Sinn Fein's work in Dublin's poor neighborhoods THE FOLLOWING interview was given to Gerry Foley in early February in Tallaght, a new working-class suburb to the southwest of Dublin by John Noonan, a local organizer of Sinn Fein. This is a vast flat area of soggy meadowland covered with an untidy scattering of basic cinder-block and concrete houses, overlooked by the blue Wicklow mountains. The Sinn Fein center was a couple of rooms over a store in a small shopping center behind a huge supermarket. The area is almost a caricature of desolate urban sprawl, and it was not made any more cheerful by the steady chill drizzle typical of the Irish late winter.
Question. What sort of work do you do out of this center?
Answer. This is one of our most recently opened centers. We deliberately opened it in Tallaght because this is a major population area and three-quarters of the people in the area would be unemployed. We serve a number of purposes. In the main, people are ignorant of their rights relative to social-welfare claims, housing and so forth. So, we give them the relevant information and urge them to take on the problem themselves. That doesn't always help, however. People feel inadequate in dealing with government officials. It's then that Sinn Fein becomes the vehicle that the people can use.
Q. How does that differ from the patronage work that the established parties do? A. We see our work as different from the clientelism that the other parties would be into. People relate to this center, come in and have a chat and tell us what their problems are, and we chase it up. The other side of our community work would be what we term community action on issues relevant to the community overall - jobs, proper facilities, facilities for youth in particular. We organize campaigns to pressurize the different government bodies to get these facilities.
Q. Other groups before you have tried this business of organizing people to demand their rights rather than just trying to do that for them. It's tended to fall back into running an office that serves people rather than organizes them. How do you think you can avoid that?
A. Well, the history of our community action is there to be seen by anybody. We don't just take up the popular issues, that is, the issues that would get us votes. A typical example was the campaign against travellers (1) that was whipped up in this area the last year and the year before by the local politicians. There was mass hysteria against the travellers. We took the view that the travellers were entitled to the same rights as the settled people, which was a minority view at the time. Our view won respect, and people have come to us ever since then and told us that we were right.
When people ring us up about their problems, we urge them to take the initiative themselves. It doesn't always happen that way, and we can't just tell them to go away if they won't do it for themselves. But they know that the next time they come it's not automatic that we wil! do it for them.
Q. What actual organizing work do you do?
A. What we have been successful in doing out in this area is organizing a number of tenants' associations, which take the responsibility for activity on community issues in the areas that they cover. We've formed
1. Something like gypsies. They are the descendents of people driven off their land, who then became itinerant tradespeople, and fell into poverty as the old trades died. International Viewpoint 21 April 1986
an unemployed group for people anunemploved aroun for neonle who are on the dole. The first issue it took up was better conditions for signing on. The situation here was that thousands had to queue out in the rain to go into a little caravan [trailer] to sign on.
We're organizing youth in the area. We have set up youth clubs covering specific areas. Tallaght is broken down into a number of areas. You have Feddercairn, for example, which consists of 750 houses. And what we try to do is get people to organize in their estates and then to collaborate when there's common problems affecting both.
Q. Do you have a big problem with youth crime in this area?
A. We did have. We had a major problem with "joy-riding" in particular. That is, kids would steal highpowered cars and then tempt the police out to chase them. That obviously endangers the people who live on the estates. So, a number of people were seriously injured, and a number of young kids were seriously injured and a number of joy riders were involved in crashes.
We went out to talk to these kids, and we found that we were the only adults they had ever talked to who had any kind of a caring view. We then developed a youth club, called the Setanta Youth (2), which covers this area. It includes a lot of the young people who had been involved in that sort of thing. We've given them an alternative for releasing their energy, in getting their youth club off the ground, exposing the wrongs that happen in the area, exposing the misdeeds of the police and other state bodies. This has not solved the problem altogether, but it has saved a lot of young people from going down that road.
Q. What about drugs?
A. There is an organization in Dublin called the Concerned Parents Against Drugs in which we are involved. I am the chairperson of the Tallaght Concerned Parents Against Drugs. What we are doing here is more preventative - keeping drugs out. This is only a new estate. Two years ago we evicted two drug pushers by organizing people in the area to confront them. For a good number of years, people had seen pushers as "heavies," who were too dangerous to be tackled. now the people have seen that they have the power to deal with them. They have seen that when you actually go and knock on a drugpusher's door and tell him to get out, and when he looks out his door and sees 500 or 600 people outside it, that's it, he goes. There has never been any physical violence used
International Viewpoint 21 April 1986 against drug pushers out here. The publicity we got from that success wiped out the drugs problem in Tallaght.
