Introduction

Television brought images of protest into Irish homes in the 1960s. International issues such as the Americans’ war in Vietnam and the struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa were taken up in Dublin, as was the domestic question of public housing. At the beginning of the 1960s, the Soviet Union decided to support national liberation movements to undermine the USA and its allies worldwide. Concurrently, the new leadership of the republican movement began to emphasise socialism, secularism and anti-sectarianism. This departure, Ultán Gillen writes, was rooted in ‘the ideas of prominent republicans of the past, especially the Marxism of James Connolly and the foundational ideas of Theobald Wolfe Tone, particularly Tone's belief that overcoming sectarianism was the means to revolutionary change in Ireland’. The development of ‘anti-imperialist’ struggle worldwide helped to shape this ‘new departure’ – unlike the Republican Congress period in the 1930s, the republican leftists around Cathal Goulding decided to stay in the IRA. Its leadership also retained the military option, but the Soviets, through their embassy in London, turned down an IRA appeal for arms, as did the Chinese and the newly independent Algeria. Nevertheless, the IRA began to co-operate with communists in various agitations – the most significant would be the northern civil rights movement.

Militant republicans did not take to the ‘new departure’ immediately. The republican movement, such as it was after the failure of the ‘border campaign’, could not execute a tactical U-turn as quickly as, say, an orthodox communist party.