A Tunnel To The Moon

Mark Hayes , author and researcher, reviews a book by long time republican activist and former IRA prisoner Matt Treacy.

Matthew Treacy, an ex-IRA volunteer and Sinn Fein activist who spent more than 30 years in the Republican movement, has chosen to publish a book about his experiences. Before I make any substantive observations about the content of his text, in the interest of honesty and transparency I should make a confession - I have been a friend of Matt Treacy for many years. Indeed, I remember visiting him in the dreary edifice of Portlaoise prison during the “troubles”. So disentangling personal and political motivations in the context of writing a review might be construed as a challenging task.
In fact this proposition is less onerous than one might assume because I have often disagreed with Matt Treacy, and I know he is sensible enough to welcome robust debate and intelligent discussion. Which brings us to the book itself.
Treacy’s text deals with the “endgame” in Ireland and the demise of militant Irish Republicanism: “the end of the Irish Republican Army”. This delicate subject is tackled through the lens of his own personal experience as someone who was at the very epicentre of the Provisional Republican machine for many years. If anyone was a Sinn Fein “insider” it was Matthew Treacy, which affords his recollections a heuristic value which perhaps evades other, similar account.
The first point to make is an obvious one. Treacy is a talented writer and has a keen eye for the subtle nuances of political subterfuge, and he covers the choreography of the “peace process” with dexterity and skill. Indeed, anyone wishing to track the electoral fortunes of Sinn Fein in recent years could do far worse than consult the psephological analysis contained in this text.
Treacy takes us through the “peace process” and examines how it played out from a Provisional perspective.  However, in the process of outlining these historic political developments Treacy also outlines a critique of Sinn Fein which is both insightful, acerbic and, occasionally, humorous. The essence of Treacy’s thesis is that Sinn Fein is, fundamentally, an organisation which is “opportunist” and “tactically promiscuous”. Sinn Fein, according to Treacy, has had its ideology subverted by new post-modern political fashions and been bought off by the “benign corruption” implicit in British government funding of community projects in the north of Ireland. In effect Treacy argues that Sinn Fein has succumbed to the “liberal left” and the “soft power” of the British state.
The logic of this process, of course, has been to underpin the Union and reinforce sectarian categories in the scramble for scarce resources. Traditional Republican aspirations have thereby been seriously attenuated, or discarded altogether. In effect Sinn Fein has become an electoral machine designed to win votes at any cost, and what Treacy’s narrative describes is a sorry tale of relentless political pragmatism – a party driven by an instrumental calculus of cost-benefit analysis and cynical self-interest. 
In terms of actual political dividends, Treacy suggests that the results for Sinn Fein have been meagre, to say the least. The Good Friday Agreement was concluded as an “internal settlement”, which has meant that the “Unionist veto” has remained intact. The much vaunted “cross border bodies” have clearly had no measurable impact on the contours of the Union, and are described by Treacy as “impotent” and “irrelevant”. He should know.
However, Treacy does make the rather more interesting point that the hostility and acrimony of the Unionists at key moments in the process made it much easier to sell the GFA to a republican constituency because there was an implicit assumption that if the loyalists were unhappy it must be good for republicans. It wasn’t. In fact, the GFA was little different (and may be worse) than Sunningdale or Hillsborough, a point that Treacy makes to good effect. Indeed, Matt Treacy goes on to say that the GFA represented “nothing less than almost total capitulation by revolutionary republicanism”. Of course, this is hardly surprising given the fact that, as noted in the book, British government official Jonathan Powell was writing speeches for Martin McGuinness, to be delivered at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis. One is reminded, in reading this, of Brendan Hughes’s explanation of the acronym GFA as “Got Fuck All”.
This makes for uncomfortable reading if you are a Republican, but it is hardly news. However, in playing their particular political parlour games Treacy also reiterates that the leadership of Provisional Republicanism have been less than honest with their activists. As he points out:

…at no stage did Adams and McGuinness and their closest supporters ever let on, to the very end, to the IRA or the republican support base, that a united Ireland was not an achievable objective. Had they done so then they would not have been able to bring the IRA or Sinn Fein to the stage where they agreed to an internal settlement and de facto to Partition.

