FEARGAL O’HANLON MEMORIAL LECTURE 2011

Seán Cronin - IRA strategist, historian and journalist

Sinn Féin Councillor Mícheál Mac Donncha and Dr Ruan O’Donnell

THE 2011 Annual Feargal O’Hanlon Memorial Lecture was a tribute to the late Seán Cronin, who was the strategist of the IRA’s Operation Harvest – the Border Campaign – as well as a distinguished author, historian and journalist. Seán Cronin died in March of this year in the United States, where he spent much of his life. His ashes were returned to Ireland for burial in Kerry, his childhood home, on 17th September. A number of his old comrades as well as younger people from across the generations gathered in Teach na nDaoine, Cortolvin, Monaghan, on 9th October for the Memorial Lecture.

Seán Cronin and Operation Harvest
The first part of the lecture was delivered by Dr Ruan O’Donnell of the History Department, University of Limerick.

Journalism was Cronin’s main professional calling and he migrated to Canada and the US in 1948 to pursue this interest. He lived in New York City in the early 1950s and was already an active member of the pro-Irish republican Clan na Gael organisation when the IRA Army Council announced its intention to resume its campaign against the British presence in the North of Ireland.
On returning to Ireland in 1955, Cronin was, as arranged, inducted into the IRA under its effective Chief of Staff, Tony Magan. Paid work on the Evening Press covered other endeavours as a Training Officer in the IRA. By 1956, Cronin was the Director of Operations and, as such, made a key input into the ‘Operation Harvest’ document which outlined IRA strategy and was adopted by the Army Council in July 1956.
Cronin devised and ran a series of ‘battle schools’ in which some of the largest training programmes ever organised by the IRA were held in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains. The under-rated ‘Border’ or ‘Resistance’ campaign commenced on 12th December 1956 with leading IRA figures such as Seán Cronin and Charlie Murphy playing active roles in the first phase of attacks on barracks and infrastructure.
Although arrested and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment in Mountjoy in January 1957, Cronin remained one of the most dynamic members of the IRA leadership. He and Murphy persevered in directing the campaign in July 1957 when the introduction of internment badly disrupted the Republican Movement. Pamphlets and article written by Cronin helped sustain an effort which, if serious in intent and comprehensive in scale, had failed to ignite the anticipated level of public support.
Problems arising from factionalism within the Curragh Camp, where Cronin was held from September 1958, complicated the task of waging an unequal armed struggle against vastly more numerous and resourced British forces.
Following the closure of the camp in early 1959, Cronin retained sufficient confidence among the IRA to be reinstated as Chief of Staff. Rearrested in June 1960, the Kerryman had lost favour with elements of the trans-Atlantic support base by the time of his emancipation. While an IRA Court of Inquiry cleared him of false allegations, he believed his presence within the upper leadership was counter-productive to the conduct of the campaign. He remained, however, a popular figure with many Volunteers and his rare combination of military, propaganda and management skills made him a valuable ally to successors at the helm of the Republican Movement.

The writings Seán Cronin
The second part of the lecture was given by Dublin City Sinn Féin Councillor Mícheál Mac Donncha.

Seán Cronin’s writings spoke initially and in a special way for the generation of republicans that carried out the Resistance Campaign. Cronin produced much of the publicity material for the Resistance Campaign both as a regular writer and sometime editor of the Republican Movement’s monthly newspaper The United Irishman/An tEireannach Aontaithe and as the author of pamphlets and other publicity material.
His most significant production from that period was the book ‘Resistance – The Story of the Struggle in British-Occupied Ireland’ (republished in IRIS magazine, Number 20, 2007).
In 1972, Cronin joined with Wexford republican and journalist Richard Roche and the Belfast republican and journalist from a Protestant background, Jack Bennett, to produce a collection of Wolfe Tone’s writings entitled ‘Freedom the Wolfe Tone Way’, which was published by Anvil in 1973. This was an influential book for the republicans of the 1970s and 1980s and is still the best short collection of Tone’s writings.
The introduction by Jack Bennett is a brilliant argument against the two nations theory advanced by Conor Cruise O’Brien and others at the time as their excuse for abandoning the nationalists of the Six Counties and for opposing Irish unity.
It was in 1972 also that Cronin published a landmark work of Irish history – ‘The McGarrity Papers’. This was the fruit of his two years’ research of the treasure trove of documents left in the care of Clan na Gael in America by Joe McGarrity, the County Tyrone republican who died in 1940 and spent most of his life in the United States.
One of Cronin’s most significant works was his study published in 1980 entitled ‘Irish Nationalism – A History of its Roots and Ideology’. This analyses Irish nationalism and republicanism from the United Irishmen up to the 1970s.
I will conclude with a passage from Seán Cronin that I think is especially relevant today as we take up the task of national reconciliation, reunification and building a new Republic. With our new imperial masters the IMF and EU in mind we recall what Cronin wrote in 1972:

In Tone’s Republic, the resources of the nation would be used for the benefit of all the people of the nation. Education would not be the preserve of a few, and poverty and emigration the lot of the many. In Tone’s Ireland this land would not be merely a tributary for foreign finance, a base for foreign forces or a bridgehead for imperialism, political or economic.