Special Powers? Milotte goes on to mention on p277 the December 1969 IRA Convention, which he alleges took place in Dublin; it didn't, it was in a farmhouse somewhere in the wilds.

Milotte seems to rejoice in the fact that the left-politicising elements were blamed for the failure of the IRA to defend the Falls, and in the consequent emeregence of the right-wing Provisionals. He names names: myself, Coughlan, Kadar Asmal and Derry Kelleher were seen by the Provisionals as '...acting directly on behalf of the Irish Workers Party (which the IWL had become) or for Desmond Greaves' Connolly Association..'. Yet he goes on to admit that the Provisionals felt the need to act for 'Catholic workers' and to declare socialist aims, in which context they took up my shelved Eire Nua notes, which he however dismisses as 'reactionary distributism'. This situation, riven by contradictions as it was, is far from clarified by Milotte's analysis, which deserves detailed critical attention, more than I can give here. Was he perhaps promoting a neo-Trotskyist version of Stalinist central-Statism, achieved via the Provisionals? The mind boggles.

Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie, in their Provisional IRA (Heinemann 1987) has quite a few references. On p38 they accuse Goulding, MacGiolla and myself of '...preferring Dublin and the company of fellow left-wing intellectials, especially those from the CPI, to that of the rural membership..'. This was pure invention, unreferenced, and so far from the truth as to be laughable. We in fact spent, variously, most of our time down the country, to the extent that Dublin tended to be neglected. On p40 they pick up on the Bowyer Bell story about the issue of the rosary at Republican commemorations, and its attempted use as a lever by Mac Stiofain to get rid of me. This episode is substantially correct, but one gets the impression that the authors regarded with hostility my (alas only partially successful) attempt to decouple the republican vision from Catholicism.

On pp50-54 they give a highly garbled account of the 1966 Maghera meetings, which took place in August and October. These 2 meetings they conflate into one, neither of which involved an overnight stay, or a dinner. Their sourcing is obscure, and the detail given imaginative. The first meeting was representative of the Belfast and Dublin Wolfe Tone Societies, and took the steps which led to the War Memorial Hall meeting, at which Ciaran Mac an Aili and Kadar Asmal spoke, with John D Stewart in the chair, and which led to the foundation of the NICRA as a broad-based initiative. The October meeting was planned as a means of explaining to the Republican Clubs the significance of the projected Civil Rights developments; it was attended by Billy McMillan and others. Coughlan's paper (basically issue 7 of Tuairisc the Dublin WRT newsletter) was read in his absence by Eoin Harris, then a member of the Dublin WTS. Coughlan was unable to attend due to a family bereavement. I had no input to this paper, much as I would like to be able to claim some. I had not at the time appreciated the key role of civil rights, to the extent that Coughlan had. The Dublin WTS in no way could be described as an 'IRA debating club'; it was a source of politicising ideas from a group of intellectuals who could broadly be described as 'republican left'. Goulding and Mac Giolla were nominal members but semdom attended.

On p52 the authors attribute to me an attempt to hijack the Coalisland to Dungannon march with an 'IRA message of support' to be read from the platform, in my alleged capacity as 'director of information on the Army Council'. There was no such document; there was however a duplicated document from Coughlan which encapsulated exactly the aspirations of the NICRA, a copy of which I have. This had not been cleared by the NICRA committee, having been prepared in a hurry, and Fred Heatley (Belfast WTS and NICRA Committee) did not know about it. He jumped to a wrong conclusion as to what it was, and tore it up. Nor was I 'on' the Army Council; I was serving on Goulding's HQ staff as the organiser of some educational events in the context of the politicisation process. This illustrates the problems and misunderstandings which bedevilled our attempts in the 1960s to get the movement to go political. I have since clarified this situation with Heatley, who admits to recording it wrongly in his memoirs.

On p54 the idea was attributed to us that we envisaged '..civil rights educating Catholic and Protestant workers towards a new revolutionary consciousness..' which, stated like that, sounds naive. What we had in mind was opening up a 'civil society' environment in which political developments involving working people might take place outside the realm of religious bigotry.

On p100 there is a reference to 'Army Council discussions' (in fact probably at an HQ staff meeting), attributed to Ruairi O Bradaigh, which suggest that the Goulding leadership was increasingly out of touch with the requirements, seen as being primarily military by those who became the Provisionals. Those on the British and Unionist side who wanted to militarise the situation were clearly succeeding, and our attempts to keep the situation within the Civil Rights politicising framework were in vain. O Bradaigh succeeds in capturing the increasing ambiguity and weakness of Goulding's position, and the increasing isolation of the present writer, despite the correctness of my characterisation of the situation as anything but 'revolutionary'. On the whole this section correctly describes the emergent right-wing catholic-nationalist nature of the Provisional process.

