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6th January 2002
Ferris throws down the gauntlet to Bertie Ahern
Sinn Fein Ard Chomhairle member Cllr Martin Ferris speaking today at the Feargal O'Hanlon Memorial Lecture in Monaghan threw down the gauntlet to An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern when he stated, ``the story of the 2002 general election will be the success of Sinn Fein''. Cllr Ferris said:
``The year 2001 will be remembered in electoral terms as the year Sinn Fein became the largest nationalist party in the Six Counties and won four Westminster seats, and when our party played a key role in defeating the Nice Treaty referendum in the 26 Counties.
``I believe that the story of the 2002 general election, as it was in the 1999 local elections, will be the success of Sinn Fein. Our preparation for the 2002 general election did not begin today or yesterday. It began the day after the 1997 election and our workers in every constituency have been busy ever since. Our task in the weeks and months ahead is to reap what we have sown - to ensure that the support won by the hard work of the past five years is mobilised on polling day.
``I confidently predict that our sole TD Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin will be re-elected here in Cavan/Monaghan. That will be an historic achievement because not since the 1920s has Sinn Fein retained a Leinster House seat. But we will do more - we will send a strong contingent of Sinn Fein TDs to Leinster House and we will make an impact on the political scene as never before. I look forward to taking my place on that team.''
Responding to comments made recently by the Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Cllr. Ferris said:
``In an interview in last week's Sunday Business Post the Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil Bertie Ahern stated that it "would not be tenable for Sinn Fein to participate in a sovereign Irish government" and he referred to the "continued existence of an illegal private army associated with a political party". The Taoiseach appeared to rule out negotiations with Sinn Fein about the formation of a government after the general election.
``I would remind the Taoiseach that Sinn Fein does not have a private army. What we do have is an electoral mandate, a mandate that will be increased after the general election. I think the electorate should be told plainly by the Taoiseach that he regards votes cast for Sinn Fein as less valid than those cast for other parties, and TDs elected for Sinn Fein as less qualified to represent the people. Because if no party emerges with a clear majority then all parties whose numbers in Leinster House make them relevant must be considered in the negotiations to form a government.
``The Taoiseach does not really believe that it would be untenable for Sinn Fein to participate in government in this State. His statement is merely another instalment in the negative campaigning by the establishment parties as they attempt to frighten voters from supporting Sinn Fein.
``The Taoiseach need not be too concerned on Sinn Fein's behalf as we are not holding our breath in anticipation of entering government with Fianna Fáil. Yes, we want to be in government, but the government we are aiming for is a national government in a 32-County parliament with a Sinn Fein majority. That is our ultimate aim and though it may seem distant now, we need only look at the rapid changes, which occurred, in recent years to realise that it is no pipe dream.
``Sinn Fein is the only party in a position to challenge the stale, corrupt and careerist establishment which has dominated politics in the 26 Counties for so long. The gross inequalities and inefficiencies in our health service, despite unprecedented economic prosperity, provide just one indication of the failure of successive governments to serve the people. Sinn Fein is building the radical alternative and pointing the way forward to an all-Ireland democracy, an Ireland of equals. ''
FULLL TEXT OF SPEECH
Is onóir speisialta dom an Léacht Chomórtha seo a thabhairt i mbliana. Ba mhaith liom buíochas a ghabháil le poblachtánaigh Chontae Mhuineacháin don chuireadh chun labhairt libh.
It is an honour to be asked to deliver the Feargal O'Hanlon Memorial Lecture and I thank the republicans of County Monaghan for your invitation. This year marks the 45th Anniversary of the death of Feargal O'Hanlon from this town of Monaghan, and of his comrade Seán Sabhat from Limerick City. They died on New Year's Day 1957 at the start of the IRA's Operation Harvest - the armed campaign against British occupation of the Six Counties which lasted from 1956 until 1962.
