‘A Party of the Extreme Left’
The Irish minister for justice, Patrick Cooney, in 1976 identified two threats to the state: the ‘Sino-Hibernian’ Official republican movement and the Provisional IRA. ‘Harsh laws’ to counter subversion would be widely welcomed, he claimed. The Official movement’s leadership now openly endorsed the Soviets’ agenda. This chapter focuses on the Official IRA’s determination to build a political party that stayed close to the Soviet Union but opposed its support for the Provisionals’ ‘prison war’ – the campaign to restore ‘political status’ for newly-convicted paramilitary prisoners. Now advocating ‘peace, work and class politics’ as the solution to the northern crisis, the Official movement’s political creation, Sinn Féin The Workers’ Party (SFWP), abandoned the traditional left-wing republican ‘anti-imperialist’ position. Ironically, this involved the party analysing the situation in the north along the same lines as the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.