Reflections on the Deportation of Joe Doherty and the Irish Republican Struggle Today

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On Wednesday, February 19th, Joe Doherty, one of the most famous political prisoners in the United States, was returned to the same Crumlin Jail in Belfast, Northern Ireland from which he escaped eleven years ago. Doherty’s deportation was clearly imminent from the moment the United States Supreme Court refused, three weeks ago, to uphold five lower court decisions which had barred the United States Justice Department from extraditing Doherty.

During the nine years he has been held without charge in various American prisons, while awaiting exhaustion of the federal government’s efforts to extradite him and hoping to gain political asylum in the United States, Doherty has become an inspirational symbol and a direct focus of American solidarity with the cause of Irish Republican struggle to end the last vestige of what is now over 800 years of British colonial rule in Ireland. Doherty has been very difficult to ignore because he has continued, from his prison cell, to be an outspoken and eloquent fighter for freedom and justice both within and beyond the North of Ireland.

Perhaps you would like to read about how “our” federal justice department has, throughout both the Reagan and Bush administrations, deliberately violated the United States constitution in the course of its relentless prosecution of Doherty and perhaps you would like to read about how heroically Joe, Joe’s family, Joe’s attorneys and Joe’s supporters have fought back against the United States and British governments to secure his freedom. I would like to tell you this story — and yet I think it is more important at this point, given how little most Americans know about or understand what is and has been going on in Northern Ireland, first to tell you a different story.

Joe Doherty was condemned to life in prison for the murder of a British soldier who he killed while on active service duty as a soldier in the Irish Republican Army. The Irish Republican Army and the British military have been fighting a war in the North of Ireland since 1969 and they have fought this war to a virtual stalemate despite the enormous advantages that the British maintain versus the IRA in financial and military resources (the British have the advantage of far more money, far more troops, far more advanced military technology, far more sophisticated military intelligence, far more powerful propaganda, and far more powerful international support). The IRA has not lost the ground war despite tremendous efforts to defeat them.

Since 1969 Northern Ireland has been a police state operating under de facto martial law. Before war broke out in 1969, Northern Ireland was run as an independent fascistic statelet within “The United Kingdom” so that a garrison settler population — predominantly Protestant — would maintain domination over a subject nationalist — predominantly Catholic — population. Rigidly enforced hierarchical separations of and divisions between these two populations resembled nowhere else in the world other than apartheid South Africa.

Northern Ireland was an artificial creation of British imperialism: in 1921 Britain successfully imposed partition of Ireland upon the Irish people against the expressed will of over three- fourths of the Irish population and after five years of war had been fought between the Irish and the British over Irish independence. The partition of Ireland in 1921 was deliberately designed to weaken and impoverish (economically, politically, socially, and culturally ) both the twenty-six county South and the six county North, allowing the British to maintain direct imperialist control over the North and insuring the inevitability of their indirect neo-imperialist control over the South.

It is now over 800 years since the British established their first colony in Ireland. What is the legacy of this 800 years of British domination? Britain has virtually destroyed the indigenous Irish language and has devastated and impoverished indigenous Irish culture; Britain has robbed from the Irish the vast majority of the wealth that has been generated in Ireland by the labor of Irish men and women; Britain has killed hundreds of thousands of Irish directly through conquest and physical repression; Britain has killed millions more Irish indirectly through famine, through alcoholism, and through suicide and despair; Britain has sent additional millions of Irish — and to this day continues to send thousands more every year — into exile, into forced emigration from Ireland.

Today the majority of the Irish in Ireland have come to accept, at least tacitly, and for the most part either fatalistically in the case of proletarian and lower petit-bourgeois classes, or cynically in the case of upper petit-bourgeois and bourgeois classes, the subjection of Ireland to British imperialist and neo- imperialist domination as a seemingly inevitable law of nature. And yet despite this, a small yet substantial minority continues to struggle and resist with a courage and a tenacity which truly is fanatical. This is a fanaticism to be admired and supported by all Americans who are likewise sincerely committed, as Joe Doherty certainly continues to be, to the fight “for freedom and justice for all.” As Doherty urged before he was sent back to Crumlin Jail, we “must not be disillusioned” by the end result of the struggle fought on his behalf but must instead fight on: “we have won a lot of victories and we have to use these victories and this strength on every other issue.” (The Irish People, February 22, 1992. Vol 19, No. 8. Page 3.)