Q. Is there an exceptionally high proportion of youth in this area?
A. The census says there are 70,000 people in the area. That leaves out a lot of the very young children in the estate. But of the official number, about three-quarters would be below the age of 18. That's a mass of young people coming along with ideas and problems of their own. What we hope to do is let them know what's right for them, and that's certainly not the system they're coming into. They're leaving school and there's nothing for them.
Q. What impact has the nationalist cultural revival had on youth in this area? Is there anything here like West Belfast with the growth of Irish language classes and the audience for traditional music?
A. Tallaght is probably the area in Dublin that has sparked off the Irish revival in Dublin itself. We have three all-Irish schools, and two of them in West Tallaght, which is the most socially deprived area. It started with a small group of people who moved into Tallaght and decided they wanted their children educa ted through Irish. The parents raised the money for them. They also get a certain amount off the government. Now we have three schools catering for hundreds of children, and I think the way it's going that it will eventually take over the state, the National School. And they've done all that in the face of great opposition from the state. (3)
Originally, people wanted to get their children into the all-Irish school because the classes in such schools are smaller than in the normal English medium schools. Then the language spreads from there to the parents. They listen to their children speaking Irish. And the schools run programs for the adults so that they can keep up with what their children are learning and talk to them in Irish at home.
That's spreading. If you sit down with people involved in an Irish school, in a pub or wherever you are, and you start to speak a bit of Irish to them, they recognize it and can answer you. The embarrassment that was in speaking Irish, which was a terrible thing in Irish society, has been broken down. (4)
Q. You mentioned the problem of travellers. Are there a particularly large number of them in the area?
A. Tallaght has been a traditional stopping ground for the travellers. They were here before the settled people were.
Q. As far as I know travellers have always been outside politics in Ireland. But I heard that you had some success in recruiting them.
A. We have. The young travellers have said that they've had enough of being pushed around by the est blishment, as they see it, by the settled people. And since we have been involved with them over the years, they've tended to side with us. A leading member of the travelling community, Nan Joyce, stood here in the general election a couple of years ago. Sinn Fein actively canvassed for her and helped them run the campaign.
Q. I've visited travellers' caravans, not here but down around Cork. It's obviously a very deprived life. What solutions do you pose for those problems. There is also this accumulation of desperate travellers in Dublin, with large numbers of children begging.
A. That's a major problem all right, the children who beg. Breaking that down will take time. What we believe is that the travellers are entitled to continue their way of life, which is their tradition. And we settled people should give them as much help as we can. That can mean providing proper sites where they can take their caravans, with running water, showers, toilets, that sort of thing. We should pay more attention to asking the travellers what they want. Because they do not want to be out in the streets or camped along. side of roads.
Q. You were a candidate in the European elections. What district did you run in and where did you get your vote?
A. The district covered all of the Dublin area, and we got our vote from places like Tallaght. We got our vote in places where Sinn Fein had been involved with the local people for some years.
Q. So you think that your vote was the result of your community work and not your involvement with the national question?
2. The boyhood name of the ancient Gaelic hero Cuchullain, who symbolizes bravery and honor above self-interest, the symbol of the sacrifice of nationalist fighters and of the Dublin uprising.
3. The language revival implied the determination to build a totally independent Ireland. It has long been abandoned in reality by the rulers.
4. There are two reasons for this embarrassment. Since the great famine, Irish has been the language only of very poor and isolated rural groups. Since the establishment of an Irish state, the main people speaking it have been civil servants, priests, and teachers - very middle-class elements, marked by stiffness and pretension.
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A. The bulk of the 15,000 people who voted for us would have done that because of our involvement with them on a community level.
Q. Was there an H-Block Committee here during the hunger strike?
A. There was a very active H-Block Committee. There is a successful committee now active in opposing strip searches of women political prisoners in Armagh jail.
Q. What proportion of the people active in the H-Block Committee are now involved in community work?
A. The H-Block Committee was about 12 people, and a lot of those were non-Sinn Feiners. Of those 12, 10 would be members of Sinn Fein today, and the best part of those would be active in local work.
