While looking for something else recently, I came across a long and interesting interview with Patrick Hayes, a former Provisional IRA terrorist who was jailed for 30 years for his part in the second Harrods bombing in London in 1992, and who was then released as part of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. In it, Pat Hayes talks about his background (he was born in London to Irish parents, and now lives in Ireland) his reasons for joining the Provisionals, and the two ‘campaigns’  which he regards himself as having participated in: these were the IRA bombing campaign in 1992/3, and the effort by the British Anti Fascist Action (AFA) group in the late ’80s and early ’90s to violently prevent the Neo Nazi British National Party (BNP) from organizing on British streets. Pat says that he regards the IRA’s campaign as ending in defeat, and AFA’s as achieving victory.  

The interview was of particular interest to me because I knew Pat Hayes in the late 80s and early 90s, when he was AFA’s London organiser. I was in my late teens then and he in his mid 30s, so we werent friends exactly, but I have a strong memory of him. I was a rank and file member of AFA at that time. I knew that many of the people in that organization had strong Irish Republican sympathies – to which I wasnt opposed, but also wasnt especially interested in. I didn’t know, of course, that Pat and a number of other senior people in that group were doubling up as Republican gunmen in the same period.

I had joined AFA at the age of 18 because I was looking for people who wanted to confront the British Neo-Nazis physically and I happened by chance to meet members of that organization.  In retrospect, I tend to share Pat Hayes’s view of the activities in which we both took part.  Our tactics were quite simple. We physically attacked the BNP wherever they tried to surface and organize.  I don’t want to exaggerate the violence of these confrontations.  No one was killed.  No one used guns.  On the other hand, the injuries sustained and inflicted and the extent of the disorder created were quite considerable. The result I think was that the BNP were unable to build up the head of steam needed to begin to portray themselves as a normal item on the menu of political options available to the citizenry – which was what they wished, and what we wanted to prevent.  There were of course other elements present in their failure at that time, and it’s a fact that they won a single soon-lost local council seat in 1993,  but I do think our campaign was one of the factors in their failure to take off. Anyway, I don’t at all regret my involvement. It remains a minor, maybe anecdotal but not insignificant point of pride for me when I think about my youth.

Regarding the second area, the details of the IRA bombing campaign in England at that time are shocking, because this was very openly and self-declaredly a war against civilians. Pat says somewhere in the interview that the rationale was that the British government didnt care about deaths in the north of Ireland but they would care about them in Britain itself. On this basis, the IRA operatives placed high explosive devices in litter bins close to where civilians would be gathering. Sometimes, garbled warnings seem to have been given, sometimes not.  The warnings were I think deliberately ambiguous, so as to cause massive disruption.  If people got killed or injured as part of that process, that was apparently fine. The campaign included the deaths of two young children and a woman in Warrington in a bombing, though it should be noted that Pat Hayes wasn’t convicted of or proveed to have had involvement in that attack.

I’m writing all this with mixed motives. Partly because its profoundly strange to read about the involvement of a person who as a very young man I liked, appreciated and respected (and who i can see is still the same person) in what I regard as a criminal and murderous campaign. And partly, of course, because one can’t ignore the politics. Ireland to some degree in general, but certainly the ‘Irish Republican movement’ in particular, is now one of the hotbeds in Europe of hatred of Israel very often thickly leavened with an open hatred of Jews that seems to have been never very far below the surface. The party that in its military iteration was running Pat Hayes’s bombing campaign is now the second largest in the Dail, very much part of the political establishment and with a good chance of participating in the next government.  It is also one of the most anti-Israel parties in Europe, and it delights in accusing Israel of ‘genocide’ and the rest of it. 

So its worth remembering that the same party that makes that accusation was running an insurgent military campaign squarely directed against a civilian population, not only in living memory, but in relatively recent times.  One can criticise various elements of Israeli tactical behavior, obviously, but its important to bear in mind that Israeli military behavior and culture occupy a different moral universe to those who would openly order a campaign containing no rationale other than the deliberate targeting and indiscriminate murder of civilians, as the Provisional IRA did at that time, and as Hamas and other related Islamist militias do at the present moment. It seems to be the peculiar fate of Israel and the Jews to be the subject of bizarre efforts at moral admonishment and sanctimonious instruction by supporters of these kinds of tactics.  Their efforts are grotesque, and it deserves to be remembered exactly why and to what extent. Not to put too fine a point on it, if one were to combine their outlook on tactics and strategy with Israel’s military capacities, the Gaza war would have been over in a few days, would have been conducted without losses on the Israeli side, entirely by the air force and the artillery corps, and would have resulted in Gaza being a smoking ruin with a million or so dead.  That didn’t happen, because we don’t share their view of the worth of civilian lives on the enemy side. 

I continue to not have very strong views on the strategic goal of Patrick Hayes’s organization. I like Ireland and Irish music and literature a great deal. Its easy to understand why Irish people would like to see their country unified.  On the other hand, its also not hard to understand the view of Ulster Protestants that after 400 years of residency in Northern Ireland, their communities surely have the same rights to self determination as other entities deriving from English and Scottish Protestant settlement conducted without the consent sought of the native population several centuries ago.  Such entities would include the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, whose peoples’ right to determine their own future by democratic means are not usually questioned, despite the circumstances of their establishment. My only hope is that any democratic arrangement reached, with the mutual consent of both communities/peoples, can be maintained or implemented without violence.

Regarding Pat Hayes, we’re all older now and I must confess to being glad to see how well he looked.  For some reason, I have a memory of him from the time we knew each other of an occasion when a crowd of us were walking along the platform of a tube station somewhere in London, and I saw Pat suddenly jump down onto the track and carry on walking along in the narrow space between the platform and the electrified tracks.  Very calmly and without ceremony he walked like that for a minute or so and then when we reached the end of the platform he jumped up again and kept on walking with the rest of us.  No one commented on it.  My 19 year old self was very impressed by what Ben Kingsley as Don Logan would have called the ‘sheer fuck offness of it.’  I’m glad that we won the campaign that we took part in together.  I’m also glad he lost the second one of which he was a part.