Costello launched his new party at an open conference in a hotel in Lucan, Co Dublin in December 1974. The party was to maintain the policies of Official Sinn Féin before the 1972 ceasefire and to re-establish the link between revolutionary socialism and Irish nationalism. The new group was named the Irish Republican Socialist Party - a nod in the direction of Connolly whose Irish Socialist Republican Party was founded in 1896. Of course Connolly also had his Irish Citizens Army and there was a secret second meeting at the same hotel. There the armed wing of the new party was secretly established with Costello as Chief of Staff. In public, Costello denied the existence of a military wing, insisting that the IRSP was purely political, but as the authors wryly observe, it is difficult to explain how a mere political party could manage to attract recruits from the Official IRA on the grounds that the Sticks were not militant enough! However, the public pretence was kept up. Prominent individuals like Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, the former Mid-Ulster MP, were associated with it. According to Ms McAliskey there was a need for the IRSP as at the time the Provos were militarists, without any policy on the class war. And the Officials now have no policy on the national question. The new year, 1975, was a time of great tension. There was a shaky Provo ceasefire. Secret talks were taking place between the Provos and the Wilson government. The UVF/PAF were very active. The new group made a lot of headway in Belfast, particularly in the former Official strongholds of the Markets, Whiterock and Divis. Many new recruits were from Fianna Éireann, the Official IRAs militant youth wing. The atmosphere between the OIRA and the new group quickly degenerated from a war of words to a full scale feud. The OIRA, however, failed to crush the new group, which even at this early stage, showed itself to be dangerously undisciplined, especially in relations between the Dublin-based leadership and the members in Belfast and between the IRSP and what became known as the Irish National Liberation Army. The pattern of former comrades cruising the streets of Belfast, hunting down one-another was repeated time and again in the short bloody history of the INLA and its vicious offshoot, the Irish Peoples Liberation Organisation. Once established, the INLA/IRSP showed an initiative which occasionally upstaged the Provos. They perfected the mercury tilt switch which was used most effectively to detonate the bomb which murdered Airey Neave MP on the eve of the 1979 election. The IRSP was at the forefront of the agitation over the removal of special category status from prisoners convicted of terrorist offences at a time when the Provisionals regarded it as a distraction from the armed struggle. Again, during the hunger strike of 1981, Provisional Sinn Féin stood aside from elections, maintaining their traditional abstentionist policy. The IRSP won two seats on Belfast City Council and came close to gaining another. Ironically enough, for a group so prone to vicious factionalism, the republican socialist movement was a strong advocate of a `broad front composed of all organisations and individuals at home and abroad who are prepared to assert the right of the Irish people to full control of their own destiny. This again pioneered the pan-nationalist strategy advocated by Gerry Adams some fifteen years later. In the case of the IRSP it failed. The feud with the Officials had weakened the IRSP as a political party. It almost collapsed after Costellos assassination by the Official IRA in 1977. Nevertheless an armed robbery in 1978 transformed the finances of the party and helped to re-arm the INLA.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 18:28:55 +0000
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