Q. How many people did you have in Sinn Fein before?
A. There would have been a solid nucleus of about six.
2. By your accent, it's clea that you are a Dubliner, but I heard that you were imprisoned for a time in the North?
A. That's right. I was in the cages in Long Kesh from 1972 to 1976, before the H-Blocks were built.
Q. Is there any connection between your experience in the North and what you're doing here?
A. There is. I was in the cages with a lot of people who have become prominent members of Sinn Fein since, Bobby Sands and Gerry Adams, for instance. There was a lot of discussion, debate. In • the early 1970s, people went in just on the national issue, then they began to discover the deeper issues involved, and therefore the relevance of this type of work.
When I was released in 1976, the problem was to get a lot of Sinn Fein people to see the relevance of this sort of work.
Q. Do you find that out here people are aware of the identification of Sinn Fein with socialism and movements such as the African National Congress?
A. A certain percentage of people are interested in what's happening in other places. But in the main, trying to survive in Tallaght is enough for anybody. What people want to know about here is what you are going to do about jobs for people here. But when we put out news sheets, we bring in the national question and national struggles elsewhere.
Q. What about education in the basic principles? I would imagine 24 that at least after a time people would wonder where all this is heading.
A. We have no education program at the moment. There are some basic problems. We can't get a premises for meetings. The minister for education has instructed all the schools in this area not to give any halls or rooms to Sinn Fein. The community centers only give a room once a year to all the political parties. You can only get a limited number of people into the front room of a house, and you certainly won't get them into a field in this kind of weather.
People are not really interested in the "isms" of political life. That is a barrier we have to break down. We have to break down the barrier that keeps people from seeing the relevance of the armed struggle, how its relevant to them.
What we are doing here is all the time related to the armed struggle, to the necessity for the armed struggle. Whenever we talk to people the armed struggle comes up.
Q. It would seem to me that there are two aspects to that. One is to explain why the armed struggle exists in the North, because of the pogroms, the British army, and all that. I would think that would be the easier aspect. But the other is the relevance of armed struggle here, where it has not really been seen since the civil war.
A. The media has imposed this idea that there is a 26-county and a six-county Ireland. We see the whole thing as a 32-county problem. If there is an armed struggle in six of those counties, it's very relevant to the people in the 26 also, and that has to be emphasized at every opportunity. We have to get people's minds geared up down here to understanding that the reason British soldiers or policemen are being shot up North is because Britain is safeguarding its interests in the 32 counties.
We have the hardest task here because we don't have a visible, readily identifiable enemy. People in the Six Counties have. We have to emphasize that the reason British soldiers are there is to safeguard Britain's hold on the 32 counties. They have a visible hold in the North and a financial stranglehold in the 26 counties.
If we can smash their hold militarily in the Six Counties, then with the power that people have we can break their financial and political hold here. And doing that we can set about a better society. But it is very hard to get that across to people. If you can get them to start thinking about it, you have accomplished something.
Q. The implication is that you find it much easier to reach people on economic issues than on the national question.
A. That's it.
Q. Are you making any progress on the second issue?
A. We are, our growth shows that. We would have a membership now of about 60. Two-and-a-half years ago, we had one cumann [cell], with 10 to 15 people.
Q. This would be one of your stronger areas in Dublin?
A. It would.
Q. When did this growth start?
A. About two-and-a-half years ago.
Q. That was well after the end of the H-Block campaign.
A. Yes. There was a gap.
Q. So, essentially your growth is out of your community work.
A. It is, yeah.
Q. Would that be true of other areas in Dublin?
A. There is the North Inner City, where we have a councillor. There is also a strong area in Ballyfermot.
Q. Is Sinn Fein going to run a candidate out here in the general elections, which are now less than two years away?
A. Yes. It has been decided that we will contest this area on an abstentionist platform, as well as Dublin North Central, Dublin South Central, most of the Dublin constituencies.
Q. I was at your ard-fheis [congress) where abstentionism was debated, and the debate has continued since in the letter columns of your paper. Do you find that it is something that people discuss here
A. Yeah, it has been an issue. There's no sense in saying that it hasn't. People are interested, and they're interested in putting their views to us. Some say we should stand on the basis that if we win we will take our seats, others no. But we are a principled party. We have taken principled stands that are unpopular right across the board and we will continue to do so until the ard-feis changes it.
Besides, people out here • can relate to the abstentionist position. They can identify with not taking the money, the big cars, not sitting in the Dail [parliament] talking. It's more important to work out here on the ground than spend our time debating in the Dail.
International Viewpoint 21 April 1986