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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
— October – November 2013
T
HANKFULLY, Éamonn McCann is
one of the few significant political
figures from the late s still
active.
He fought his first election in February
, as Northern Ireland Labour
Party candidate for the Stormont
Parliament, and his most recent
two years ago as the People Before
Profit Alliance’s candidate in Foyle
(Derry City) for the Northern Ireland
Assembly. This was the fifth time he
had stood for Foyle, and he came close
to taking the last seat.
Over the years, he has lived, cam-
paigned and worked as a journalist on
both sides of the border and is reflec-
tive on both.
In general, he is cheered by
changed social attitudes, particularly
in the Republic, but sees the left as hav-
ing lost significant ground in politics.
In the North, he sees a left-wing party as
more needed than ever. However, he admits
the task is difficult. Having worked as a jour-
nalist for over years he bemoans media
that question ever less.
He views the social changes in the
Republic as particularly positive. “Women
couldn’t work in the civil service if they were
married”, he notes. “Or serve on juries until
the early nineteen seventies”. What strikes
him most is that “some of the things that
were contentious in the past have just ceased
to be issues”.
When he first became an activist: “even
very prominent gay people in Ireland were
afraid to declare themselves. In the nineteen-
sixties, I’m not sure that there was anybody
in the South who was openly gay, not any-
body who was prominent or well-known.
Look at now, where you have the captain of
the Cork hurling team. Compare that to
the soccer situation in Britain, or here
indeed, where not a single gay soc-
cer player has come out”. [Apart from
Justin Fashanu.]
Politically, however, the s
were more optimistic. He became
a member of the Northern Ireland
Labour Party. “For a time, the Northern
Ireland Labour Party was a viable politi-
cal organisation”, McCann says. “It had
a number of very able campaigners.
Some of them would have appeared to
me to be quite right-wing, but neverthe-
less there was Charlie [later Sir Charles]
Brett on housing, and there was a good
number of solid people there. It was a
party taken seriously at that time”. While
controlled by the right-wing, there was a
sizeable socialist left.
The political landscape was different
through to the early s. “I can remem-
ber that there was a very lively rank and file
life within the Labour Party in the sixties,
and indeed in the seventies, where there was
a lot of passionate and indeed robust discus-
sion going on”, he recalls. “I remember being
at a Labour Party conference in Cork, and
it was at a time when there was an election
for the Dáil imminent, and I can remember
noting that this was clearly an anti-Coalition
conference. The leadership was denounced
by TDs and it wasn’t considered the most
ridiculous thing in the world – people were
allowed to have very different views”.
He has seen changes, too, in the media.
“The decline in print media has gone parallel
with a change in ideological surroundings”,
he said. “The media, my experience of it,
was much less predictable back say in the
nineteen seventies. It could be much more
awkward than it is today”. He could tell a
news editor that a piece was far longer than
requested, and it would be printed, in full.
Now, pages are laid out in advance and jour-
nalists have to write to a template.
When he began, RTÉ was the only broad-
casting institution in the Republic. “But it
also meant that RTÉ could be rather expan-
sive in the way it did things”. he says. “It
could put on programmes on both radio and
television that were not simply calculated to
attract a large audience”. An example was
Donncha Ó Dúlaing’s ‘Highways and Bye-
Ways’. “He used to just go about talking to
people around the country,” McCann said. “A
quaint old programme in many, many ways,
but very interesting”.
Newspapers are losing their appetite for
investigative work. “Very rarely now do you
have a situation where a couple of journal-
ists on a newspaper will be put on to a story
and allowed to dig away and then report
back”, he said. “And sometimes a newspaper
might have to invest that sort of resources in
a story on the understanding that no story
might ever appear”.
The nature of journalism has changed,
being office-bound. “I used to be news editor
Éamonn McCann interview
by Anton McCabe
Cann-do
pessimist
He sees
prospects
for the left
as never
better,
and never
worse
“
NEWS
INTERVIEW
Eamonn McCann
of the Sunday World”, he tells me. “We used
to come in on a Tuesday. We had eight or
nine reporters, but you would never see all
of them in the newsroom together, there was
always somebody out and about, somebody
down the country, maybe somebody across
in London, digging up at something and so
forth”.
Since those days, the national media pay
less attention to the North. He remembers
over a dozen journalists working in Belfast
for Dublin-based media. The Irish Times
reported on debates in the old Stormont par-
liament. “Difficulties in the peace process
and violent incidents are looked on as news”,
he said. “If it doesn’t have to do with Orange-
Green relations, it’s not news at all. That’s
a very limited and narrow view on what’s
going on in the North. And it’s become the
default view of the media in Dublin”.