On p157 the authors place on record a bizarre episode, recounted by Tom Caldwell, an independent Unionist Stormont MP, in which he was supposed to have interviewed me, and reported back to Wilson in Downing St, only to be told he had been 'talking to the wrong guys'. He subsequently met with Mac Stiofain and O Bradaigh. He had been discouraged from going by Sir Harry Tuzo, then in charge of the British army, but went all the same. This was in the context of a possible truce. I have some recollections of this event; I introduced him to a meeting of the Dublin WTS, in Cathal MacLiam's house in Rathmines, not in Ballsbridge, but I do not recollect meeting him on my own, in the context of any mission. In immediate retrospect we found the encounter somewhat hilarious. In mature retrospect, decades later, it is perhaps possible to interpret the event as indicating that 'Harry' was quite happy to continue with his live training-ground (British top brass subsequently held publicly that 'the war in the Falklands was won on the streets of Belfast'), but that Tom Caldwell was a precursor of the current Unionist support for the Good Friday Agreement: he wanted a political settlement, and was prepared to enlist our support in trying to get one. It is ironical that Gerry Adams and co have now in the end come around to the political position that we probably tried to project then; this I think would probably have been more GFA-like than Caldwell subsequently picked up in his encounter with the Provisionals.

On p261 there is a reference to the Provisional vision-document Eire Nua and it is attributed, ironically, to the present writer. This, in fact, is true. I had produced it some years earlier, but shelved it, reserving the concept for a time when the movement would have become politicised, and had the makings of a political prosence nationally. The Provisionals, being largely bankrupt of political ideas, dug it up and used it to give their movement some degree of credibility, though it was in fact a half-baked, somewhat utopian, federal-type model. It had a role on the subsequent displacement of O Bradaigh by Adams, current Provisional policy being centralist.

On the whole this book is journalistic rather than scholarly, and adds little to the political understanding of the complexities of the Irish national identity.

Tim Pat Coogan in his Disillusioned Decades: Ireland 1966-87 (Gill and Macmillan, 1987) on p13 gives me a disparaging mention, repeating the 'Trinity College computer science' canard, picked up from lazy journalistic secondary sources. He appears to regard as sacred the traditional militarist abstentionism, and the Goulding MacGiolla attempt to politicise as sacrilege, expressing the classical Fianna Fail view that real politics should be left to them, and radical activism kept neutered.

Later on p204 he records that Gerry Adams was 'interested but unimpressed' by our approach to networking via trade unions, being influenced by the fact that most Catholics being unskilled were condemned in effect to a trade union ghetto, with the skilled workers in the plum jobs being organised elsewhere. This of course we knew was largely true, but the barriers were beginning to break down thanks to improved education, there were signs of interest in Irish historical and cultural issues at the trade union fringe, and these processes could have been given a political dimension had the 1969 pogrom not taken place. It could be argued that the pogrom must have been organised to kill the positive political processes which were beginning to happen, and provoke a reversion to an armed sectarian confrontational situation. Coogan's analysis is representative of Catholic-nationalist Fianna Fail journalism at its worst.

Henry Patterson makes, in his Politics of Illusion (Hutchinson Radius, London, 1989) a serious attempt to analyse the evolution of social-republican thinking from its origins in the 1916 period, though somewhat dismissively, from a Unionist standpoint. He does give credit to the attempt we, and our predecessors, made to decouple the concept of the Republic from that of Catholic nationalism, and to arouse the interest of working people across the religious barriers.

He treats in some depth (p64ff) the attempts made by Peadar O'Donnell and George Gilmore, in the 1934 Republican Congress, to lead the movement in a political direction. This followed on an explicit attempt, which the Army Coumcil made in 1932, to address the Protestant working-class, in the situation leading up to the 'outdoor relief riots', when Belfast workers began to unite as a class, in the depths of the depression. Gilmore and O'Donnell set much store by this event, and a trip was organised to Bodenstown in which Belfast workers participated. Patterson however points out the gulf between Belfast industry and what de Valera was trying to do in the protectionist Free State economy. The economics of all-Ireland unification in the context had indeed not been thought through. It comes over as a courageous failed attempt, which for Patterson triggered the subsequent return to militarism.