Irish Republicans are not psychotic terrorists and they are not consumed by either an atavistic frenzy or a romantic nostalgia to return to a mythical past. Irish Republicanism offers the only real hope for the salvation of the Irish people from a bleak future: a future in which they either struggle to continue to live within or are forced to take up and leave an Ireland which is currently steadily declining into even greater backwardness, corruption, poverty, and neo-colonial dependence. Irish Republicanism fights for a future of hope and promise for all Irish men and women, for a radically progressive future in a 32 county democratic socialist Republic of Ireland.

Much can — and, in fact, much has been and more will need to be — written in support of what I have claimed to be true of the Irish Republican cause. Yet I would like, in this article, to offer something different than an argument, a history, or an analysis. I would like to share something of what it continues to be like to live and die as one dedicated to and active within the Irish Republican struggle. I would like to share with you the following account, from The Irish People of this February 22nd, of the life and death of IRA Volunteer Joseph McManus, killed in action just this past February 5th. As one who has read both An Phoblacht/Republican News (published in association with Sinn Fein in Ireland) and The Irish People (published in association with Irish Northern Aid in the United States) for the past ten years, I can testify that the particular details of Joseph MacManus’s story are unique and yet his determination and courage are typical of that shown by so many, many other Irish Republican men and women — who have willingly risked and continue to risk their lives in the revolutionary struggle for the national liberation of Ireland.

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“Joe made up his own mind. He saw the sham of politics in this country. He saw the strokes. He saw emigration and poverty, unemployment and the war which has lasted for his entire life in the occupied area. And he wanted to change it.”

These words spoken at the gravesite of Volunteer Joseph MacManus summed up the ideals of the young Sligo man who died on active service with Oglaigh na hEireann in County Fermanagh on February 5th. The last farewell from his family and friends in Sligo and republicans from around the country who travelled to his funeral was a touching tribute to him as a man and as a freedom fighter.

It was a tribute that was largely ignored by the media, as indeed was his death, many republicans remarking how significant it is that such a loss is made so little of when an IRA volunteer from the 26-County area is killed in action across the border. The very fact that any young person from the 26 Counties should risk their life in the struggle is obviously seen as too dangerous to report.

The body of Joseph MacManus was brought across the border—the same border he had sought to abolish—to his home town of Sligo on Thursday evening, February 6th. There was a mass of riot- clad gardai present as the body crossed the border at Blacklion, County Cavan. Hundreds of people filed past the body as it lay in state overnight with a republican guard of honour at the MacManus family home at Maugheraboy, Sligo. On Friday afternoon, Volunteers of Oglaigh na hEireann fired a volley of shots in final salute to Joe at the Republican Plot in Sligo Cemetery where he himself had marched with his comrades many times to annual Easter commemorations.

A huge crowd gathered outside the home on Friday evening for the removal to Sligo Cathedral. The coffin, draped in the Tricolour with a black beret and gloves and the jersey of Corinthians Football Club, and flanked by an eight-person guard of honour, made its way slowly to the church, led by a lone piper. Friends and relatives took turns carrying the coffin. There was a large Garda presence all along the route to the cathedral and in the churchyard.

The funeral on Saturday was attended by a crowd of over 1,500 people. At requiem mass a haunting lament for Joe was played on the flute and at the end family members carried him out of the church to begin his last journey. The coffin was carried the entire way from the cathedral through the streets of Joseph’s native town where so many who knew him were, as the priest officiating at the mass had pointed out, stunned at his death and sharing the grief of his loss with his family.

Doherty then called for the many wreaths from friends and various branches of the Republican Movement to be laid on the grave. Following the recitation in Irish of a decade of the rosary, a bugler sounded the Last Post and the crowd observed two minutes of silence.

The MacManus family are my friends. Many of us through the years when Joe and Chris were only wee lads, had our tea there, many a time had a bed there. Many a time until the spare room was sorted out I had Joe’s bed or Chris’s bed. And when we left, the MacManus family worried about us and were concerned about us. So when the news came that Joe MacManus was the Volunteer who had been killed in Fermanagh came to me in West Belfast, my sorrow was personal. Oglaigh na hEireann had lost a Volunteer, the MacManus family had lost a son and a brother and I had lost a friend.

He was only 21. Intelligent, good looking (though I would never have said that to him in the slagging that went on during the times that I was in and out of the house), a footballer. Funny enough, he was born just after Jack Lynch said ‘We will not stand idly by’ and just before Bloody Sunday.

Parents here will acknowledge and appreciate the joy of a child. All the early days, his first day in school, the first time he cursed, the girl-friends, maybe he was spoiled a bit, headstrong, a bit cheeky like all of us at that age, his first pint. And parents are bound to ask, ‘is it our fault’? If Sean or Helen think for one moment it’s their fault that their son was killed in Fermanagh, they’re thinking wrong.

