A prisoner of his past

Ex-chief of staff of the IRA, founder of Republican Sinn Féin, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh is the subject of a new biography which relies on its subject too much for its content. By Scott Millar

Ruairi O'Bradaigh: The Life and Politics of an Irish Revolutionary. Robert W White. Indiana University Press, €27.90

Being central to two damaging splits in a political movement which you have dedicated your life to, both times supporting a clearly minority position, takes a certain dogmatism and self belief. Both qualities have been valued by Irish republican militants since the suicide of Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet's court room defiance at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, the 74 year old president of Republican Sinn Féin, the subject of an important new biography by the US sociologist Robert W White, imbues these qualities like few other living republicans.

White traces the foundations of Ó Brádaigh's career back to the politics of War of Independence, north Longford and his staunchly anti-treaty parents Matt and May Brady. Matt, crippled by injuries received at the start of the conflict, was later to become an independent Republican councillor. A hard-line republican who was unable to condemn a botched IRA punishment attack that left the intended victim's son dead but still remained close friends with Sean McEoin, his former commanding officer in the IRA who supported the Treaty and would later become a Fine Gael presidential candidate. May played the role expected of all good republican women of the time, providing succour and books from the republican canon to her men folk. White sums up Brady senior's politics as dependent on a view that "the struggle against England and the United Kingdom was continuous and consistent over time". With parents like these you might be tempted, as this authorised biography certainly is, to envisage Ó Brádaigh, and his younger brother Sean, as being set upon the course of "true men" from the cradle.

It is the unwillingness of White to fully examine the other practical and usually dominant currents within republican politics that did transform the beliefs of many men with a similar background that is the book's major weakness. As an account, though not totally uncritical, which relies heavily on Ó Brádaigh's own input, it may not have been possible to do otherwise. We are presented with Ó Brádaigh's position attempting to protect the key tenets of republicanism, central of these the "principle" of abstentionism. This policy, which became central to republican politics with Arthur Griffith and Sinn Féin post 1908, has been discarded by succeeding generations of republicans as an outmoded and temporary tactic, as Griffin envisaged it to be. But not by Ó Brádaigh, who has made the refusal to recognise the sovereignty of any representative parliament in Ireland the fundamental basis of his political career as much as his desire for a unified state.

Ó Brádaigh reached the position of chief of staff of the IRA and was elected to Dáil Eireann, in which of course he never sat, during the unsuccessful IRA border campaign of 1956 to 1962. The book's subject managed to elevate the failed tactics of this generation of republicans into principles, making him a prisoner not only of his country's but also of his own past. White, perhaps in deference to his willing subject, or more likely due to his reliance on interviews with persons who broadly share similar political attachments, does not fully expose the absurdity of this position.

Ó Brádaigh's politics encapsulated in the aspirational Éire Nua document, are not only borrowed from his parents' experience but from diverse sources such as Tanzanian socialism. An interview with Roy Johnston, the Dublin academic and bête noir of the traditionalists within the IRA of the 1960s, who initially formulated the Eire Nua policy, would have been informative in examining the lack of real political development Ó Brádaigh was willing to contemplate.

The importance placed on abstentionism is most clear in the accounts of the republican splits of 1969-70 and 1986. White reveals that as early a 1965, when the use of this policy began to be questioned by IRA leaders such as Cathal Goulding and Seamus Costello, Ó Brádaigh began to mentally prepare for a coming split. Unfortunately, as with the later establishment of the Continuity IRA in the 1980s, White is unable to reveal what concrete actions Ó Brádaigh played in building a new organisation prepared to die and kill for his brand of political theology.

The current leadership of Provisional republicanism has argued that the lack of arms was key in the republican split of 1969-70. The Life and Politics of an Irish Revolutionary shows that for the southern rural republican base, whom Ó Brádaigh personifies, it was the willingness of the majority of the republican leadership to attempt to pursue their agenda through real involvement in politics, and the compromises such a course would enviably entail, that was of most concern.

These criticisms apart, the book displays a critical academic rigour that has been notably absent from most studies of the Republican movement since Bowyer Bell's seminal works.

The book is full of incidents related by Ó Brádaigh which reveal the core of his politics. One incident that sticks is Ó Brádaigh's reaction to hearing the Offences against the State Act read to him in English following his arrest by the Garda in 1956. He put his fingers in his ears! The book reveals Ó Brádaigh does not believe the Provisional IRA carried out the 1974 Birmingham Pub bombings that left 21 dead because his colleague Daithi O'Conaill told him so.

Ó Brádaigh emerges as an affable man unwilling to place his principles to the rigour of constructive representative democracy. His attachment to a political creed which seeks to win majority support not through concrete actions but by a sudden awakening of the populace to its irrefutable correctness could be dismissed easily as "cloud cuckooland" (as it is in one section by the unionist John Laird). If it was not the unfortunate case that there are still people who seek to use this ideology to carry out an armed campaign, clearly with the full support of Ó Brádaigh.

The book is as marked by its flaws as its insight. p