Feargal O'Hanlon and Seán Sabhat gave their lives in the cause of Irish freedom in exactly the same way as the Volunteers of 1916, the Black and Tan war, the Civil War and those republicans who, numbered in hundreds, died in the struggle since 1969. I extend a special word of solidarity here today to Feargal's sister, Pádraigín, a dedicated and highly respected member of Sinn Fein and elected representative of the people of Monaghan town, since 1985.
Feargal's memory and the memory of all those who died for Irish freedom lives on in the commitment of the republicans of 2002 to achieve the Republic for which they gave their lives. Decades have passed and times have changed. Political circumstances have altered in many ways. Republicans have made much progress. New strategies and new methods of struggle have been adopted but the core aim of our struggle is the same. We remain totally committed to the ending of British rule in the Six Counties and the unity of our country and our people. We remain totally committed to the establishment of Irish unity and independence in a 32-County Republic.
That is the basic principle which has always guided us and which guides us still in our work today. The work is bearing fruit in the growing electoral strength of Sinn Fein throughout the 32 Counties. The year 2001 will be remembered in electoral terms as the year Sinn Fein became the largest nationalist party in the Six Counties and won four Westminster seats, and when our party played a key role in defeating the Nice Treaty referendum in the 26 Counties.
I believe that the year 2002 will be remembered as the year Sinn Fein made a major impact in the general election in this state and sent a strong team to Leinster House. We are determined by our work in the weeks and months ahead to make this a reality. The focus of this lecture therefore is the Electoral History of Sinn Fein in the 26 Counties - a history whose latest chapter is being written as we speak.
The first parliamentary election ever contested by Sinn Fein was North Leitrim, a Westminster by-election in 1908. The party had only been established in 1905 as a broad alliance of republicans and nationalists to the left of the Irish Parliamentary Party. Sinn Fein had great hopes invested in it for the North Leitrim by-election but was not yet in a position to shift the monolithic Irish Party. Yet ten years after the defeat of Charles Dolan of Sinn Fein in North Leitrim the party swept the boards at the 1918 general election. In an unequivocal vote for Irish independence and unity the people of the 32 Counties elected Sinn Fein TDs in 73 out of the 105 single-seat constituencies in Ireland.
It is not stressed often enough that the British government could have and should have recognised this mandate for freedom and acknowledged the republican leadership democratically chosen by the Irish people. But in 1919, as so often afterwards, the imperial interests of the British government came before democracy and real peace between the Irish and British peoples. The violent suppression of the First Dáil Éireann by the British made the Anglo-Irish war inevitable.
In the Municipal Elections of January 1920 Sinn Fein won majorities in 72 of the 127 corporations and councils concerned in that poll. The following June Sinn Fein won majorities in 28 of the 33 County Councils in Ireland - a further overwhelming republican mandate.
The first general election on a partitionist basis was held in May 1921 when Sinn Fein won 124 of the 128 seats in the 26 Counties but only 6 of the 52 seats in the Six Counties. Gerrymandering and intimidation by Orange State forces were already well under way in the Six Counties and non-unionists won only 12 of the 52 seats. Nevertheless in Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone there was an anti-partition majority of nearly 8,000. Sinn Fein treated the 1921 election on an all-Ireland basis and the elected republicans came together to form the Second Dáil Éireann.
The general election of 1922 was held in the 26 Counties only. 58 Pro-Treaty and 36 Anti-Treaty TDs were elected. Within days the Civil War began. Despite massive repression and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of republicans in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the abstentionist Republican Party won 44 of the 153 seats in the Free State Parliament in the August 1923 General Election.
In 1924 the republicans had reasserted their claim to the name Sinn Fein and won two Leinster House by-elections in Dublin and Mayo. In 1925 they won a further two by-elections in Dublin and Sligo-Leitrim. By this time the abstentionist issue had come to the fore and in 1926 Eamon de Valera departed from Sinn Fein to form Fianna Fáil. I do not propose to discuss here the complexities of the abstentionist question then and subsequently. Suffice to say that the formation of Fianna Fáil left Sinn Fein as a much reduced and increasingly isolated party.
