Irish Republican Quotes

I have often noticed that nationalism is at its strongest at the periphery. Hitler was Austrian, Bonaparte Corsican. In postwar Greece and Turkey the two most prominent ultra-right nationalists had both been born in Cyprus. The most extreme Irish Republicans are in Belfast and Derry (and Boston and New York). Sun Yat Sen, father of Chinese nationalism, was from Hong Kong. The Serbian extremists Milošević and Karadžić were from Montenegro and their most incendiary Croat counterparts in the Ustashe tended to hail from the frontier lands of Western Herzegovina.

Dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver.

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain-porridge unleavened literature licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

They have become spoilers because in their view America’s political elites, both Republican and Democrat, have grown together into an almost indiscernible “hybrid royalty” that offers them little to choose from in terms of how the nation is actually being governed.

It's an Irish Republican rebel ballad from the 1840s. The reason I know is because I was once in a bar in Liverpool and a couple of lads started singing it and a couple others objected and a fight broke out. As a loyal subject of the Crown, I was on the side of the objectors. We eventually prevailed, but, even if we hadn't, 'A Nation Once Again' is a fine song to get your head kicked into, at least when compared to 'Believe' by Cher, which would rank pretty high on the list of numbers I'd least like to be listening to as my eye's gouged out and I fall into a coma, although it would be a merciful release.

In our co-lecturing days, Flo Kennedy and I were sitting in the back of a taxi on the way to the Boston airport, discussing Flo’s book Abortion Rap. The driver, an old Irish woman, the only such cabbie I’ve ever seen, turned to us at a traffic light and said the immortal words, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament!” Would she have wanted to own her words in public? I don’t know, but I so wish we had asked her name. When Flo and I told this taxi story at speeches, the driver’s sentence spread on T-shirts, political buttons, clinic walls, and protest banners from Washington to Vatican Square, from Ireland to Nigeria. By 2012, almost forty years after that taxi ride, the driver’s words were on a banner outside the Republican National Convention in Tampa, when the party nominated Mitt Romney for president of the United States on a platform that included criminalizing abortion. Neither Flo nor the taxi driver could have lived to see him lose—and yet they were there.

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse.

Your Pride I sit and beg beside the gate, I watch and wait to see you pass, You never pass the portals old, The gate of gold like gleaming glass. Yet you have often wandered by, I've heard you sigh, I've seen you smile, You never smile now as you stray- You can but stay a little while. And now you know your task is hard, You must discard your jewelled gear, You must not fear to crave a dole From any soul that wats you here. And you still have your regal pride And you have sighed that I should see Your gifts to me beside the gate, Your pride, your great humility

How do I look, Marty?’ he would say

very similar to his conduct at the Republican Convention in Chicago. There he was more concerned to show that he was the leader of Irish opinion than with the possible benefits to Ireland of the Cohalan-sponsored resolution.

They shared a hostility to partisan politics and championed civil service reform. Between 1880 and 1900, a segment of Boston’s reformist elite aligned themselves with the Democratic Party; however, the depression of 1893 and the growing power of Irish Democratic ward bosses eroded the stability of this alliance, and after 1900 most of Boston’s affluent reformers were associated with Boston’s Republican Party.19

The seven official founders were as follows: •  Michael Cusack from Carron, County Clare, a teacher •  Maurice Davin from Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, a farmer •  John Wyse Power, a journalist, editor of the Leinster Leader and an ‘associate of the extreme section of Irish Nationalism’ •  James K. Bracken, a building contractor and a monumental mason from Templemore, County Tipperary, who was a prominent member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood •  Joseph P. O’Ryan, who was born in Carrick-on-Suir and practised as a solicitor in Callan and Thurles •  John McKay, a Belfast man then working as a journalist with the Cork Examiner •  District Inspector St George McCarthy, who was born in Bansha, County Tipperary and who was a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary stationed at Templemore THE UNOFFICIAL LIST As well as the official founders a number of other people are reputed to have been present at the meeting. They include Frank Moloney from Nenagh, William Foley from Carrick-on-Suir and Thurles residents T.K. Dwyer, Charles Culhane, William Delahunty, John Butler and Michael Cantwell. There is a strong Kilkenny tradition that Henry Joseph Meagher, father of the famous Lory, Jack Hoyne, who played on Kilkenny’s first All-Ireland winning side in 1904, and a third Tullaroan man, Ned Teehan, also attended the foundation meeting

The point is obvious. There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/ Unitarian, Irish/ Italian/ Octogenarian/ Zen Buddhist, Zionist/ Seventh-day Adventist, Women’s Lib/ Republican, Mattachine/ Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse. Every dimwit editor who sees himself as the source of all dreary blanc-mange plain-porridge unleavened literature licks his guillotine and eyes the neck of any author who dares to speak above a whisper or write above a nursery rhyme.

