Ireland -- Politics and government; Political parties -- Ireland -- History; Sinn Fein
The definitely Republican movement found an organ of expression in the
autumn of 1910 by the establishment of _Saoirseacht na h-Eireann, Irish
Freedom_, a fortnightly paper of eight pages, under the management of
Seaghan MacDiarmada. Its motto was a quotation from Wolfe Tone: "To
subvert the tyranny of our execrable Government, to break the connection
with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils and to
assert the independence of my country--these were my objects." Its policy
was explained at length in its editorial: "We believe that free political
institutions are an absolute essential for the future security and
development of the Irish people and, therefore, we seek to establish free
political institutions in this country; and in this we wish not to be the
organ of any party, but the organ of an uncompromising Nationalism. We
stand not for an Irish party but for National tradition--the tradition of
Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, of John Mitchel and John O'Leary. Like them
we believe in and would work for the independence of Ireland--and we use
the term with no reservation stated or implied; we stand for the complete
and total separation of Ireland from England and the establishment of an
Irish Government, untrammelled and uncontrolled by any other Government in
the world. Like them we stand for an Irish Republic--for, as Thomas Devin
Reilly said in 1848, 'Freedom can take but one shape amongst us--a
Republic.'"
The attitude of this new republican movement to that of the previous Sinn
Fein movement is clearly defined in a subsequent leader. "The temporary
suspension of the Sinn Fein movement is often cited as a throwback but it
is nothing of the kind. Under whatever name we propagate our ideas the
Irish Nation must be built on Sinn Fein principles, or non-recognition of
British authority, law, justice or legislature: that is our basis and the
principles of the Sinn Fein policy are as sound to-day as ever they were.
The movement is temporarily suspended because some of its leaders directed
it into an '82 movement, thinking they could collar the middle-classes and
drop the separatists; but when the separatists were dropped there was no
movement left."
The new movement was in fact an attempt to rehabilitate and re-establish
the Sinn Fein movement by making it definitely republican while adhering
to the main lines of the policy by which Sinn Fein hoped to succeed. But
the original Sinn Fein continued on its way. Its paper continued to be
published and to find readers. It was unrepentant with regard to its
political aims: "We do not care a fig for republicanism as republicanism,"
said _Sinn Fein_ two years later; but from the winter of 1910 dates the
movement which eventually drove out of Sinn Fein the idea of the
re-establishment of the King, Lords and Commons of Ireland under the
Constitution of 1782 and replaced it by that of an Irish Republic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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