In the 1927 general election Sinn Fein, after the departure of Fianna Fáil, won five seats in Leinster House which it lost in 1932. Thereafter the party went into the electoral wilderness. While Sinn Fein maintained a presence in local government the party did not return to the general election contest for another 30 years.
This brings us to the general election of 1957. Sinn Fein had been reorganised in the early 1950s and for the first time in decades adopted a policy of electoral intervention in the 26 Counties. It must be noted that this came after the rise and decline of Clann na Poblachta. A significant section of that party's vote had come from republicans who were not being represented by Sinn Fein.
The March 1957 election result was a shock to the establishment. Four Sinn Fein TDs were elected. County Monaghan was at that time a separate constituency, a three-seater. The late Éineachán Ó hAnnluain, brother of Feargal, was elected for Sinn Fein. The people of South Kerry elected the late John Joe Rice. Ruairi Ó Brádaigh won a seat in Longford/Westmeath and the late John Joe McGirl won for Sinn Fein in Sligo-Leitrim.
The 1957 election marked a very significant electoral intervention by Sinn Fein - but it was an intervention and not the start of an electoral strategy. The republican focus was on the Border Campaign, on opposition to internment North and South which was introduced at that time, and on support for the prisoners. There was no long-term strategy to build republican electoral strength. With the Border campaign coming to an end and republican morale at a low ebb, none of the four Sinn Fein seats were retained in the general election of 1961.
It was a full 20 years before the Republican Movement made another significant intervention in elections in the 26 Counties. While republicans maintained a presence on local authorities, it was only in June 1981 that the electorate was offered the opportunity once again to vote for them at parliamentary level.
The 26-County general election of June 1981 followed the election of Bobby Sands in the Fermanagh/South Tyrone by-election and his subsequent death on hunger strike. Charles Haughey was then in power, having become leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach in 1979. His various efforts to defuse the H-Block crisis fell short of supporting the five demands of the prisoners and he failed to confront Thatcher. He feared that his first electoral test as Fianna Fáil leader would be marred by the crisis and he was correct.
The National H-Block-Armagh Committee stood nine republican prisoner candidates. Here in Counties Monaghan and Cavan the people elected hunger striker Kieran Doherty as their TD while in neighbouring County Louth H-Block prisoner Paddy Agnew was elected. Joe McDonnell came within 300 votes of election in Sligo-Leitrim. Across the nine constituencies contested some 40,000 people gave their vote to the republican prisoners.
The election of two prisoners helped to deprive Fianna Fáil of office and there followed a short-lived Fine Gael/Labour Coalition.
We have been recalling the 1981 Hunger Strike during the past 20th anniversary year and all have recognised what a watershed in our history it was. New forms of struggle were opened up during the campaign in support of the political prisoners. For the first time in this phase of the struggle the republican leadership seriously addressed the need for an electoral strategy, as distinct from occasional interventions at times of crisis.
Sinn Fein had been a campaigning party with a narrow agenda, a vocal support group for the resistance fighters in the Six Counties but with little relevance to the vast majority of people in the 26 Counties. The party had not attempted to build its electoral strength. In the years that followed 1969, it was sincerely believed that such was the level of armed conflict that the IRA's efforts alone would continue to escalate the crisis and force British withdrawal. The organisation of political support for Irish republicanism on a broad basis was neglected, especially in the 26 Counties. No real attempt was made to build Sinn Fein as a political party with a radical alternative to offer in social, economic and cultural terms, as well as on the National Question.
The experience of the H-Block/Armagh Movement and the Hunger Strikes changed all that radically. But there was still a very long way to go.