Yet, some things do not change. Overall, designers have stayed with techniques that work—in different countries and historical periods. Flagg’s 'I Want You for U.S. Army' design in World War I, with 'Uncle Sam' looking directly at the viewer and pointing a finger at him, was derived from a British poster produced three years earlier; in the British poster, Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener is pointing a finger at British males, with the words 'Wants You, Join Your Country’s Army! God Save The King.' Other countries—Italy, Hungary, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, France, the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Red Army in Russia, and later, the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War—designed similar posters. The British applied the same design idea in World War II, featuring Prime Minister Winston Churchill, instead of Kitchener, in the same pose; the U.S. Democratic Party resurrected Flagg’s Uncle Sam image, including it in an election poster for Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the decades that followed, however, anti-war protest groups issued satires of Flagg’s 'I Want You' poster, with 'Uncle Sam' in a variety of poses: pointing a gun at the audience; making the 'peace sign,' bandaged and accompanied by the slogan 'I Want Out'; as a skeleton, with a target superimposed on him; and with the 'bad breath' of airplanes dropping bombs on houses in his mouth.

By formal declaration the Northern American states had abolished slavery; but the shovel gangs of the Irish and Chinese immigrants who built the railroads were, during their working span, hardly to be distinguished from slaves, if only temporary slaves. Republican government had promoted civil justice, along with law and order, to such an extent that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts showed such a low rate of violence or crime that Daniel Webster could boast without exaggeration that no one had to lock the door of his house at night. But these democratic communities were nevertheless part of a National State that waged merciless war all through the nineteenth century upon the rightful original occupants of the soil, the American Indians; that still shamelessly robs and mistreats their descendants; and that had despoiled Mexico of millions of acres of land in an infamous war.

In a nutshell, over the decades the national policies of the Republicans had raped the region while the actions of many state and local Democrats too often were designed to preserve the assets of a select few at the expense of just about everyone else.

The crosshairs also found their way onto other minorities. Temperance was a way to control the Irish, Italian, German, and Jewish immigrants who had been arriving since the Civil War. Rural Republican strongholds like Wheeler’s Ohio feared these immigrants landing in coastal cities, taking up all the jobs, and then voting for Democratic candidates who were backed by political machines.

During my years inside the IRA, a number of senior provo intelligence officers confirmed to me that, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, McGuinness had been Head of the IRA Northern Command, one of the most senior positions throughout the entire IRA organisation. More disgracefully and, I would suggest, more sickening, was the fact that McGuinness was widely known in the ‘Derry area of Northern Ireland to have been responsible for the loss of several people’s lives, as well as being the authority behind many savage punishment beatings. Over

It seems that the great majority of these men and women are still employed in the organisations, and are capable of handing over information which would put their targets at risk from attack. 

These funds had been built up over many years, mainly from North American sources sympathetic to the cause of a united Ireland, and it seemed that the money never entered the Republic of Ireland or the Province, but would be invested mainly in Europe. There was also income from protection rackets, bank robberies, post office raids, black taxis, DSS scams, video and CD pirating, fruit machines, republican clubs and pubs and local collections among sympathisers. 

Consequently, many of those who agreed to hide weapons were widows or young, unmarried mothers who desperately needed the money. Most

And a few hundred people, who risked their lives working for the Government or the RUC, have been pulled out of the Province because their undercover work had been detected by the IRA.  It is always necessary in such situations to pull out the person immediately, and often their families as well, and re-settle them in different locations throughout the mainland.  They are then given houses or apartments, new identities and sometimes a job.  Often, as the IRA keeps up its attempts to find and target these families, they have to be moved three or four times in an effort to keep them one step ahead of the gunmen.  I understand that these rescue missions, which are still carried out, have so far cost the British taxpayer between £75-£100 million.

It’s not only us who need your help, it’s all those other poor bastards who might be on the receiving end.

I realised that my life was at risk; yet I knew that I could not permit an innocent man or woman to be targeted and murdered without trying everything in my power to stop it. 

The Catholic Bishop Cahal Daly, describing the abduction as ‘repugnant’ and ‘an outrage to all humanitarian feelings

Later, claiming responsibility for the killing, the IRA said the man had been killed because he was supplying the Security Forces with fruit and vegetables.  McVeigh would not be the only person to die for such a tenuous reason – many businessmen would be murdered in cold blood for similar ‘activities’. Throughout

One IRA man, a schoolteacher, has a part-time job and is employed and paid a monthly wage by the intelligence wing of the IRA Belfast Brigade, spending his spare time feeding information into a computer; details of thousands of men and women whom the IRA believe that it might want to target at some future date. Every

Throughout my years inside the IRA, there was always a desperate shortage of good-quality, modern hand-guns.  The IRA had ample supplies of AK-47s, hundreds of which had been supplied virtually free of charge by the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) and Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. A

You could tell by looking at them they were all fucking British squaddies.’ I

If you have any of those stupid women wanting to act as heroines by throwing themselves in front of the soldiers, take no fucking notice. Just shoot them. I’m not going to let any Brit’s whore fuck up an opportunity like this.’ One

bomb on the footpath used by RUC foot patrols, and then use the AKM to machine-gun them.  As the newsreader read the last few words, I felt tears come to my eyes, knowing that some poor kids could have been caught up in it, hurt, maimed or even worse.  I felt so angry that the IRA could put the lives of kids, kids like mine, in such danger that, at that moment, I didn’t care what the IRA did to me. The

Hamilton and McCarthy have since become the most trusted henchmen of Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams, employed as his personal bodyguards. 

