The 13th Desmond Greaves Summer School

Looking around the Irish Labour History Museum in the former army base at Beggars Bush Barracks, Sinn Féin's Jim Gibney expressed the hope that the day would come when British bases in Ireland would serve a similarly useful purpose as the hosting of the Thirteenth Desmond Greaves Summer School.

     
The Good Friday Agreement is not a settlement, it is an interim political arrangement. The only settlement that will be acceptable to republicans is one that brings about the unification and independence of Ireland. It will not be over until we achieve that." - Jim Gibney
Greaves will be familiar to many republicans as the author of books like 'The Life and Times of James Connolly' and 'Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution'. Over a career spanning several decades, Greaves edited the Connolly Association's newspaper, The Irish Democrat, and was a prolific radical socialist-republican writer and historian.

Jim Gibney was speaking at the closing lecture of this year's school, titled 'Modern Republicanism From the Hunger-Strike to the Good Friday Agreement: An Evaluation'. Recently suspended ATGWU secretary Mick O'Reilly was also scheduled to speak but the organisers reported that on legal advice he would not be taking part following the controversial ban on making public appearances placed on him by the union's British leadership.

In a speech that was at times moving, Gibney outlined the debt owed by people, not just in Ireland, to the sacrifices of the hunger-strikers of 1981:

"In my opinion the hunger strike of 1981 changed fundamentally the republican struggle. Those who died on hunger strike not only set a new moral frame or context from which everything else derived, they propelled the struggle forward into a new arena; they strengthened the struggle at a time when it was under pressure.

"They inflicted both a moral and a political defeat on Margaret Thatcher and continue to inspire republicans all over Ireland. In fact, Bobby Sands became an icon for oppressed peoples all over the world. And he still is. The prisoners in Turkish jails who are on hunger strike at the minute told two ex-prisoners a few weeks ago that Bobby Sands was their hero and they drew strength from him."

Gibney went on to say: "When the year was over it was obvious to the leadership that an electoral strategy was needed. The prisoners gave us the courage to open up this front. That meant a party has to be built. It was no longer good enough for Sinn Féin to be a party of protest on the outside. It had to build as an effective and real party and it had to bring its protest politics into the system. As I speak, that might sound reasonably straightforward. Back then it was a huge shift."

The Summer School typically attracts a fairly broad spectrum of opinion from the Irish socialist and republican traditions and this year was no exception. Following Jim Gibney's warmly received speech, a question and answer session followed, with many of the speakers criticising elements of the Good Friday Agreement.

There was some dissatisfaction expressed at Sinn Féin's role in the Stormont Executive which was, Gibney asserted, in large part down to the party 'not blowing its own trumpet' on the issue enough as to what it had accomplished since Martin McGuinness and Bairbre de Brún took office. He pointed out that in the first hundred days of the Executive, Martin McGuinness has spent more on integrated education than the British government did over the last 30 years and that the party was hampered in what it could do by the fact that the Executive was essentially a coalition.

He also repeatedly stressed the point that no republican seriously considered the Good Friday Agreement as a final settlement. "The Good Friday Agreement is not a settlement, it is an interim political arrangement," he said. "The only settlement that will be acceptable to republicans is one that brings about the unification and independence of Ireland. It is not over, and it will not be over until we achieve that."

Gibney's lecture was but the last in a series that had gone on throughout the weekend, dealing with a range of issues from economic unity in Ireland to globalisation to democracy in the European Union.

Thirteen years since his death, C Desmond Greaves continues to be a name synonymous with informed debate and discussion of radical alternatives to the status quo and this year's school underlined the commitment of the organisers to those principles.