Patterson correctly dates the first public event based on Goulding's emerging left-wing programme to June 1963 in Belfast, and associates it with the Wolfe Tone Society, and with the names also of Dick Roche and Sean Cronin (p84). This however is not quite right: initially the Wolfe Tone bicentenary events were under a 'Directory' of Goulding appointees; it became a Society in 1964 when a constitution was drafted and I became a member, helping to develop the 'policy think-tank' role.

On p85 we find the first mention of 'Anthony Coughlan and Roy Johnston'. The context is Patterson's attempt to put right the simplistic Bishop-Mallie analysis ('Goulding allowing Marxists to take effective strategic direction'), in which he does come closer to the truth, giving credit to the Connolly Association for having emerged from the shreds of the Republican Congress via its emigrants, and to Greaves for originating the idea of the need for a civil rights campaign as early as 1955. He also credits the Wolfe Tone Society with evolving a life of its own, and notes that the IRA was evolving its own internal re-assessment under Goulding's direction, with the aid of the present writer. His criticism of Goulding's concept of the role of the Army (p92ff) in the politicising situation is valid, and approximates to what my own was at the time. In this context Patterson references the 1966 'captured document'.

On p98 Patterson puts his finger on a key weakness in the left-republican strategy: the Belfast movement had virtually no contact with any elements of the Protestant working-class. Goulding sometimes used to visit Belfast and talk to Communist Party people without contacting the local IRA; he attached exaggerated significance to the Protestant working-class credentials of the CP comrades. He got this from Goulding, and he remarks that '..this recoil from republican Belfast was an unconscious recognition of the terrible obstacles which the sectarian realities of Ulster posed for even a modernised republican project..'. I can confirm that I was aware of this situation at the time, and it made me uneasily aware of the scale of the internal education problem in the IRA, and indeed in the CP, if the sectarian barriers were to be overcome and common perceptions of class interests identified.

In the subsequent section 'Civil Rights and Abstentionism' Patterson repeats earlier misconceptions about the roles of the Maghera meetings which initiated the Civil Rights Movement, attributing the process to a single meeting in August, addressed by Eoghan Harris, with a paper claimed to have Army Council status.

There were in fact 2 meetings, at the first of which the steps were taken leading to the War Memorial Hall meeting from which the NICRA sprang. This was a joint meeting of Bublin and Belfast Wofe Tone Societies, and Harris was not present. There was a subsequent meeting in October, at which the Tuairisc #7 paper was read by Harris, at my request; he was there as an observer, and because of my stammer I am unable to 'read a paper' effectively. This later meeting was attended by Republican Club representatives, and the objective was to win over the republican activists to support for the Civil Rights approach. The paper could have had 'Army Council' status in the sense that Goulding had probably instructed the Republican Club people to take it seriously; it was however purely a Wolfe Tone Society paper, and had been written by Coughlan, who would have read it himself were it not for family pressures related to the death of his father. The attendance was not as broad-based as it should have been, and this probably reflects proto-Provisional unease with the Goulding policy. I have expanded on this in the Wolfe Tone Society module; see my notes on the 1966 minutes and commentary.

On p103 Patterson castigates me for being critical of the Labour Party's political development in the context of the recruitment of Conor Cruise O'Brien; I warned against seeing this as an indicator of radicalisation. I instanced the telegram of congratulation to Harold Wilson on his 1966 victory as an indication if disregard for the Party's 'manifest imperialist record'. While on the whole I stand over this position, I think he is unfair to accuse me of distain for the achievements of the Attlee government, though I argued then, and still would do, that its failure to survive, or to do more good than than it did, was due to pressures arising from the imperial legacy; see below re p136.

In a section headed 'Fianna Fail and the IRA' (p130ff) Patterson avoids the problem of who instigated the August 1969 pogroms, and at what level in the State system they were instigated; they did after all involve the B-Specials. He does however throw some light on the role of Fianna Fail in helping to arm 'Catholic defence committees' and in helping to isolate the left-oriented leadership, as confirmed subsequently by Justin O'Brien.