Palace Barracks, Holywood, a secure army base where British army families live during their tour of duty in the Province. The

I was desperately trying to relive the love we shared after you left. I began visiting underground gay sex clubs in the hope of finding another like you. Instead I spiraled into disillusionment. I used sex as a pervasive tool to drown my sorrowful loneliness, which drove me deeper into abysmal miseries. I knew I had to leave London and salvation arrived with my acceptance into The Belfast College of Art and Technology, to pursue my Foundation Art Studies. I plunged myself passionately into my college projects in war-torn Belfast, where the IRA (Irish Republican Army) were in conflict with the British Army. There wasn’t much a nightlife to divert my attention, and I had the perfect opportunity to devote time to my numerous artistic pursuits. Being a workaholic, I channeled my pervasive vexations into my eternal love: fashion design.

...the War on Terror is in fact a war against Islam. After all, this was never conceived of as a war against terror per se. If it were, it would have included the Basque separatists in Spain, the Christian insurgency in East Timor, the Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist rebels in eastern India, the Jewish Kach and Kahane underground in Israel, the Irish Republican Army, the Sikh separatists in the Punjab, the Marxist Mujahadin-e khalq, the Kurdish PKK, and so on. Rather, this is a war against a particular brand of terrorism: that employed exclusively by Islamic entities, which is why the enemy in this ideological conflict gradually and systematically expanded to include not just the persons who attacked America on September 11, 2001, and the organisations that supported them, but also an ever-widening conspiracy of disparate groups such as Hamas in Palestine, Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the clerical regime in Iran, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Chechen rebels, the Kashmiri militants, the Taliban, and any other organisation that declares itself Muslim and employs terrorism as a tactic.

Europe’s long and checkered history of far-right extremism and other varieties of militancy, from violent Marxism to the Irish Republican Army, makes the continent a rich laboratory for counterextremism and deradicalization.

in the early 1980s an armed wing emerged from the Communist Party of Chile in opposition to the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In September of 1986 the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez carried out an assassination attempt against Pinochet. The action did not kill Pinochet and its aftermath is still debated today. Some argue the action led to no positive result but a wave of repression. Others claim that it came to demonstrate the weakness of the dictatorship to the masses of Chileans and the repression represented the government’s fear of loosing further control over the civilian population. The examples are many—from the Irish Republican Army to the Algerian Nationalists.

Despite denying any link between the two organisations, Adams himself was not only President of Sinn Fein but was also a member of the seven-man Provisional IRA Army Council,

Adams held the position of Officer Commanding the 2nd Battalion, a total of 52 people were murdered, including soldiers, police and civilians.  As a result of those ‘successes’, Adams was promoted, becoming Commander of the IRA’s foremost operational command, the Provisional IRA Belfast Brigade, with three Battalions under his authority. I

Over recent years, it has been extraordinary to hear the Sinn Fein leadership declaring to British and American politicians, as well as the media, that they had no knowledge of the decisions taken by the IRA Army Council, while both Adams and McGuinness were Council members. The

One example of how closely the two work together was revealed during the British Parliamentary or local Northern Ireland elections.  During the years, I would become involved in helping the Sinn Fein cause, along with many other young men and women, many of whom were members of the IRA. From their headquarters in Connolly House, Belfast, Sinn Fein organisers would try, with the assistance of the IRA, to do everything in their power to rig the elections.  The plan would be to distribute false identification papers to IRA men and women and other republican sympathisers, and send them around to a number of polling stations so that they could cast votes in perhaps six to ten different places. The

The apparent unrest among Irish soldiers and seamen in royal service in the early 1790s coincides closely with the emergence of nationalist republicanism in Ireland, a new and vital stage in the developing opposition to British rule.

James Connolly (1868-1916), an Irish republican and socialist leader who a British firing squad executed for his role in the Easter Rising said that there is no conscience in warfare. ''It would be well to realize that all the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare,’ of the ‘rules of civilized warfare,’ and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race is hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress…What a lover of humanity can view with anything but horror this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.

which Redmond had presided ‘to efficiently arm and equip the National Volunteers of Dublin City’, even though a proclamation had just been issued forbidding the sales of rifles and ammunition. ‘Subscriptions amounting to £642 were raised on the spot.’ It is not clear whether Redmond’s followers wanted the rifles to arm against republicans or Unionists. Despite the United Kingdom’s national emergency, many Irish seemed to be arming themselves against another enemy.