“When it comes to both economic and
social matters, I know that any Northern
journalist who goes to the South is frequently
struck by, well, the sheer ignorance of Dublin
journalists about the North. During the last
couple of years there’s been the big contro-
versy on the law about abortion. It seemed
to come as a surprise to not just one or two
but most Dublin journalists that abortion
was just as illegal in the North as it was in
the South”.
McCann is still an active campaigner in
Northern politics. He sees prospects for the
left as simultaneously never better, and never
worse. “You can see objectively, to use the
old Marxist term, the need for working-class
unity and working-class politics has never
been more obvious, and never more urgent”,
he said. “For example, we’ve got deepening
poverty affecting all sections of the working
class equally”. Until the s, discrimina-
tion was a distorting factor. In some areas
poor Catholic housing was caused by dis-
proportionate numbers of council houses
going to Protestants. “Nowadays, because of
anti-discrimination legislation, because of
changes in the economy, there are no prob-
lems in the Catholic working class that can’t
be solved other than by measures that can
solve problems within the Protestant work-
ing class”, he says.
The political process is an obstacle to
left-wing politics. “The moment somebody
is elected, before they go into the chamber,
they have to describe themselves as Unionist,
Nationalist, or Other,” he says. “Others
become second-class citizens, because
the veto system and the system for parallel
consensus, weighted majority, and all these
things depends on a majority of the Green
MLAs and a majority of the Orange MLAs.
And the people who are in the middle are
simply left in the middle, isolated”.
At present he is uncertain whether com-
munal politics or class politics will triumph.
“People aren’t going to abandon Orange-
Green politics, they aren’t going to abandon
a communal identity as their main form of
political allegiance, they’re not going to
abandon that unless there’s a viable mass
movement that they can look at”, he says.
“It’s all to play for, and it’s up to those who
claim to be on the left, up to those parties
and organisations which see themselves as
being on the left, it’s not something you can
stand back from and say ‘Let’s say how it’s
going to work out’”.
This complex situation leaves him feeling
like Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who
said: “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence,
but an optimist because of will”.
‘69
ÉAMONN McCann was
born in Derry in 1943, and
educated at the renowned
St Columb’s College
grammar school. At Queen’s
University Belfast, he was
president of the Literary
and Scientific Society, the
university’s debating society.
He remains one of the
great orators in the English
language, typically leather-
jacketed and demonstrative.
His politics has always
been based on class, not
cultural identity. He was
one of the organisers
of the Derry Housing
Action Committee, which
promoted a radical agenda
of access to social housing. With the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association
(NICRA) it organised the second civil rights march in Northern Ireland in
October 1968 – often seen as the spark for the civil rights movement in
the north. McCann would go on to become one of the most prominent civil
rights activists. He was election agent for (Maudling-slapping) Bernadette
Devlin. He was present at the Battle of the Bogside in August 1969 and Bloody
Sunday in January 1972 (he would later become chairman of the Bloody
Sunday Trust) and campaigned against internment. He argued recently that
Marian Price was effectively being interned by the Northern Ireland Office.
McCann worked as a journalist for the
Sunday World
newspaper, contributed
to the original
In Dublin
magazine, and wrote the political miscellany column
for the early
Magill
magazine. He currently writes for the
Belfast Telegraph
and the
Derry Journal
, and has a longstanding column in
Hot Press
magazine.
He has campaigned against militarism and war since the days of CND and
the Vietnam protests, A Trotskyist, atheist, pro-choice activist and anti-Bono
proselytiser, he is now a prominent member of the Socialist Workers Party
in Ireland. In recent Northern Ireland elections he has stood as a candidate
for the Socialist Environmental Alliance, though he stood (unsuccessfully)
as a Labour Party candidate in the 1970s. McCann was tried in Belfast 2008
for his actions as one of the Raytheon 9, a group who attacked and damaged
the Israeli-Defence-Forces-supplying Raytheon factory in Derry. The jury
unanimously acquitted McCann, and all the other defendants, on grounds
of justification. He is Chair of his local branch of the National Union of
Journalists. He had a relationship with the late Mary Holland, one-time Northern
correspondent of
The Irish Times
. Their daughter Kitty Holland is now a
journalist for
The Irish Times
. For the last thirty years he has lived with fellow
SWP member and academic, Goretti Horgan with whom he has a daughter.