Whether this was a deliberate misrepresentation or a more piecemeal accommodation with emerging “political realities” is immaterial – the fact is that many in the Provisional movement were deceived. That Matt Treacy confirms this should at least be of some comfort to those that have claimed this all along. Many republicans were, in effect, misled into surrendering. However, according to Treacy submission was not the worst possible option, because the task which Republicanism had set itself was far too difficult to accomplish - the “war” was unwinnable.
In the book Treacy notes, in confessional tones, his own growing disenchantment with military option, despite the fact he was recruiting officer for the Dublin Brigade while working as a researcher for Sinn Fein in Leinster House. It became increasing clear to Treacy that the military strategy was no longer viable. However, he notes that during the “peace process” many in the IRA were very slow to grasp the new realities, indeed “some chaps were still avidly following the progress of an increasingly erratic ‘war’ with the blind faith of stranded Japanese soldiers on a Pacific Atoll convinced that some stroke of military genius would turn the tide in favour of the Army of the Republic”.
Interestingly, Treacy points out that to a large extent the IRA in the prisons were largely kept in the dark over key developments during the “peace process”. For example, the so-called debates around the TUAS document, which was circulated to prisoners, was designed to foster ambiguity. Treacy recollects that he was told TUAS was “Towards an Unarmed Struggle” but the various alternative explanations fitted well the “Orwellian machinations designed to convince disparate parties of whatever the Army Council thought they wanted or needed to hear”.
Treacy clearly felt that he, and other members of the IRA were “unwitting pawns in a game” where they were “unaware of the rules”. Yet some volunteers were nevertheless anxious to believe the leadership were not leading them astray: “from what I saw myself, both in prison and afterwards, most IRA members believed anything they were told, no matter how absurd”.
Treacy clearly came to a realisation that the armed struggle was a dead-end, as he puts it: I felt under no obligation to make any more stupid decisions on the basis of some illusion. It was every man for himself as far as I was concerned”.
Unsurprisingly Treacy now rejects the “deluded fantasists” and “retro Provos” who believe a new army can achieve what the PIRA could not. As Treacy confirms in a telling turn of phrase: “No doubt Adams was the consummate Machiavellian in bringing an unwinnable war to an end. If for no other reason he deserves thanks for that”.
Yet there was another dimension to the acquiescence of Sinn Fein to British rule. Sinn Fein, according to Treacy, had been subverted by an infatuation with “identity politics”. The idea of an “Ireland of equals”, “parity of esteem” or “national reconciliation” is regarded by Treacy, as vacuous nonsense, which meant Sinn Fein constructed a strategy consisting of “politically correct soundbites”.
Treacy notes that “the meaningless slogan of ‘equality’ has pretty much replaced any pretence to being socialist”. The “Shinner left” had become infected by “ultra-liberal” concerns, which focused on abortion, immigration and certain marginalised social groups. Moreover, Treacy notes that militant socialism was abruptly and unceremoniously jettisoned in order to form an alliance with constitutional nationalism in the hope of invoking the support of Irish and US governments. Diplomatic pan-Nationalism therefore displaced radical, socialist anti-imperialism as the key strategic imperative.
Treacy also points out that “the move away from anything that might be construed as Marxism caused little stir within either the IRA or Sinn Fein, where even in the rare cases that it was properly understood, had never been more than an exotic minority interest”. Sinn Fein, with its focus on “identity politics” was perfectly prepared to abandon the notion of class conflict and ride the new zeitgeist. Of course, Treacy is correct to call out the “happy clappy” lefties, many of whom had infected the “New” Labour party in Britain. Indeed, Treacy mentions Ken Livingston and Jeremy Corbyn in this context, although there are much better examples – Anthony Giddens or Geoff Mulgan for example, whose muddled musings on the “third way” and post-modern “designer socialism” nearly destroyed the Labour movement in Britain.
The bottom line for Sinn Fein, according to Treacy, was that a new breed of activists, many of whom were motivated by careerism, had replaced many of the old “revolutionaries” who were “active when it was dangerous”. Treacy is clearly angry at this transformation, and it is difficult not to concur with him that “the left” in general has indeed been infected by the most insipid type of middle class lifestyle lobbyists who have absolutely no organic link to working class people at all. They are indeed a pestilential nuisance.
However, where Matt Treacy is far less convincing is when he talks about the “shedding of ideological illusions” especially his summary dismissal of the left-wing critique of Sinn Fein. This is where, politically speaking, he and I part company. Treacy is dismissive of the Republican Congress, and he notes (perhaps correctly) that Eirigi is “moribund”, but the vitriol deployed to deride any and all efforts at egalitarian transcendence suggests a much deeper animus - and Treacy repeats this often enough in the text to suggest that he genuinely believes it. For example, Treacy talks about:

‘the urge to make men perfect against their will’. They have learned nothing from the horrors of Leninism and Stalinism and Nazism and Maoism, and all the other simplistic myths that murdered tens of millions in order to make them and the rest of us better people.