Joe made up his own mind. He saw the sham of politics in this country. He saw the strokes. He saw the emigration and poverty, unemployment and the war which has lasted for his entire life in the occupied area. And he wanted to change it. So what could he do? If Sean or Helen have doubts they should ask themselves that. What could he do? Could he join Fianna Fail? Fine Gael? The PDs? The Workers Party? Of course he could. But he had integrity. And if Sean and Helen are to blame for anything, they are to blame for giving their son integrity.

Maybe in these days of national confusion, in these days of censorship, maybe many of Joe’s non-republican friends don’t understand — and that’s fair enough. He had a secret life. I never guessed for a minute that he was a Volunteer. Pat Doherty only guessed because of a chance meeting on a bus. How could Mary, his girlfriend, know? How could the lads on the football team know? How could his social friends know? How could they understand today? But they do know one thing. Because they knew the man they know he wasn’t a terrorist. They don’t have to agree with him. They only have to look at their own acquaintance with him and they know, agree or disagree, that Joe MacManus was a freedom fighter.

Last night I was in the Markets area of South Belfast. A man stopped me and asked me when the funeral for the lad from Sligo was. And he said, ‘it’s a pity you know, he didn’t have to fight but we do’. So the republicans throughout the island and especially in the Six Counties know what Joe MacManus lived and died for . . .

One of the reasons why the agony of the Six Counties continues is because the Dublin government has done nothing of substance to end it. The Ormeau Road massacre is in line with the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, McGurk’s bar — all milestones littering Joe MacManus’s life, and they won’t be ended by meetings in Downing Street. They will only be ended when the conditions which spawned them are tackled. And that meeting, coming this week, like Peter Brooke’s tenure at Stormont, is based upon the politics of deception and the politics of pretence. The politics of fooling people, in this case in Britain, that something is being done to solve the conflict in Ireland. It’s the politics of the big lie. Joe MacManus, so young, refused in his youth to live the politics of the big lie. But it’s hardly surprising that the British can behave like this given that there is no pressure from Dublin for them to do anything else.”

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The death in action of another IRA Volunteer from the 26-County area — Jim Lynagh in 1987 — had a deep and enduring effect on the young Joe MacManus. According to his comrades it was shortly after attending the funeral in County Monaghan of Lynagh, killed in the Loughgall ambush in County Armagh, that Joe made the decision to join the ranks of Oglaigh na hEireann. While the sacrifice of Jim Lynagh was one of the factors on the road to Joe volunteering his services to the IRA, it certainly wasn’t the only one.

Joe was born the first son of strongly republican parents Sean and Helen MacManus, in Willesden, North London, where his father was working, in May 1970. The family moved back to Ireland when Joe was six years of age and he attended Scoil Ursula and St. John’s national schools in Sligo and Summerhill College where he sat the Leaving Certificate in 1988. He went on to Sligo Regional Technical College (RTC) to follow a business studies course which eventually he left to devote himself more fully to the national liberation struggle.

Joe was an extremely outgoing, lively character who made many friends in his short but active life. He is remembered by all who knew him as an easygoing and popular socialiser. One person described Joe as being “so laid back that his head was almost touching the ground.”

His relaxed and happy-go-lucky nature possibly deceived those not aware of the more serious side of Joe’s life. He was a voracious reader of history and politics and his understanding of Irish republicanism was deep and clear-sighted. He was involved in local Sinn Fein activities in Sligo for several years before his involvement with the IRA.

Joe’s father, Sean, is a member of Sinn Fein’s Ard Chomhairle and served for four years as party chairperson. He succeeded the late John McGirl as the Sinn Fein general election candidate in the Sligo/Leitrim constituency. The MacManus family home has often been the scene of Garda Special Branch raids over the years, giving Joe a firsthand insight into the nature of 26-County collaboration with British rule in Ireland.

Joe’s reading of Irish history, his awareness of the turbulent situation in the occupied Six Counties, only a few miles up the road from his native Sligo, his knowledge of Irish republican philosophy, but above all his inherent integrity led him to throw himself fully into the fight for national liberation.

As he recently told Sinn Fein’s Pat Doherty, he felt that the fight against British occupation could not be left to the nationalist people of the Six Counties alone. It was the duty, he said, of every Irish person to oppose it. Joe paid dearly for his bravery and integrity in the cause of Irish freedom. The Irish Republican Movement extends deepest sympathy to his father Sean, mother Helen, brother Chris and to his girlfriend Mary.

[“Sorrowful Homecoming for a Brave Young Irishman” and “Volunteer Joseph MacManus,” The Irish People, February 22, 1992. Vol 19, No 8. Pages 8-9.]