Casually Red
tomorrow belongs to me
The pertinent point is the very reason it looked like northern Catholics were about to be wiped out was because they were utterly defenceless . There had been previous pogroms over the decades but the means to withstand them were to hand on those occasions . Their complete absence on this occasion in itself was solely due to the direction the then IRA leadership had taken the organisation . On the advice of their clueless and reformist socialist advisers. And it was that direction , the reformist nature of it, which caused the split, not Fianna Fail .
FF didn't arm anyone . They had no leverage with which to split anyone. And what's more the " attacks on private property " the memo refers to we're the spate of mansion burnings in Meath and North Louth . Which were resoundingly popular among even the most conservative factions of republicans . Which were instigated and carried out by those southern based republicans who founded the Provos . And which had actually been stopped prior to that memo, solely because the later sticky leadership put a stop to them in case it encouraged more militancy . Which it did. They wanted to turn the IRA into little more than the internal police force of the newly Bolshevised " workers party " they were trying to turn Sinn Fein into .
In the same period they tried and narrowly failed to have Richard Behal ...himself a marxist and one of the most active militants in the south...executed for attacking a British warship in Waterford, despite authorising the attack they thought wouldn't actually happen . It was the later sticks who were furiously clamping down on militancy in the south in the 1960s . Most certainly not " the conservative Provos " .
TV programme recalls armed attack on warship
Eta
Behal explains this period very articulately from a first hand socialist perspective .
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