The Fine Gael/Labour Coalition collapsed in January 1982 and called a general election. Sinn Fein contested seven constituencies but retained only half of the vote achieved by the prisoners the previous year. The candidate in Cavan/Monaghan on that occasion was Seamus McElwain, then a remand prisoner and later to die in action as a member of Óglaigh na hÉireann. The other prisoner candidate was Joe O'Connell in Clare, one of the Balcombe Street Four, then serving a life sentence in an English prison, and since released as part of the peace process.
It was a bad election for Sinn Fein. The state of underdevelopment and poor organisation and finance of Sinn Fein was such that when a second general election was called in 1982 the party was not in a position to contest in any constituency. There began a period of intense debate on the way forward and of hard work to build up the organisation.
While the abstentionist attitude to Leinster House was deeply rooted in republican history it had been undermined by the harsh reality of contesting elections in the 26 Counties on an abstentionist basis.
Once republicans began to develop an electoral strategy it was inevitable that the abstentionist policy would be set aside. In hindsight it is easy to say that this policy should have been ended much earlier. But we must take into account the experience of the 1969 split and the years of crisis in the Six Counties when the nationalist people were under siege and when a rejuvenated IRA confronted the British forces in a way not seen since the Tan War. Republicans in the 26 Counties had fulfilled a role which was essentially supportive of their brothers and sisters across the Border. The need for republican political struggle in this state was neglected.
It was only from the mid 1980s onwards that a real Sinn Fein electoral strategy was developed for the 26 Counties. Speaking at Bodenstown in 1983 the newly elected Sinn Fein MP for West Belfast, Gerry Adams, stated that "the advances made in the Six Counties need to be matched by a parallel development in the 26 Counties" and that "the drawing up of a political strategy for the 26 Counties must become the primary short-term objective facing republicans".
The party contested the Dublin Central by-election with Christy Burke as our candidate in November 1983. He doubled the Sinn Fein percentage from 1982 and won a higher first preference vote than the Labour candidate. From that election onwards Sinn Fein participated in all electoral contests in the 26 Counties - European Parliament, local government and Leinster House.
I do not propose to detail here the Sinn Fein performance in each of those elections. They were part of the long and difficult process of building an organisation and an electoral strategy. On the whole successes were limited to a few areas of strength such as here in County Monaghan where seats were won on Monaghan County Council by Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin and Pat Treanor in 1985. But for the first time the party was in for the long haul in electoral terms - building on the foundations of local organisation and community involvement. I want to acknowledge the key role played by the republicans of this County in showing the way forward for Sinn Fein throughout the 26 Counties. Your example of efficiency and professionalism helped and encouraged other and weaker areas.
In the 80s and early 90s Sinn Fein fought elections with two major disadvantages. First there was the legacy of previous non-participation as we tried to challenge a system which had been dominated by the three larger parties for decades. Secondly, and more importantly, was the censorship imposed by Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act. Our candidates and elected representatives were barred from television and radio in this jurisdiction by order of successive governments. The effect was two-fold. The people were denied the truth about the conflict in the Six Counties and they were denied the Sinn Fein viewpoint on the national question and all other issues.
The politicians of Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour and the Progressive Democrats often lecture us about our democratic credentials but none of them should ever be allowed to forget that all their parties served in governments which imposed blatant political censorship. Section 31 censorship stifled debate, spread misinformation and ultimately helped to prolong the conflict.
We owe a special debt of gratitude to republicans throughout the 26 Counties who fought elections under those very difficult conditions. It was a time when republicans were regarded by the political and media Establishment as non-people. Indeed the physical danger to Sinn Fein representatives was not confined to the Occupied North and, in the context of our electoral history in the 26 Counties, we remember especially Donegal County Councillor Eddie Fullerton who was murdered in his home by pro-British forces during the 1991 local government election campaign.
The campaign against Section 31 finally bore fruit in 1994 when the odious ban was lifted. The peace process began later that year and Sinn Fein was well placed for the growing electoral successes on both sides of the Border which we have seen since then. We must never forget those who helped to lay the foundations for Sinn Fein successes here in the 26 Counties in the very difficult years of censorship, Special Branch harassment and attempted isolation of republicans.
