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Éire Nua, or "New Ireland", was a political strategy of the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin during the 1970s and early 1980s. It was particularly associated with the Dublin based leadership group centred around Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Dáithí Ó Conaill who were the authors of the policy.
Éire Nua envisaged an all-Ireland Republic that would be created when the British withdrew from Northern Ireland. It also involved the dissolution of the existing Republic of Ireland, which republicans of that era considered an illegitimate entity imposed by the British in 1922. Under Éire Nua, Ireland would become a federal state, with parliaments for each of its four provinces as well as a central parliament based in Athlone.
The purpose of the federal structure was twofold. Firstly, it was intended to show unionists in Northern Ireland that they would have some kind of self-government in a united Ireland. This would be achieved by the provision of a parliament, Dáil Uladh, for Ulster. However, by including all of historic Ulster - nine counties instead of the six in Northern Ireland - it was intended that the unionist majority would be slim enough to prevent abuses against the Catholic nationalist population in the province.
Secondly, the federal parliaments were intended to redress the perceived economic imbalance between the eastern and western parts of Ireland and was hoped to increase economic prosperity in the poorer west of the country. This provision demonstrates the socialist nature of both the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin which, in spite of their objections to the Marxism of the Official IRA and Official Sinn Fein, became increasingly characteristic of the Provisional movement in the 1970s.
Éire Nua was objected to by many members of the party mainly northern based members of the Republican movement on the grounds that it would perpetuate the dominance of Protestant unionists in the north of the country, even after Irish independence. When northern republicans grouped around Gerry Adams gained control of the IRA and Sinn Féin in the late 1970s, they attacked the policy. In 1982, the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis voted to drop the policy, and the following year all reference to it in the Sinn Féin Constitution and rules was removed, it was removed as the policy of the Republican movement in favour of the creation of a unitary Irish Republic.
Ó Brádaigh and his supporters walked out of the 1986 Ard Fheis after a motion was passed that ended the Republican policy of Abstentionism to Leinster House and reconvened the Ard Fheis at the West County Hotel in the village of Chapelizod just west of Dublin. Henceforth referring to itself as Republican Sinn Féin to distinguish itself from former associates, the party still advocates the Éire Nua agenda.
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- This page was last modified on 6 January 2009, at 10:01.
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