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Post by Stallit 2 de Halfo on Dec 10, 2007 21:30:45 GMT
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Post by Stallit 2 de Halfo on Dec 10, 2007 21:41:29 GMT
Leading MarxistHarris was a leading Irish republican in Official Sinn Féin in the 1960s, and was an important influence in the party's move from Irish nationalism to Marxism, a political ideology which Harris currently claims to abhor. He was close to leading Official Sinn Féin members Eamonn Smullen and Cathal Goulding, the latter of whom was at the time Chief of Staff of the paramilitary Official IRA, an organisation the demonisation of which Harris has built his recent journalistic career upon. According to Patterson in the Politics of Illusion, Harris's pamphlet the "Irish Industrial Revolution" (1975) was influential in shifting the party away from nationalism. However, Swan, in Official Irish Republicanism, 1962 to 1972 (2007), maintains that Harris' powers of persuasion are over rated, arguing that the only political conversions that Harris was responsible for were his own politically opportunistic conversions to different political postures. He also implies that the Official IRA leadership's attitude to Harris was basically functional.[3] In 1990 Harris published a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Social Democracy in which he surmised that socialism would not survive its East European crisis. Harris called for a shift to social democracy and that the party should seek an historic alliance with the social democratic wing of Fine Gael. The document was initially submitted by Eamonn Smullen on Harris's behalf for publication in the party's theoretical magazine "Making Sense" but when this was refused Harris and Smullen published it themselves as a publication of the party's Economic Affairs Department of which Smullen was head. When the pamphlet began to circulate it was banned by the Workers Party and Smullen was suspended from his position on the committee. Harris resigned in protest and Smullen resigned subsequent with many of the members of the Research Section of the party, a move which was the prelude to a bigger split in the party in 1992, when senior members of the party alleged that the supposedly moribund Official IRA still existed and was implicated in criminality and sought to move to some extent in the direction proposed earlier by Harris. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eoghan_Harris
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Post by Papa C. on Dec 12, 2007 19:54:52 GMT
Harris just seems like an opportunist to me. I always thought he was a bit of a dinosaur when it comes to politics.
- 'In 2006, during an RTÉ Television debate Harris stated that the leaders of the Easter Rising were "suicide bombers, I mean suicide terrorists" '
This doesn't even make sense. What the hell is he talking about here and how did he come to this conclusion?
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