The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA and the Workers' Party

Brian Hanley and Scott Millar

Penguin, Ireland, €19.99

Former IRA strongman Seamus Costello was a demon behind the wheel. When a terrified passenger once complained that getting a lift from him was like being propelled around town in a spaceship, Costello asked sweetly: "Were you ever in a spaceship?"

At least one reader of Brian Hanley and Scott Millar's noisy book on the Official IRA felt like he had been in a spaceship by the last page.

This 600-page blizzard of innuendo, pub talk and culchaint is less a history of the Workers' Party than a typed transcript of hours of taped monologues with old timers who seem to have a lot of time on their hands.

Someone called "Mick Ryan" gets more play here than the Garland faction of the old Workers' Party (the "Koreans") or their cuddlier comrades from student politics who went on to better things (the "Bunnies").

Having promised a ground breaking history of the "other Sinn Fein" since 1970, the authors instead served up an elephantine catalogue of gossip and score-settling that makes their joint enterprise almost unreadable at times. This is a pity considering the inherent importance of the topic itself. The key figure in this story should have been not "Mick Ryan" but Eamon Smullen, a hardnosed communist, industrial agitator and critic of Irish nationalism who dominated the WP's internal intellectual discussions.

Smullen's enormous importance in the development of what became modern Ireland's most electorally successful socialist party presented Hanley and Millar with a grave problem, however.

First, he's dead, and so not around to be taped. Second, Smullen's most formidable lieutenant, Senator Eoghan Harris, refused to talk to them, judging from the list of interviews printed in the index.

This omission weakened the entire enterprise as Harris was a key player in Smullen's Economic Affairs Department, the engine room that produced a series of pungent polemics that upended several republican nostrums and led the party's successful drive to be the political and ideological spearhead of the Irish industrial and white-collar class.

The Smullen group, a party within the party in effect, won over huge numbers of middle-class and public-sector votes with an acceptable mix of socialism and anti-nationalist policies enshrined in a dozen influential pamphlets, including the analysis of the Irish industrial revolution which offered an unusually sophisticated account of the Irish experience under the Union after 1800.

The Smullen group also pioneered a radical critique of the Provisional IRA's campaign in Northern Ireland, a campaign that was designed specifically to ignite full-scale sectarian civil war.

They were light years ahead of most opinion formers in the Republic on the consent principle, RUC reform, and the superiority of power sharing and a local bill of rights in Northern Ireland over, say, Poppy Day bombs, the incineration of civilians eating in hotels or the assassination of unionist MPs as a prelude towards the "reintegration of the national territory".

While Hanley and Millar devote some chapters to these issues, they are really just tantalising asides in a sea of trivia and gossip, best exemplified by Paddy Woodworth's unintentionally hilarious monologue about Harris's "factionalism". "It was very creepy," Woodworth is quoted as saying. "I frankly found... the Harris faction a far more frightening phenomenon than the IRA itself."

An evening with Slab Murphy would have cured him of that hyperbole. Woodworth's grumpiness goes back, it seems, to a feeling among some of the Mick Ryan-types that the Smullen faction were really running the party.

This book allows them to settle old scores with the help of old newspapers, old men and old recordings. Empiricism never seemed so bankrupt.

Much of the paranoia smacks of Vincent Browne's famous Magill column on "The secret world of SFWP" in the Eighties. But at least Browne knew how to be concise.

But what seems to have most worried the Woodworth/ Ryans was the suspicion that Smullen's team in RTE were more interested in supporting Section 31 than in supporting socialism. And the authors seem to agree.

Hanley and Millar give the former RTE producer Gerry Gregg (a determined fighter for Section 31) only a few sentences on this matter -- Mick Ryan must have nipped to the loo -- but Gregg's grim analysis gets swamped by an irrelevant account of Joe Sherlock's devotion to Mallow Hospital.

As Gregg sees it, any rough stuff within RTE was designed to head off a nightmare scenario which needed more attention than socialism. This was the looming civil war situation in Northern Ireland, the Provisional IRA's chosen method of settling the hash of Ulster Protestants.

RTE was the cockpit of the Provisional IRA's attempts to get access to the airwaves -- and Smullen's determination to deprive them of it. And in retrospect they were right. Because civil war was close.

To get a sense of how close the Republic of Ireland was to a Balkan-style catastrophe in the mid-Seventies, and again in the Eighties, one need go no further than the series of chilling papers written by cabinet secretary Dermot Nally in 1975. (His H-Block analysis is sealed for another two years.)

Writing to then Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave amid the gravest rumours of an impending UK withdrawal from Northern Ireland, Nally allowed his mind to run on to several future possibilities, up to and including an independent Northern Ireland comprising either the six counties or the area east of the Bann.

"An army of the order of 60,000 would be required to control Northern Ireland with the majority population in revolt against southern authority... Any excessive actions on our part could make certain the holocaust mentioned by the British Prime Minister, that is likely to involve the whole island.'

Gregg's insistence on matching the PIRA juggernaut stride for stride in Montrose may well have failed the Woodworth test of openness, accountability and transparency. Gregg's analysis passed a much bigger test, however. We are happily still here to tell the tale. Pity it was not told better here, and with less bile directed at the Smullen group who behaved like good democrats if not good socialists.

John-Paul McCarthy teaches Irish history at Exeter College, Oxford

- John-Paul McCarthy

Sunday Independent