Our contemporary analysis of the British role this period Patterson has dismissed as 'exotic' (p136, and note 27 p 235). Our analysis was rooted in knowledge of the way the British had managed the withdrawal from India (under Attlee, with Mountbatten in charge locally): bring about an inter-communal conflict, arming both sides; this would lead to movement of populations, and (re)partition. Lynch would get his expanded (more Catholic) republic; there would be a totally Protestant entity in the North-East; the whole would end up in some sort of loose federal structure, with which Britain would enter the EEC having an additional Irish government puppet vote. This was the 'worst-case scenario', to be avoided at all costs. The alternative was a reformed Stormont, with the possibility of developing 'civil society' in which a peaceful transition to the Republic could be legally on the political agenda, in an environment where it might be possible to win over some Protestants interested in socio-economic reform in an all-Ireland context. This alternative process has in the end been accepted by the Republicans under Gerry Adams, in the context of the Good Friday Agreement.

There are references on p162ff to Eire Nua, and the process of re-invention of the 'social republic', attributed to Gerry Adams' political development while in jail, in a repeat of the Goulding process. Then on p167 there is a reference to the origins of Eire Nua, attributed to one Richard Davis in the University of Tasmania, in an 'unpublished manuscript'. The ideas are attributed to Seamus O Mongain, who developed the Comhar na gComharsan (neighbourhood co-operation) philosophy in the 1940s.

This attribution is basically correct, but the path back to O Mongain went via the present writer, who interacted with him in the mid-1960s, and drafted the original version of Eire Nua in the context of the Wolfe Tone Society-led politicisation process. It was consciously an attempt to get away from the dead hand of Stalinist central-Statism in the direction of bottom-up economic democracy, with an updating of the Ralahine model in mind, as described by James Connolly, and earlier by Craig who had been the manager of the historic Co Clare Owenite commune. However due to pressure of events as they developed in the North, we left Eire Nua on one side, and it remained in limbo until the Provisionals re-discovered it after the split, and adopted it as their own.

It is ironic that this very positive democratic socio-economic approach, associated with devolved regional politics, has since been rejected by the Provisionals, and adopted by Ruairi O Bradaigh and the 'Republican Sinn Fein' purists, who by their total rejection of political participation in 'illegal assemblies' have no possibility of ever delivering on it. The Provisionals have gone for what they perceive as 'left-wing' top-down central-Statism, with which the road to Stalinism is paved. Insofar as shreds of Eire Nua remain in political currency, they exist in the emergent policies and influence of the Green party, in which the present writer continues to play a part.

After my resignation in February 1972, which was due to the 'officials' going in for competitive violence, the overall strategic thinking of the Goulding-led movement went through various stages, under the influence successively of Eoin O Murchu, Eoghan Harris, Eamonn Smullen and others; the overall outcome was on the whole disastrous and I am not going to attempt to analyse it here. Patterson's attempt is perhaps a good starting-point for further analysis by historians, but they need to view it critically, and remember his basically Unionist standpoint; he aspires to make it all look a bit ridiculous. The context is the 'international movement' and its global crisis: the controversies over 'Euro-communism' and the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'; the concept of the 'vanguard Party'. My efforts in the previous decade had been to decouple the Marxist analysis of the Irish movement from the incubus of the international movement and the Stalin legacy; I succeeded for a time, but once the 'gun' came back in, theoretical sense went out the window. Costello, the IRSP and the INLA emerged, and there were feuds, with loss of life; the 1970s were a period of extreme pathology, during which it was difficult to find any political sense. Kelleher has attempted an analysis, but much remains to be done.

Desmond Fennell gives me a couple of mentions in his Heresy (Blackstaff, 1993). In this book he criticises the lack of opportunity in Ireland for the emergence of critical ideas, across a broad spectrum, and in doing so touches briefly on my 1960s attempt with Goulding to politicise the IRA, linking it, correctly with the prior such attempt made in the 1930s by Peadar O'Donnell and George Gilmore. On p36 he labels our efforts as an attampt to '...remodel the movement on Marxist principles..', as indeed others have done repeatedly. Marxist orthodoxy however viewed our attempt as highly heretical, which indeed it was. Our attempt to think in terms of the interests of 'working people' in general, rather than the narrow 'proletarian' concept, was outside the Marxist canon, though it could be argued that it was in fact the way Marxist thinking should have been developed, and its failure to develop in this direction contributed to its historic collapse.

On p239 I get a mention in the context of Fennell's 'Constitution Club' initiative, along with John Robb, Tom Barrington, Ray Crotty and others. I made some contribution to this, on the theme of the role of the regional colleges as foci of regional development outside Dublin. The initiative lapsed after a time; its membership was not cohesive, most being individually otherwise engaged. It might have survived had it take the form of an editorial group associated with a critical quarterly. This is a niche that remains to be filled RJ July 2003.

