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A View North MacStiofain: one man’s psychopath

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

By Jack Holland

The death of Sean MacStiofain, founding member of the Provisional IRA, has as expected produced an extraordinary divergence of opinion as to his standing in recent Irish history.

To Gerry Adams, who was one of the young men who followed MacStiofain’s leadership in the early 1970s, he "played a leading role throughout his life in the struggle for social justice and a United Ireland."

To Kevin Myers, an Irish Times columnist, he was "such a mediocrity that you really must wonder at the culture which could accept him into its ranks and make him its leader." According to Myers, this man who Adams said "will be missed by republicans everywhere" was a "deracinated psychopath." Yet, according to Martin Lyons, a life-long member of the republican movement who was a close friend of MacStiofain’s, he was "a most compassionate man."

Presuming Adams and Myers are both reasonably sane men, at least insofar as they possess the power of continuous thought, how could they be describing the same person? How can one man’s "psychopath" be another’s "compassionate man"?

MacStiofain’s role in the IRA and later the Provisional wing of it brought him many enemies and few friends. He was hated not only because he was an organizer of a violent campaign, which would cost many lives, but because he was English. Cathal Goulding, who had been a close comrade of MacStiofain’s until the IRA split and Goulding went on to head the Official IRA, called him "that English Irishman."

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MacStiofain’s Englishness and the fact that he identified with Irish nationalism enrages Myers. Myers sees this transference of identity as typical of certain kinds of extreme nationalists, such as Hitler (born Austrian) and Napoleon (born Corsican), both of whom he also regards as psychopaths. He might have instanced a few examples closer to home, such as William Joyce, otherwise known as Lord Haw-Haw, the pro-British Irishman who ended up working for Hitler, or the Rev. Ian Paisley, whose obsession with Britishness would make an interesting parallel, perhaps, to MacStiofain’s determination to be "Irish."

MacStiofain’s identity was never a problem for Martin Lyons, however. Lyons knew him for 32 years and agrees with Adams’s assessment.

"He was one of Ireland’s great republicans," Lyons said. "And he suffered a lot for that." Lyons is convinced that without MacStiofain, the Provisional IRA "would never have gotten off the ground."

For Myers, this, of course, is a major part of the problem. After all, according to him, it was "under this fascist stewardship" of this "emotional and intellectual deviant" that the IRA "launched its terrible assault on Northern Ireland, the Northern Unionist people and the British state." Myers added, "It was an insane project, doomed to failure."

In 1969, a man standing among the rubble of Bombay Street, burned to the ground by loyalist mobs, need not have been a deracinated psychopath to come to a somewhat different conclusion about a role for the IRA. At that time, there was no talk among the IRA of an all-out assault on Northern Ireland, just the need to defend local Catholics from another such attack. That was what led to the birth of the Provisional IRA. But what Myers is doing is indulging in a kind of negative revisionism to counter the positive revisionism we read in the remarks by Sinn Fein leaders like Adams, who talk about the Provisionals as if they were from the start a sort of civil rights/housing activist/peace movement the aim of which has always been to establish a peace process. For Myers, the Provisionals spring fully armed, dripping with gore, commanded by lunatics, howling for Protestant blood. One image is as bogus as the other.

Myers discredits his own argument by throwing words like "psychopath" around, rather like the way advertising executives have made the word "creative" ridiculous so that now it is almost impossible to use meaningfully. The truth is that whatever MacStiofain might have been, he was no psychopath. But then neither was Hitler nor Napoleon.

Likewise, Myers’s theory of the Oedipal complex as an explanation for the reason why men such as Frank O’Connor, whose father was a British soldier, joined the IRA, needs to be treated with caution. Myers’s own father was an IRA man. But Myers rejects any suggestion that his hatred of the IRA is his own Oedipal reaction to his father’s association, because, he says, his father actually became a hater of militaristic republicanism.

However, Myers is correct in comparing MacStiofain with Hitler in one sense: both were marginalized men who lived a large part of their lives on society’s fringes.

This emerges from MacStiofain’s own account of his life, "Memoirs of a Revolutionary", published in 1975. It is, in ways, a much franker account than Gerry Adams’s autobiography, "Before The Dawn". At least MacStiofain makes no attempt to delude the reader into thinking that he was never in the IRA. Quite the opposite, in fact. His being in the IRA gave his life meaning, even when he it was merely the London "unit" which MacStiofain set up in 1950 or so and whose six members did little except read military books in Foyle’s Bookshop. Inadvertently, MacStiofain’s account conveys the sense of a rather sad, somewhat seedy world of Irish exiles desperate to find a role in life that would afford them an escape from its empty dullness, marginal people with fantasies of fighting for Mother Ireland. At the time, that seemed most unlikely. In Ireland as well, the IRA in the early 1950s was a marginalized organization.

However, that changed. In 1970, the Provisional IRA was attracting more people than MacStiofain could have dreamed of as he trudged the dreary London pavements with unsold copies of "The United Irishman" 20 years earlier. Myers’s assertion that in the world of the Provisionals "unprincipled, unfeeling ruthlessness is the lodestar, the quality all aspire to . . . " misses the point. The really interesting, and disturbing, truth is precisely the opposite. The IRA attracted ordinary, decent men (and some women), with ordinary feelings and a sense of right and wrong. How they became killers is the interesting story. Perhaps it is the story of all wars, which are rarely fought by psychopaths, but nearly always by the man in the street.

Perhaps this comes as a shock to middle-class people who live lives of unprecedented security, free from violence. But, unfortunately, it is a fact that every civilization that has ever existed would take for granted.

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