Now this is contentious stuff. It would indeed be interesting, for example, to try and tease out exactly how Nazism was designed to “make better people”. However, of greater importance for republicans is the fact that Treacy has his eyes more firmly fixed on the “delusions” of “scientific socialism”, “the failed economics of socialism” and “simplistic slogan ridden diaper Marxism favoured by left wing Republicans”. Indeed, Treacy argues that “most serious historians of political ideology would claim that there is a profound disjunction between the pursuit of a nebulous concept like ‘equality’, and democracy, other than of course equality before the law”. Enough is enough. This is just not true, in fact one of the reasons why right-wing political theorists got so agitated about the electoral process and the extension of the franchise is precisely because of the seemingly inexorable logic which drives democracy toward equality – of rights, opportunity and material outcomes.
Nevertheless, not content with traducing Marxism, Treacy quotes favourably the likes of Popper, Berlin and Hayek, and goes on to talk about “utopian totalitarian ideologies”, the “totalitarian nightmare”, “totalitarian myths of class or of race”, and “the mass murder of millions in the Soviet Union”. This is dangerous territory, and such comments are particularly disingenuous because, as Treacy surely knows, the “freedom loving” nations of the West were also constructed upon a mountain of corpses (slavery, colonialism, imperialism) and the black farce of counting victims cannot eradicate that fact.
Moreover, “totalitarianism” as a theory (as articulated by the likes of Schapiro or Brzezinski for example) was a conceptual remnant of the Cold War which was specifically designed to tar Communism with the same brush as Fascism. It is a simplistic conceptual trap which Dr. Treacy (apparently gleefully) has fallen into. The “totalitarian” theory is flawed principally because it focuses on political methods rather than desired social outcomes but, more importantly, it defames the memory of those brave communists who actually fought and died fighting fascism. To paraphrase Primo Levi, it is perfectly possible to conceive of a communism without concentration camps, but the idea of fascism without them is utterly inconceivable. In short, connecting fascism and communism is lazy politics, and “totalitarian theory” is nonsense on stilts - it is the usual neo-liberal bullshit dressed up in a tuxedo and no amount of semantic chicanery can make it otherwise. Reading Hayek et al is entirely excusable in an effort to stave off the boredom induced by enforced incarceration, but taking them seriously is quite another matter – their self-serving theoretical constructions were drivel before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the financial crash of 2008, and the idea that we should take them seriously now is risible.
Without some kind of extended analysis, Treacy’s perfunctory forays into political philosophy are not simply ill-judged, they can be easily construed as gratuitous grand-standing. Indeed, it might be argued that Treacy has thrown the baby out with the bath water because there is an obvious left-republican tradition which eschews the trendy post-modern, politically-correct notions of “equality” as deployed by Sinn Fein – and we need to look no further than James Connolly to find it (Connolly does not feature at all in the book).
Perhaps if I was forced to walk a mile in Matt Treacy’s shoes I would also be sceptical about the utility of political ideologies and their “malign consequences”. I haven’t, so I am not, but to put my point in another more personalised way, it is relatively easy to malign Martin McGuinness or indeed marginalise Micky McKevitt, but dismissing Tommy McKearney or Eddie O’Neill (men who have experienced the very worst of the “troubles” but who have retained deeply held socialist principles) is not quite so easy. Matthew Treacy knows this, and I know he knows.
Of course, Treacy is undoubtedly correct to point out that Sinn Fein “has been able to survive the regular expulsion and resignations of large numbers of experienced people including elected representatives without that cohering as a political threat”. The sooner that changes the better, but it is difficult to see how Matt Treacy can contribute to that process.
In conclusion, maybe sceptics are entitled to ask why it took Matt Treacy so long to write this book, and they might even point to the issue of remuneration and his refusal to comply with Sinn Fein’s party line on wages (which is dealt with at length), but it is very difficult to argue with his critique of Sinn Fein. Indeed, Treacy now adds his name to the ever-expanding pantheon of those who have managed to detach themselves from the eviscerated husk of Provisional Republicanism.
We might note that the title of the book “A Tunnel to the Moon” uses a phrase borrowed from Anthony McIntyre, which is entirely appropriate because McIntyre’s thesis on the trajectory of Provisional Republicanism, outlined many years ago, has proven to be remarkably prescient. I have disagreed with Matt Treacy, McIntyre, and other ex-Provisionals on many things over the years but the consensus that has been constructed around the reality of Sinn Fein’s egregious apostasy is absolutely compelling. They have abandoned militant socialist Republicanism to become a meaningless political cult that worships the electoral process and Matt Treacy’s latest treatise confirms this in a spectacular way.
Matt Treacy isn’t going to win many friends with this book, which in many ways seems deliberately designed to be provocative, but that will not bother him in the slightest. Treacy is a formidable talent and his loss to the Sinn Fein is a very serious blow – and they will doubtless try to undermine the substance of his critique by attempting to destroy his integrity. They will fail. The real tragedy, however, is that Matt Treacy, and many other so-called “dissidents”, committed themselves to a movement that was not worthy of the many magnificent volunteers that supported it.
Matt Treacy, 2017.   A Tunnel to the Moon: The End of the Irish Republican Army. Publisher: Brocaire Books, Dublin. IBSN: 5-800122-479495