Brian Leeson address to James Connolly commemoration

A chairde,

For Irish Republicans there are few sites more hallowed then where we stand today. Arbour Hill takes its place alongside Bodenstown, Glasnevin, Milltown and dozens of other lesser known graveyards in cities, towns and villages across Ireland. These places have always served as focal points for Republicans to come together to honour those who have fallen and to recommit themselves to the goal of a free and fair Ireland. And that is what we do today at the spot where James Connolly, Pádraig Pearse, Thomas Clarke and the other 1916 leaders rest.

And just as Ireland holds countless republican graves, Ireland’s history holds countless anniversaries – a never-ending calendar of significant dates. Dates of rebellions, dates of defeats; dates of treaties; dates of famine and genocide. This year alone marks the 210th anniversary of the 1798 rebellion, the 160th anniversary of the Young Irelanders rebellion, the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the 90th anniversary of the historic 1918 elections, the 40th anniversary of the suppression of the civil rights movement and the 20th anniversary of the Gibraltar killings. All important events in the great unbroken epic that is the history of revolutionary Irish republicanism.

Our opponents often claim that republicans spend too much time looking backwards – indeed, they claim that we have failed to move with the times and that we want to live in the past.

They are wrong of course. They believe our interest in history to be rooted in a desire to live in the past while in reality our interest in history springs from a desire to live in a better future.

We study our history not as an abstract, a theoretical or academic exercise. No, we study it to identify the failures of our struggle so that we can avoid making those same mistakes in the future and we study it to identify the successes of our struggle so that we can replicate them in the future.

The history of Ireland is dominated by a number of recurrent themes which emerge across the decades and centuries - invasion, oppression, rebellion, famine, emigration; failed negotiations and flawed treaties. And most importantly ours is a history of resistance, of organised opposition to occupation and to exploitation. – So while famine is hopefully now a thing of the past and immigration has largely replaced emigration resistance to the occupation and to exploitation will continue to exist so long as even one Irish Republican draws breath.

Mo chairde, this year marks one more anniversary, one which socialist republicans will not celebrate, but cannot afford to ignore – that of the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement.

A decade ago all of the parties that signed up to it claimed it as a victory – a win/win for all sides, but those who understood the issues involved knew that no such scenario could exist – and that someone had been sold the proverbial pup!

So ten years later the unionist veto – the cornerstone of the Good Friday Agreement – has now been fully been accepted by all supporters of that treaty. So who now can claim victory?

The British claim of legal jurisdiction to the six counties remains intact while the twenty-six counties claim, nominal as it was, has been vanquished. So who now can claim victory?

There remains a so-called ‘permanent garrison’ of more then 5,000 British combat troops in Ireland. So who now can claim victory?

A 6,000 strong, heavily-armed colonial police force remains in place. So who now can claim victory?

So confident is the British government of its position in Ireland it has located the emergency headquarters of M15 on the outskirts of Belfast. So who now can claim victory?

Sectarianism has been knitted into the very fabric of the institutions of Stormont – where positions are distributed on a base sectarian head-count. So who now can claim victory?

Any hopes that Stormont could deliver radical social and economic policies have been proven to be hopelessly naive. So who now can claim victory?

As recently as this week the true limits of the institutions of Stormont were exposed as Gordon Brown’s permission was sought and granted for the transfer of hundreds of millions of pounds of public property into private hands. So who now can claim victory?

A decade after the Good Friday Agreement the dust has settled, and it is now clear who was victorious and who got the crumbs from the table.

This is not the first time that republicanism has found itself weakened and demoralised in the aftermath of years of bloody struggle and fractious negotiation. In 1921 the legacy of the men whose bodies lie in the ground at our feet was abandoned by a well-suited marriage of the opportunist and the conservative.

For decades afterwards, through the twilight years of the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s republicanism struggled to find its place in a post-partition Ireland. For far too long republicans of that era dwelled upon the betrayal of the treaty, of the civil war and of Fianna Fáil. The bitterness of that civil war for many became a self-destructive, all consuming personal cancer.

Republicans of this generation would do well to learn a lesson from this dark phase of our collective history.

Radical, revolutionary, separatist, republicanism is far weaker now then what it was a decade ago – in both political and organisational terms. Acceptance of this fact is the first necessary step in the process of reorganising and re-building a diverse social movement for the combined objectives of British withdrawal and social and economic justice.

From our foundation we in éirígí have believed that that very little good can come from dwelling on the past and that the only long term-beneficiaries of inter-republican recriminations will be the ruling classes in both Britain and Ireland. Instead of such recrimination we need to make a cold, accurate, objective assessment of where republicanism now stands and from there plot a course for expansion, popularisation and ultimately for victory.

And within that process there are difficult personal choices for us all to make. Individually we each must choose to draw a line under the betrayals and disappointments of the past. Individually we each must choose to recommit ourselves to the objective of an Irish Socialist Republic. Individually we must again begin to believe that we can achieve that objective through a movement of ordinary Irish women and men working together in political struggle and individually we must choose to commit of our time and energy through certain hard times in the months and years ahead.

Then finally and collectively, we must choose to act.

Our actions and our tactics must be appropriate to their time - recognising that while republicanism has been weakened over recent years the enemies of republicanism have grown proportionately stronger. We should neither overstretch nor undersell ourselves but instead set about taking realistic steps to incrementally strengthen republicanism across the island.

As we rebuilt our strength we will, no doubt, have to endure more television images of our opponents congratulating themselves on what a thorough job they have done in pacifying Ireland. Let them have their day in the sun. Let them back-slap each other till their backs are raw for those images will be far easier to endure knowing, that all across Ireland republicans are slowly and patiently preparing the ground for the day when imperialism and injustice in Ireland will finally be defeated.

Before I finish I want to return to theme of our collective history and the accusation that we as republicans want to turn back the clocks to some bygone age.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The republic we seek to build exists not in the past but in the future. The republic we seek to build is about life and joy in the future, not about the death and sorrow in the past. The republic we seek to build is about justice and freedom not the injustice and enslavement of the past.

So enemies can have their history of oppression, of discrimination, of landlordism, of exploitative labour, of deceit and trickery, of division and conquest.

They can have the past – the future is ours!