The actual antecedents of contemporary populist politicians like Trump are to be found not in interwar Central European totalitarian states but in state and local politics, particularly urban politics. In Europe, pro-Brexit Boris Johnson was the mayor of London before becoming prime minister, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini was on the city council of Milan from 1993 to 2012. In the United States, the shift from post-1945 democratic pluralism to technocratic neoliberalism was fostered from the 1960s onward by an alliance of the white overclass with African Americans and other racial minority groups. The result was a backlash by white working-class voters, not only against nonwhites who were seen as competitors for jobs and housing, but also against the alien cultural liberalism of white “gentry liberals.” The backlash in the North was particularly intense among “white ethnics”—first-, second-, and third-generation white immigrants like Irish, German, Italian, and Polish Americans, many of them Catholic. The disproportionately working-class white ethnics now found themselves defined as bigots by the same white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) elites who until recently had imposed quotas on Jews and Catholics in their Ivy League universities, but who were now posing as the virtuous, enlightened champions of civil rights. This toxic mix of black aspiration, white ethnic backlash, and WASP condescension provided a ripe habitat for demagogues, many of them old-school Democrats like Frank Rizzo, mayor of Philadelphia, Sam Yorty, mayor of Los Angeles, and Mario Angelo Procaccino, failed mayoral candidate in New York. These populist big-city mayors or candidates in the second half of the twentieth century combined appeals to working-class grievances and resentments with folksy language and feuds with the metropolitan press, a pattern practiced, in different ways, by later New York City mayors Ed Koch, a Democrat, and Rudy Giuliani, a Republican. In its “Against Trump” issue of January 22, 2016, the editors of National Review mocked the “funky outer-borough accents” shared by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Indeed, Trump, a “white ethnic” from Queens with German and Scots ancestors, with his support in the US industrial states where working-class non-British European-Americans are concentrated, is ethnically different from most of his predecessors in the White House, whose ancestors were proportionately far more British American. Traits which seem outlandish in a US president would not have seemed so if Trump had been elected mayor of New York. Donald Trump was not Der Führer. He was Da Mayor of America.

The Rising was funded largely by American sympathizers acting through the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood.

After the Irish War of Independence led to the partition of Ireland, in 1921, the island was split in two: in the South, twenty-six counties achieved a measure of independence as the Irish Free State, while in the North, a remaining six counties continued to be ruled by Great Britain. Like other staunch republicans, the Price family did not refer to the place where they happened to reside as “Northern Ireland.” Instead it was “the North of Ireland.” In the fraught local vernacular, even proper nouns could be political.

She didn’t much like Irish republicans for the same reason she didn’t much like suffragists. There was a lot of talking, and little understanding that the problem would not go away if one only complained sufficiently.

Know-Nothings, an extremist group of nativists with a deep hatred of immigrants and Catholics that existed as an independent force but who were much closer to the Whigs and later the new Republican Party.

The Federalist-controlled Congress was maneuvering for partisan advantage and betraying an unbecoming nativist streak. Federalists wanted to curb an influx of Irish immigrants, who were usually pro-French and thus natural adherents to the Republican cause.

In the combination of Southern planters and the "plain Republicans" of the North, the Irish were to become a key element. The truth is not, as some historians would have it, that slavery made it possible to extend to the Irish the privileges of citizenship by providing another group for them to stand on, but the reverse, that the assimilation of the Irish into the white race made it possible to maintain slavery. The need to gain the loyalty of the Irish explains why the Democratic Party, on the whole, rejected nativism. It also explains why not merely slavery but the color line became so important to it.

America was well set up to teach new arrivals the overriding value of white skin. Throughout the eighteenth century, the range of dependent labor relations had blurred the distinction between freedom and slavery. The Revolution led to the decline of apprenticeship, indenture, and imprisonment for debt. These changes, together with the growth of slavery as the basis of Southern society, reinforced the tendency to equate freedom with whiteness and slavery with blackness. At the same time, the spread of wage labor made white laborers anxious about losing the precarious independence they had gained from the Revolution. In response, they sought refuge in whiteness. Republican ideology became more explicitly racial than it had been during the Revolutionary era.

They heard the zero sum from Democratic Party leaders whose strategy was twofold: become the anti-Black, pro-slavery foil to the Republicans and recruit Irish men as voters in large cities. Think about it: if you came to a country and saw the class of people in power abusing another group, and your place in relation to both groups was uncertain, wouldn’t you want to align yourself with the powerful group, and wouldn’t you be tempted to abuse the other to show your allegiance?