Red Dawn Over Derry: A History of Socialist Republicanism and Radicalism in the Troubles
Humanities
HIS-196E
Red Dawn Over Derry charts the history of the left wing of the Irish Republican movement, touching on histories that have been largely ignored in common understanding and scholarship regarding the Troubles. Often, most of the engagement with this contentious period in Irish history is reduced to discourse on the Irish Republican Army (IRA)'s terrorism and a general condemnation of violence. This paper hopes to remedy this by looking into the rhetoric, publications, and actions of militant Socialist Republicans within predominantly the "Official IRA" and the Irish National Liberation Army, revealing prescient and complex understandings of the conflict and the future of Ireland. These were thoroughly international-minded revolutionaries, real people who gave their entire lives to the goal of seeing a united and equitable Ireland, for all that inhabited it, easily dispelling the dismissive condemnations of sectarianism and base terrorism leveled at Irish militants. Of course this is a complicated history, and accordingly this paper also seeks to critique these organizations when possible, ultimately attempting to understand the thinking of these revolutionaries on their own terms, so that we may also see the incredibly human characters at the center of them. From the Republican movement's beginnings to a few of the splinters going into the late 1980s, this is a comprehensive attempt to do justice to its lesser-known and smaller but highly committed and effective left wing, which was able through its conditions and its struggle to develop truly radical comprehensions of Ireland and what to do with its North, serving to show us that a better world is possible and that, even amidst senseless and bloody sectarian violence, revolutionary thought and action blossoms.
