This is an essay about how I became concerned about Northern Ireland’s Catholic population and mostly about what I have done to support that cause. Although I wasn’t INCREDIBLY successful, between 1997 and 2004 I did a LOT of political activity as a progressive American college student in support of the North’s Catholic population, and here and there there was SOME success. I attended the 2002 National Conference of Sinn Fein Youth as a representative of the Anti-Racism Commission of the Democratic Socialists of America. More recently I have done this blog since 2008 and about 1/3 of it is about the North (years ago it was closer to 50% about the North).
I started college in the Fall of 1994. For various reasons that include the time I spent doing activism, it took me until Spring 2003 to officially graduate. I had done some political stuff in High School and there was something I did that was a little immature but nonetheless republican that I will describe next.
At some point in Jr. High I was to a small extent exposed to republicanism by a friend of my mom’s who was supportive of the PIRA. In 9th grade I read a novel that bizarrely fueled my interest in the IRA- the book was more or less anti-republican but it still had a positive effect on me (it was Tom Clancy’s Patriot Games). In the Spring semester of 10th grade, at the same time that I was becoming a sort of active and sort of radical and sort of militant opponent of racism in America, I took a white Notre Dame baseball hat and wrote some stuff on it in pen, including “IRA” and “PIRA.” I ended up having to change my class schedule because there were at last 2-3 people in my gym class that were pissed off at me about the IRA stuff (one guy suggested that Irish-Americans supporting the IRA was like Italian-Americans supporting the mafia and threatened me; an Israeli exchange student and her male friend (who was probably a supporter of Israel) gave me mean looks). I knew almost nothing about the N. Ireland conflict and didn’t respond to the Italian-American guy and even AFTER I got out of that gym class I stopped wearing the hat.
In the Summer of 1994 right before my freshman year of college I read an article about the IRA in “Spin” magazine (which was mostly about popular music but apparently also did some hard news as well). At the very end of 1996 I read a book by Gerry Adams, I then read two books by Tim Pat Coogan (The IRA and The Troubles), and in the Spring of 1997 I finally got on the internet and started educating myself there (i.e. reading the Irish News).
There is one aspect of this that I plan on mentioning only once. From about June of 1997 to about July of 2000, I was flirting with supporting the Irish Republican Socialist Party (a very small rival of Sinn Fein’s in the Catholic community of the North). As bizarre as it will sound to people familiar with one or both parties, I was also a Sinn Fein supporter- and MORE of a SF supporter- I had mixed feelings about both organizations but I really was closer to SF. My more recent, well-developed and probably permanent thoughts on the IRSP are here.
Setting aside my mistake with the IRSP, in general I have never been a supporter of SF exclusively and I will not apologize for that at all. Starting in 1995 (and ending in 2002) I was an active member of the Democratic Socialists of America, whose sister organizations on that island were (until about 9 years ago when DSA left the Socialist International) the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the Irish Labour Party. I have always rejected the SDLP (see this). I have always gotten the impression that the ILP was not anywhere near as bad as the SDLP was. Thusly I was a friend of theirs and in 2002 or 2003 wrote a letter to the editor of the Irish News, encouraging the ILP to organize in the North. I like the left of the BLP, but have always believed that the BLP could, over all, be a lot better when it comes to the North.
I have some positive thoughts about some other parties in Ireland and want to remind everyone that if I LIVED THERE I could VOTE for more than one party at the same time (they have something called Single Transferable Vote, which involves votes being transferred from one candidate to another based on a voter’s preferences), so why can’t I have positive opinions of more than one party at the same time?
Around August of 1997 I started organizing a student group at the University of Colorado at Boulder where I was an Ethnic Studies major. To be honest the first year the group had a questionable name- the “Bobby Sands Association.” For better or worse we didn’t do much that first year. The second and third years we were called Students for Justice in Northern Ireland (an independent group). I could go into more detail, but I will say this- we did about 5 events and there was an average of about 50 people at each event. We did do a bit of a campaign at one point, circulating a petition asking the History Department to offer a course on Irish History.
This might have been questionable and possibly even illegal, but I took the text from a lot of pages about the North on the internet and put them in word-processor documents, reformatted them (font size, margin width, etc. so I could get a LOT of words on each page) printed and copied them. We would make that stuff available at events and when tabling in the student center. To a large degree I think that no literature would have been a pretty big hole in our effort to educate people and we gave conspicuous credit to the organizations responsible for the content in the literature we offered.
