‘The Age-Old Struggle’: Irish republicanism from the Battle of the Bogside to the Belfast Agreement, 1969–1998. By Jack Hepworth

Abstract

What exactly was Irish ‘republicanism’ during the era of the ‘Troubles’? Jack Hepworth’s forensically researched monograph is one of the most satisfying works to date that attempts to answer that question in all its complexity. Across five research chapters (1968 and its legacies, shifting republican strategies, the revolutionary Left, feminism and women’s activism, and Catholicism), Hepworth uses an impressive range of sources to challenge the homogenous portrayal of republicanism that still pervades the media, political rhetoric, and scholarly portrayals of the ‘Troubles’ and politics in Northern Ireland. The result is a rich history of the evolving ideas, actions and divergences that shaped a movement whose complexity has been—and continues to be—downplayed. Hepworth does not explicitly set out to write a history of ideas, yet this is the fundamental impulse behind the work. For instance, we learn how thinkers and activists in 1968–72 looked to local, regional, national and international contexts to justify ‘protest’ in the early years of mass civil disorder. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), the moderate civil rights group that sought constitutional reform within the UK, was a broad church comprising socialists, nationalists, leftists, internationalists and radicals. Internal differences over what NICRA could achieve were just as important as tactics in the split of 1969–70, and Hepworth highlights how the radical, student-led People’s Democracy (PD) distanced themselves from NICRA by lobbying for socialist and international causes, forging a blend of socialist republicanism that endured beyond these years. Hepworth demonstrates overlaps between PD and the French New Left, and for some members, crossovers with militant republicanism via the short-lived Northern Resistance Movement during 1971–72. The close attention paid to chronology and shifting allegiances within and between groups demonstrates that no easy characterizations can be made about the civil rights movement as it evolved in the early years.