Ireland’s Marxist guerrillas: the story of the Saor Éire Action Group, 1967-73

by Mick Healy, in collaboration with several former Saor Eire members

(Mick wrote an article about Saor Eire which appeared on this site in 2011;  this is an updated and expanded version of that article, including new material added by former Saor Eire members; the article has been proofed and edited by me – PF)

The 1960s was a time of upheaval and change in conservative Irish society; social attitudes, fashion and music, for instance, all changed dramatically. New social movements reflected the thinking of a new generation that, in particular, wanted more freedom. The huge student-worker protests of May-June 1968 in France, the Vietnamese struggle to remove the US, its allies and their Vietnamese toadies, the US civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, and the national liberation struggles in Latin America and Africa galvanised opposition to the existing order. In Ireland, these events inspired people, especially the new generation, into action. This was especially the case around the civil rights movement in the north of Ireland. Among the new organisations which emerged here as a result of this new ferment and revolutionary idealism was the Dublin-based Saor Éire (SE) or, to give it its full name, the Saor Eire Action Group.

Saor Éire Action Group was established in the late 1960s by former members of the Republican Movement and newer young Irish political left activists coming together. As an organisation they claimed to have their roots in the

Around the blogs

On the Treason Felony blog:

By 13th August, in anticipation of protests over events in Derry, the Unionists had 400 B Specials on duty in Belfast. The RUC were briefing that events in Derry and the solidarity protests elsewhere were being organised by the IRA and Sinn Féin. This included claims to have intelligence that the IRA was mobilising units in South Armagh to make a move on Newry and IRA units assembling within Newry itself.

That night violence flared after demonstrations outside Springfield Road and Hastings Street RUC stations. There was also trouble in Short Strand and in Hooker Street off the Crumlin Road. According to Billy McMillan, the Belfast O/C in August 1969, the Battalion consisted of around eighty volunteers and an auxiliary of. . .

For full: https://treasonfelony.wordpress.com/2019/08/20/revisiting-1969-the-belfast-ira-reactions-and-responses/

 

On the Eirigi blog:

Fine Gael is handing about €2,400,000 (€2.4m) of public money per day to private landlords. The bill for renting ‘social housing’ from the private sector for all of 2019 will be about €900m.

This money is dispensed through a number of schemes including the Housing Assistance Payment (HAP), Rent Accommodation Scheme (RAS), Social Housing Current Expenditure Programme (SHCEP), Rent Supplement and the Emergency Accommodation Budget.

Despite their different names, the core function of each scheme is the same. All of them use public money to rent accommodation from the private sector. That accommodation, which includes everything from entire apartment blocks to a single bed in a B&B, is then used by the state to. . .

full at: http://eirigi.org/latestnews/2019/8/7/government-housing-policy-explained-part-three-

 

Eireann Ascendant:

“It is awfully funny being ‘on the run’!” wrote Countess Markievicz to her sister Eva, in January 1920. “I don’t know what I resemble most: the timid hare, the wily fox, or a fierce wild animal of the jungle.” For three months, she had been a free woman, since leaving Cork Jail, on the 18^th October 1919, in time for a police constable to be shot dead in Dublin later that evening.

The British authorities claimed a connection between that and her. . .

Review of Lindie Naughton’s edited Markievicz’s Prison Letters and Rebel Writings.  For full, see here: https://erinascendantwordpress.wordpress.com/2019/06/01/book-review-markievicz-prison-letters-rebel-writings-by-constance-markievicz-edited-by-lindie-naughton-2018/

 

Socialist Democracy:

An irony of the recently opened James Connolly Visitor Centre on Belfast’s Falls Road is that it confirms one of his big ideas. A larger irony is that it doesn’t even refer to it. Instead it offers a very limited version of the Connolly familiar from the murals and essentially sets out to claim him for Sinn Féin.

The exhibits start with the Easter Rising, an event that occurred at the end of his life. More appropriately it closes with the Easter Rising. In between we learn that he was born in Edinburgh, served in and deserted from the British Army, worked as a union organiser in Ireland and the United States and was executed for his role in leading the Easter Rising. The percentage of visitors to the centre who are unlikely to know these broad facts will not be high.

Virtually absent from the modest range of reproductions of posters, newspapers and ephemera from the period is any indication that Connolly was a. . .

full at: http://www.socialistdemocracy.org/RecentArticles/RecentATripToTheJamesConnollyVisitorCentre.html