J Bowyer Bell in his 1993 sequel to his earlier work, which he entitled The Irish Troubles: a Generation of Violence 1967 - 1992, published this time by Gill and Macmillan, has many more mentions of the present writer, which he must have picked up largely from second-hand sources. I remember him being around, and heard rumours of what he was at, but we never had a direct encounter.

He mentions me on p7 in the context of the Maghera meeting on August 13 1966 at which the War Memorial Hall meeting to launch Civil Rights was planned; he gets the date and purpose right, but wrongly gives the meeting an IRA flavour; in fact it was Dublin and Belfast Wolfe Tone Society people.

He goes on to mention the NICRA foundation process, with the initial meeting being on November 28 1966, chaired by John D Stewart, and with Kadar Asmal speaking, followed by the International Hotel meeting on January 29 1967, attended by Kevin Agnerw, Betty Sinclair, Joe Sherry, Con McCluskey, Paddy Devlin and others, also Tony Smythe from the NCCL in London. Subsequently in this context he has the present writer in October 1967 stressing the importance of the Civil Rights movement involving both Catholics and Protestants.

Then on p139ff he has a lengthy section in which he labels the present writer correctly as 'ex Connolly Association' but then goes on to add the 'Marxist-Leninist' label which suggests pickup of hostile gossip from right-wing provisional elements opposed to the politicisation process. As will be seen from these memoirs I had been from the 1950s onwards evolving a critical-Marxist position, anything but 'Marxist-Leninist', and getting into trouble with supporters of Stalinist orthodoxy. He goes on with belittling references to 'aging radicals' like Gilmore, O'Donnell and O Cadhain, and to a 'little group in GHQ (who) instinctively had responded with distaste to the Ireland dominated by the men on mohair suits..', and to a '..wall between marxist intellectual and rural roots..', instancing the 'rosary' episode.

Bell shows his lack of grasp of the essentials of the revolutionary process when he castigates me, on p149, for totally misunderstanding the August events, accusing me of saying that '..we don't have a revolutionary situation..'. Well, I did indeed say that, and we hadn't. If Bell thinks working people shooting each other in sectarian war is a 'revolutionary situation', then he needs to think again! Later on p309, in the context of my resignation, he notes that in March 1972 '..the core in Gardiner Place talked as if revolution were a program and not a killing matter..'. He then goes on to echo the Maoist and Trotskyist nonsense about 'stages theory', as treated below under Moloney.

Bell is a reasonably competent historian of military-type guerilla situations, but he shows that he has little political grasp of the issues, equating as he does revolution intrinsically with violence, and uncritically accepting 'ultra-leftist' and 'ultra-right traditionalist' gossip.

Dermot Keogh (UCC) has a brief reference to myself and my father in his Twentieth Century (Gill and Macmillan, 1994), the context being his analysis of McCarthyism and the 1950s world war 3 psychosis. On p201ff he notes some observations of Col Dan Bryan, who headed the G2 military intelligence unit, who commented, on March 10 1952, on the 'left-wing activities of the Trinity Professor Senator Joseph Johnston'. Keogh does not tell us what these alleged activities were. At the time JJ owed his Seanad seat to de Valera. He had however been critical of US policies in letters to the press, and in his Seanad speeches. Also mentioned in the Bryan despatches were John de Courcy Ireland, then a schoolteacher and writer on maritime topics, and Michael McInerney, then political correspondent of the Irish Times.

Bryan goes on to list some of the 'usual suspects': Sean Nolan, Niall Goold, RN Tweedy, Paul O'Higgins and Joe O'Connor, to whose participation in the Irish Anti-War Crusade (a Quaker initiastive) he attributes a hidden agenda. Keogh mentions the present writer immediately after Bryan's cryptic reference to JJ, as follows: '..His son, Roy, was described (by Bryan) as "one of the most active young Communists in Ireland". Only further research will determine whether he was accurate or wide of the mark in his reports. There is little Bryan would not have known about the Irish left in the 1950s..'.

At the time mentioned I was in France with the Ecole Polytechnique physics laboratory. I was active in the Irish left, as described in the 1950s political module, but mostly as an internal critic, becoming frustrated and disenchanted. Keogh is welcome to use what I have written in further research; this is why I am writing it. It says something about Keogh that he prefers to rely on the likes of Dan Bryan, dominated as he was by McCarthyite paranoia, than to ask any of the people named, many of whom were accessible when he wrote the book.