In the Fall of 2002 I started organizing SJNI again. This time it lasted two years and was probably less successful than the first incarnation. We did about 5 events and there was an average of about 20 people at each event. We did three things that went a bit beyond just educating people. We organized a slightly-successful fund-raiser partly for the Pat Finucane Centre (we collaborated on organizing it with the other beneficiary, the Rocky Mountain Peace (and Justice) Center). We did a VERY SLIGHTLY successful petition in response to Bernadette Devlin-McAliskey being deported from the US in 2003. And we did a sort of successful fund-raiser for an ex-IRA Volunteer facing deportation from the US- no money was raised, but his campaign might not have connected with an influential local journalist (who ended up being very helpful) if we hadn’t organized that event (the journalist was on the panel discussion). We tried to organize a debate about the North but the pro-Unionist guy (a Northern Protestant fan of Jeffrey Donaldson who was teaching history at CU-Boulder for, I think, a couple years (Donaldson was more or less anti-Good Friday Agreement)) said he wouldn’t debate our choice for the republican position because he had no relevant academic degrees (he would have been a great representative anyway, he WAS totally qualified and it might have been noteworthy that he’s Protestant).
A lot of my N. Ireland activism was anti-racist and anti-homophobic. For more about that and some other relevant thoughts, you might want to read a post here.
There’s several miscellaneous things I did that I want to mention.
1) In either 1998 or 1999 I went to a fund-raiser for the Chiapas Coalition in Denver (they were supporting the Zapatistas in Mexico) that was on May 5th. Because May 5th is not just Cinco de Mayo, it is also the day in 1981 that Bobby Sands died on hunger-strike, I showed up and asked if I could speak for a couple minutes about Sands. They enthusiastically agreed and the response from the crowd was very good.
2) Although I made some mistakes and it wasn’t successful, I made some effort to try and get the Democratic Socialists of America (and their youth wing the Young Democratic Socialists (of America)) to abandon their sister-organization in the North, the SDLP (and the SDLP Youth).
3) I was involved in one way or another with getting the progressive and popular local radio station KGNU to do several things about N. Ireland from a more or less republican perspective 1997-2002.
4) The notes BELOW the poem here are probably worth high-lighting.
5) This post says some stuff about me doing activism on both the North and for the Palestinian cause simultaneously .
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I had to stop doing activism because my neurological disorders had gotten worse (it was a gradual decline and started either Aug. of 2001 or some time around 2007 and was completed at some point in 2010). I do 3-4 things to sort of replace that although only one thing is relevant to N. Ireland- since 2008 I have done my blog, and at this point there’s about 750,000 words on it.
Since 2020 the N. Ireland component of my blog has shrunk as a percentage of the whole- it was about 1/2 and now it’s about 1//3 of my blog. This is partly because since the beginning of the pandemic, for various reasons I have not followed events in the North anywhere near as much as I did 1997-2020 (during those years I read an average of about 100 articles a week about Irish politics).
There are several posts on this blog that are pretty important in terms of what they say about the North.
1) A post here is in some ways very important, although it needs to be re-done at some point in the near future because it could be and should be shortened and some other changes need to be made to it. It’s called “Sell-Outs?!?!?! Sinn Fein, The Good Friday Agreement, And The World.” It is about how the GFA isn’t that bad, and my theory that the world didn’t support the Northern Catholic population as much as they supported South African Blacks and, how to one degree or another that’s a serious problem, and dissident republicans should be mad at the American Left and the Western European Left instead of at SF.
2) A post here called “In the Spirit of Malcom X” could be re-written and possibly shortened, but it might be worth reading in it’s current form. It’s about how SF needs to approach generating support in America in a more progressive way than what they usually do.
3) A post here called “IRA terrorists?” proves, in an objective way, that the PIRA was not a terrorist organization.
4) A post here is probably worth reading. It’s called “Gerry Adams and the N-word.”
5) ”Strategically Comprehensive,” a post here, is about the overall strategy of the Provos during the conflict.
6) Nazi Germany and the North, a post here, explains that the comparison isn’t as stupid as some think it is.
7) See- “A Brief Argument in Favor of the IRA.”
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