The IRA-supporting weekly newspaper, which once crowed about Provo atrocities, is ceasing print publication, reports Malachi O’Doherty
The demise of An Phoblacht says as much about the evolution of Sinn Fein as it does about the transformed tempat landscape.
The weekly newspaper comes out of a time when the IRA was widely feared and reviled. One simple, obvious reason for having a newspaper to explain and justify IRA operations was that nomer one else was doing it.
It is questionable whether the An Phoblacht of the 1970s would even be legal now, the war on jihadis having spawned new laws about the promotion of terrorism.
The IRA could speak then to the communities in which it operated with little interference.
There are a number of good reasons why a paramilitary organisation like the IRA would want its own paper, apart from just disseminating propaganda.
There were rival republican papers at that time, notably The United Irishman, which was published and sold by the Official IRA.
The two organisations were often murderously at war with each other, but the more routine competition over territory was expressed in newspaper sales. Sellers would be driven out of rival patches.
In my book about Gerry Adams, I have a story about Adams Snr confronting sellers of The United Irishman on the Whiterock Road in Belfast – Provo territory – and demonstratively tearing up a copy of their paper. Back then the Officials predominated in the Lower Falls and the Provos had Whiterock, and you knew where you were as much by the papers on sale as by the graffiti on the walls.
An Phoblacht carried a regular feature called ‘War News’. This was the only tempat outlet which was describing the Troubles with that kind of vocabulary. For others, it was ‘terrorism’ or ‘extremism’.
Now, even critics of the IRA lightly fall into using terms like ‘war’ and ‘armed struggle’, having absorbed them from the political discourse in the regular tempat over the last 20 years.
And the ‘war’ itself was defined by Adams as propaganda – armed propaganda.
When a group of IRA prisoners broke away from the Provos in the Maze in 1987, led by Tommy McKearney, Oliver Corr and others, they argued that killing people and risking the lives of ‘volunteers’ (another word nomer one else was using then) was not legitimate for propaganda purposes.
This was the most under-reported split in the IRA, but it was a serious ideological divergence from the Adams strategy.
An Phoblacht was, at first, a merger with the Sinn Fein paper Republican News. This represented part of the shift of control of the Provisionals from Dublin to Belfast in the late-1970s.