Some more checks on the Keogh record are in order, given the above evidence of myopia. He has nothing about the origins of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, and he dates its first Dungannon demonstration to 24 August 1969, conflating it with the Belfast B-Special pogrom events of that date. He has no reference in the index to the work of Greaves, Coughlan or the Connolly Association in laying the basis for the civil rights approach to political reform in the North. This book is not to be recommended in the context of serious scholarship of Irish 20th century history.

Conor Cruise O'Brien, in his Memoir: my Life and Times (Poolbeg 1998), gives me a mention on p326, where he notes the existence of support from the republican movement for his entry into electoral politics via the Mid-Ulster Westminster seat. This he attributed to my influence on Goulding, bearing in mind CCO'B's Congo record. This is indeed correct, and an approach was made, which he was on the verge of accepting. He was however discouraged by Bernadette Devlin, who at the time was beginning to target the seat.

O'Brien's book is an important contribution to understanding his evolution, and the overall context. His final conclusions, paradoxically, includes the proposal that the Ulster Unionists would better serve the Protestant interest by dealing with Dublin rather than with London.

Justin O'Brien in The Arms Trial, Gill & Macmillan 2000, has references to the present writer on which I have hung some commentary in a separate file. It also confirms contemporary 'official' republican analyses of the role of Fianna Fail, as outlined in Nuacht Naisiunta during the Easter 1970 period.

Geoffrey Howe in his Ireland and Empire (Oxford UP, 2000, 2002pb) links the present writer persistently with Anthony Coughlan, Desmond Greaves and the Connolly Association, labelling the latter 'London Irish Communist'. He credits TA Jackson with initiating the 'red-green synthesis', supported by Greaves's editorship of the Irish Democrat. He attributes the setting up of the Wolfe Tone Society to our joint initiative, and blames it for causing the split in the republican movement, leaning on the analyses of Sean Cronin, Henry Patterson, Tim Pat Coogan, Bishop and Mallie (see above); he also draws on Milotte (1984) and Roulston (1991). He accuses us of imposing 'orthodox Communist thought on imperialism' on an unwilling movement.

Greaves, though a member of the CP in Britain, was independent-minded and somewhat egregious; he attempted successfully to set up the Connolly Association with an independent life of its own, making it a comfortable political environment for non-Communists like Coughlan, as well as critical Communists like the present writer. The precursor of the Wolfe Tone Society was set up in 1963 by Cathal Goulding, in the context of the commemoration of the bicentenary of his birth, prior to the present writer's return to Ireland; Coughlan had returned earlier, when a job came up in TCD. The transformation of what had been a commemoration committee into a political 'think-tank' was Goulding's initiative; it opened up the possibility for each of us to participate constructively in our separate ways. No way could we have been seen to 'hammer home the previous theoretical illiteracy of the movement' or to have imposed 'orthodox Communist thought'; on the contrary we tried to develop, in simple language, devoid of abrasive left-wing jargon, an interest in socio-economic issues in Ireland as a whole (RJ), and an interest in the civil rights question in the North (AC). I have attempted to overview this quite complex process in the 1960s chapters and their supportive hypertext modules. I agree we were not very successful, and we seriously underestimated the forces we were up against.

Ed Moloney in his Secret History of the IRA (Penguin, London, 2002) has produced a creditable history of the Provisionals, and has tried to be relatively kind to the present writer as regards his role in the background to their origin. I feel I should try however to expand on some of his references, and correct them where necessary.

On p57 when first introducing my name he labels me 'a young computer scientist', repeating unverified the journalistic canard. I was at the time in my mid-30s, and had been a physicist; I had evolved into a computer-user in the domain of techno-economic system modelling. At the time there was no such thing as a 'computer scientist', as university courses in the topic were only beginning to emerge. He goes on to describe me as having been 'prominent in the Communist Party of Great Britain-linked Connolly Association', a highly misleading formulation. The CA had its roots among left-wing Irish emigrants, and could trace its ancestry back to the Republican Congress aftermath. Some of its membership were active CP supporters, but there never was to my knowledge a formal link with the CP. Greaves developed it as an independent Irish political voice. I was active in it, but hardly 'prominent'. I was nominally in the CP, but was critical and was not active. I have outlined something of the complexity of the situation in the 1960s political module.

