Beyond the “republican family”: intergenerational memory, biography, and politics in Ireland since 1969

Abstract

ABSTRACT Signalling the longevity of their struggle, Irish republicans active since 1969 frequently highlight family connections among previous generations of militant activists. First, this article interrogates how activists without republican lineage narrate their mobilisation and position themselves within the movement. Republicans without familial access to the movement, it is argued, frame their own commitment as uniquely independent, intense, and reflective. The article’s second section examines the contentious, metaphorical formulation of “family” within Irish republicanism since the peace process of the 1990s. To maintain internal unity amid strategic reorientation, the Provisional movement leadership invoked a “republican family” within which misgivings and dissent could be contained and overcome. Conversely, Sinn Féin’s republican critics rejected the Provisionals’ attempts to delimit the “family.” Simultaneously, senior Sinn Féin representatives strategically warned the London and Dublin governments of the volatility of the “family”: sustaining the peace process, they claimed, required state actors to accommodate an enduringly truculent republican rank-and-file. Drawing upon republican oral histories and written autobiography, this article elucidates how republican families – both literal and metaphorical – have alternately cohered and stabilised the movement. It illuminates a continual contest for intergenerational political legitimacy, and for the right to determine the principles and programme of the republican “family.”