Sinn Fein went into the 1997 general election with renewed confidence and the election of Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin as TD for Cavan/Monaghan represented a truly historic turning point, inspiring republicans throughout the country. Our vote increased significantly everywhere and the pattern continued into the local elections in 1999. Again, your constituency led the way but on that occasion the expansion of Sinn Fein representation throughout this State was very significant. At last we had built a 32-County organisation.
Sinn Fein now confidently faces into one of the most crucial electoral contests in our history. Our preparation for the 2002 general election did not begin today or yesterday. It began the day after the 1997 election and our workers in every constituency have been busy ever since. Our task in the weeks and months ahead is to reap what we have sown - to ensure that the support won by the hard work of the past five years is mobilised on polling day.
I believe that the story of the 2002 general election, as it was in the 1999 local elections, will be the success of Sinn Fein. I confidently predict that our sole TD Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin will be re-elected here in Cavan/Monaghan. That will be an historic achievement because not since the 1920s has Sinn Fein retained a Leinster House seat. But we will do more - we will send a strong contingent of Sinn Fein TDs to Leinster House and we will make an impact on the political scene as never before. I look forward to taking my place on that team.
In an interview in last week's Sunday Business Post the Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil Bertie Ahern stated that it "would not be tenable for Sinn Fein to participate in a sovereign Irish government" and he referred to the "continued existence of an illegal private army associated with a political party". The Taoiseach appeared to rule out negotiations with Sinn Fein about the formation of a government after the general election.
I would remind the Taoiseach that Sinn Fein does not have a private army. What we do have is an electoral mandate, a mandate that will be increased after the general election. I think the electorate should be told plainly by the Taoiseach that he regards votes cast for Sinn Fein as less valid than those cast for other parties, and TDs elected for Sinn Fein as less qualified to represent the people. Because if no party emerges with a clear majority then all parties whose numbers in Leinster House make them relevant must be considered in the negotiations to form a government.
Given the history of Fianna Fáil, which was first elected to government in 1932 and again in 1933 with the active support of the IRA, it is strange to hear the Taoiseach speak in this way. How come it is 'tenable' for Sinn Fein to participate in government in the Six Counties and in the All-Ireland Ministerial Council side by side with the Taoiseach's Cabinet colleagues? Is it because the Taoiseach regards the IRA as legitimate in that jurisdiction but not in this?
The Taoiseach does not really believe that it would be untenable for Sinn Fein to participate in government in this State. His statement is merely another instalment in the negative campaigning by the establishment parties as they attempt to frighten voters from supporting Sinn Fein. We have seen this campaign building up over recent months. The O'Reilly newspapers have been to the fore in the effort and we can be certain that it will escalate as polling day draws near.
The Taoiseach need not be too concerned on Sinn Fein's behalf as we are not holding our breath in anticipation of entering government with Fianna Fáil. Yes, we want to be in government, but the government we are aiming for is a national government in a 32-County parliament with a Sinn Fein majority. That is our ultimate aim and though it may seem distant now, we need only look at the rapid changes which occurred in recent years to realise that it is no pipe dream.
Sinn Fein is the only party in a position to challenge the stale, corrupt and careerist establishment which has dominated politics in the 26 Counties for so long. The gross inequalities and inefficiencies in our health service, despite unprecedented economic prosperity, provide just one indication of the failure of successive governments to serve the people. Sinn Fein is building the radical alternative and pointing the way forward to an all-Ireland democracy, an Ireland of equals.
Many of our political opponents and political commentators speak of the efficiency of the Sinn Fein 'electoral machine'. But the progress we have made and will continue to make is not due to a machine but to people - dedicated people who share a deep commitment to our republican beliefs. With that commitment we will go forward to increased electoral strength and, ultimately, to the Republic for which Feargal O'Hanlon and his comrades lived, worked and died.
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