He then goes on, on this same page, to attribute to myself and Anthony Coughlan something called a 'stages theory' attributed to Stalin. This is utter nonsense; it is hard to know where to begin to deal with it. I have heard the label used by ultra-left theorists, whose aspiration is to jump, as though by magic, from the current situation to full-fledged socialism (usually defined somewhat vaguely), in one step, labelled 'revolution'. The label is used to attempt to discredit those who think otherwise, and there is a tenuous link with Stalin who interfered destructively in the early days of the Chinese movement with what amounted to a mechanistic 'stages' concept. The attempt by ultra-left elements who emerged on the fringe of the Northern Ireland situation in the 1960s to label and dismiss what we were trying to do as a 'Stalinist stages theory' was totally ludicrous, and deserves the dustbin. I should remark additionbally, in passing, that the Chinese apparently made the jump from feudalism to socialism in one stage, and much criticism of 'stages' as being Stalinist originates with Maoists. But look at China now: is not the bourgeois revolution re-asserting itself? RJ 2003.

What we were doing was trying to create a political framework within which political democracy could be used to enable working people (broadly defined; not the doctrinaire 'proletariat') to organise towards economic democracy, in an all-Ireland democratic political structure. The initial priority obstacle to this of course was the civil rights issue in the North. In the developing situation we hoped to be able to educate people to make use of the expanding democratic political opportunities. To label this as some sort of obscure Stalinist 'stages theory' is pure destructive malice.

[I have however encountered a reference to 'stages' in the post-colonial transition in the context of post-colonial theory and the writings of Franz Fanon. In Ireland and Post-Colonial Theory, ed Clare Carroll and Patricia King, Cork UP 2003, Declan Kiberd is credited (p5) with deploying 'Franz Fanon's theory of the three stages', in his Inventing Ireland, under the influence of Edward Said. Kiberd goes on to give an account of the '...reactionary phase in which native elites reproduced colonial structures..'. So there may be something here worth taking further. The use of a 'stages theory', as something attributable to Stalin, as a stick to beat the present writer with, however, exposes the ignorance of these critics as regards current work going on in post-colonial theory, and in critical analysis of third-world problems generally.]

He goes on to belittle, and try to make look ridiculous, the concept we had internally labelled the 'national liberation front', which was that the movement needed not to be exclusive, but to be broad-based, with many strands and aspects. The exact form it might take was undefined, but some people, thinking perhaps in terms of the co-operation between the Volunteers and the Citizen Army in 1916, came up with analogous groupings, and this of course was used to frighten people wary of what they perceived as 'godless Marxism'. The concept did not emerge until the discussions around the Garland Commission, and even then it never crystallised out into an actual proposal or policy. Its role is best appreciated in the context of my notes in the 1969 political module. It should emerge from this that there never was a 'Johnston-Coughlan agenda' as such; we were each pursuing quite distinct roles in the context of a broad-spectrum political reform programme.

Moloney credits Adams (p68) with a positive attitude to the present writer, and to the educational programme which we attempted to develop in Belfast in the late sixties. I have had good personal relations with Adams, on the few occasions we have met since. Moloney however conflates the work of the Belfast Wolfe Tone Society with that of the republican education department. The prime movers in the former were Jack Bennett and Fred Heatley, and their events were public and aimed at developing a broad-based 'civil society'; there were Queens links via Michael Dolley; Alec Foster also was involved. I doubt if Adams at that time was moving in these circles. In parallel with this I did try to organise a few internal events for the Belfast republicans; these were virtually underground, and on one occasion I was arrested, preventing the event from happening. Adams I believe was present at one, at least, of these events. I found them very unsatisfactory, sensing the persistence of the 'underground' mind-set. Yet according to Moloney they seem to have helped Adams open up subsequent political options, and in doing so to be more skilful than hed been Goulding when attempting the same thing earlier.

Moloney treates in some detail the transition of the Provisional leadership from O Bradaigh and O Conaill towards Adams and co (p180ff), highlighting the role of Eire Nua, seen by the former as a framework which held out a hand of friendship to Northern Protestants. Moloney however, to my mind somewhat questionably, interprets Adams' rejection of Eire Nua as a 'move to the left', and links it with IRA assassinations of a du Pont executive; we have an echo here of the thinking of Mac Stiofain. Adams was, it seems according to Moloney, relying on outside advice from ultra-left sources; the Red Mole is mentioned, and the name Tariq Ali comes up, along with that of Eamonn McCann. The name of Christin ni Elias also comes up, as a supporter of Eire Nua, who fell foul of the movement and was expelled.

On the whole the political position of the Provisionals with regard to the key issue of the Left (ownership and democratic control of the means of production) remains somewhere in the misty and discredited central-Statist quagmire between Stalin and Trotsky, and a long way from the 'co-operative commonwealth' ideas shared by Robert Owen, James Connolly, George Russell, Seamus O Mongain and the present writer, and imperfectly expressed by the latter in the original 1960s Eire Nua document.

Brian Feeney in his Sinn Fein: 100 Turbulent Years (O'Brien Press, Dubllin, 2002) repeats on p219 the 'academic computer scientist' canard dealt with elsewhere; he claims to have met me in 2001, but I don't recollect it. He suggests that Goulding picked up his socialism from Klaus Fuchs in Wakefield, whom he describes as an 'East German atomic spy'. This is the first I had heard of this as the source of Goulding's left-wing politics; he claims to have got it from Ruairi O Bradaigh. It seems to me to be improbable. Incidentally, Fuchs was a nuclear physicist with a conscience, rather than a 'spy'. There were many such. This is another issue.

On p220 he goes on inaccurately to suggest that I became a founder member of the Irish Workers League on my return from England, which took place in 1963. The IWL had been founded in 1948. I had indeed been a founder member then. He attributes to me a 'set of theories' reconciling republicanism and socialism, a misleading description of some quite modest historical background picked up from Connolly and from the Republican Congress initiatives of George Gilmore and Peadar O'Donnell. Feeney goes on to belittle our attempt to politicise the movement as being ineffective as emanating from an isolated Dublin clique; he echoes the Mac Stiofain arguments: the rosary issue, the attempt to expel me, thwarted by Goulding; the latter appreciated my attempt to decouple Marx from Stalin with the aid of Connolly. Feeney has me 'co-opted to the Army Council' in 1965; there is no such co-option procedure, and I was never on the Council. I ran a few educational conferences on behalf of Goulding's HQ Staff.

Feeney goes on to give some grudging recognition to the Dublin and Belfast Wolfe Tone Societies (p231-2), 'tiny talking shops' which he attributes to Coughlan and myself. He leans heavily of our adoption of the Democratic Programme of the First Dail as a left-wing indicator; this he attributes to Tom Johnston (sic) though the Labour leader spelt his name without the t. Was he perhaps trying to suggest a family connection, conflating him with my father?

On pp234-238 Feeney manages to deliver an approximately accurate account of the emergence of the Civil Rights movement, with discreet republican support (though he uses the pejorative term 'infiltration'), and some trade union contacts, as a force for democratic reform, with a view to enabling some degree of unity to develop among working people. Then he proceeds to belittle it by counterposing to it what he calls the European path to ethnic-based nation-building, and to dismiss what we did as a 'huge castle in the sky' based on Marxist nonsense. His desired alternative presumably is to impose a Catholic-nationalist all-Ireland republic, and force Protestant emigration. He appears to be unaware that alternatives exist to ethnic nation-building on the post-Yugoslav model, and unwilling to give us credit for the attempt. At least on p236 he gets the role of Eogan Harris right; perhaps he picked this up from me. On p238 he contrasts the behaviour of Belfast republicans (flags, banners, commemorations) with what we were trying to teach; this was not a 'blind spot' on our part; we were aware of the problem and seeking ways to identify issues which could be inclusive rather than divisive.

Feeney appears to be supportive of the Provisional walk-out in January 1970, of the politics of abolition of Stormont and the resort to arms, allegedly to 'defend the people'. He does however credit Adams with being initially in favour of the political road in Belfast. He plays down the role of Fianna Fail in support of the emergence of the Provisionals; I agree that it was not primary. The primary stimulus was the armed pogrom of August 1969, led by the B-Specials. He does however make the classic mistake of taking this as given, something inevitable, to which the only response possible was armed defence of the Catholic areas. Nowhere does he address the question of who planned it, what was its objective, why did its planners feel they needed to act so as to provoke an armed response. Were there perhaps other possible responses, involving the Dublin Government, the UN and the Labour Government in Westminster?

This book deserves credit as an attempt to show the historical continuity of Sinn Fein over the century, in popular narrative form; it is however weak in accredited sources, being written totally in journalistic mode. In his concluding section Feeney's analysis of the current role of Sinn Fein in the political mainstream is somewhat uncritical, almost promotional. It is to be regretted that he fails to pick up the irony of the Provisional politicisation process following some of the paths which we tried to pioneer in the 1960s, though the parallel is far from exact.

Some navigational notes:

A highlighted number brings up a footnote or a reference. A highlighted word hotlinks to another document (chapter, appendix, table of contents, whatever). In general, if you click on the 'Back' button it will bring to to the point of departure in the document from which you came.

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 2003