One morning in 1978, as Spain was transitioning from dictatorship to democracy, and the Basque conflict was getting bloodier by the month, I went into the post office in a Basque fishing village and asked the elderly postmistress for stamps for Ireland.
“For Ireland?” she responded caustically. “Are you not ashamed to be Irish?”
A little taken aback, I drew breath before responding: “For what reason in particular should I be ashamed?”
“You’ve had 60 years of independence,” she said firmly, “and most of you don’t even speak your native language.”
She had, it turned out, read an essay by a founder of Eta, the group committed to Basque independence through “armed struggle”. He said that Ireland was “a bad mirror” for her homeland.
Writing about the Basque Country and Spain for this news organisation over the next 45 years, I have repeatedly encountered reflections, some as perceptive as this woman’s, some simply bonkers, and many in between these extremes, on Basque-Irish parallels — or the lack of them. Unsurprisingly, as Niall Cullen neatly expresses it in this impressive book, like “any real mirror, it tended to be viewed from whatever angle reflected best on the observer”.
So Spanish nationalists wilfully refused — and refuse — to recognise the self-determination element in the Belfast Agreement. Meanwhile, Eta, equally wilfully, long refused to recognise that the IRA’s engagement with the peace process had involved abandoning sacrosanct republican “principles”. Eta squandered two ceasefires and many lives before it was forced to learn the lesson.
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Cullen’s book is a well-researched, detailed, readable and illuminating study of how radical Basque and Irish nationalists have read each other’s narratives and attempted to apply them to their own strategies. It is an excellent introduction to this complex maze of ideological, political and – as he rightly emphases – personal relationships over 150 years.
I should declare a double interest here. I once played a very minor role in an arcane aspect of these relationships, as an activist with the long-defunct Official Sinn Féin/The Workers’ Party. And I have written two books about the Basque Country since. Cullen quotes me occasionally, and accurately, in both capacities.
He rightly takes a sceptical approach to the wilder allegations made about operational links between the IRA and Eta by securocrats, and echoed by sensationalist media. He is scrupulous in endorsing only facts and analyses for which he can find first-hand evidence. In my view, he is right to conclude that, while techniques, contacts and perhaps even equipment were very occasionally exchanged between the various iterations of the two armed groups, the security risks of such co-operation far outweighed their benefits.
Cullen concentrates instead on the politics of these clandestine groups and their public surrogates and apologists. He engagingly fleshes out key but enigmatic and little-known figures such as Ambrose Martin and Eli Gallastegi, acting almost autonomously on behalf of, respectively, Irish and Basque radicals, in the early to mid-20th century.
His main focus is on the ever-deepening links between Gerry Adams’s Sinn Féin and its (very broadly speaking) Basque analogue, Batasuna, between the late 1980s and today. Drawing effectively on a broad range of author interviews with the protagonists, he clearly shows that this relationship was “asymmetric”. With exceptions, Sinn Féin influenced Batasuna much more than vice versa.
His Sinn Féin interviewees insist that they never presumed to propose strategies to the Basques, only offering advice when requested. But they cannot quite conceal how Eta’s continuing violence became an increasing embarrassment as the years passed.
Cullen’s stress on Sinn Féin is entirely appropriate to his declared field of study. But, to my mind, it has the inadvertent effect of overstating the Irish influence on the Basques and understating the big contribution of the South African ANC lawyer Brian Currin to bringing an end to that conflict.
It was Currin who galvanised the demoralised Batasuna leadership in 2008 to challenge a chronically degraded Eta to follow a daringly “unilateral” peace process. And so Eta declared a permanent ceasefire, decommissioned its arms and entirely dissolved its organisation, without gaining a single benefit from the Spanish government. Still, Batasuna’s heirs are now poised to be the dominant party in a peaceful Basque Country.
The details of this historically exceptional process are foregrounded in Teresa Whitfield’s indispensable book Endgame for ETA, from which Cullen quotes quite extensively, and even more so in a valuable, if partisan, insider essay by Batasuna’s Urko Aiartza, Strategic Thinking and Conflict Transformation (Berghof Foundation, 2019), which, surprisingly, Cullen doesn’t mention.
My only other caveat is that Routledge, which wants an extortionate £135 for a hardcover version, has served the author poorly with some very careless copyediting.
Thankfully, that does not detract from Cullen’s significant achievement in setting the Basque-Irish radical relationship straighter than anyone else has done.
Paddy Woodworth’s books include Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL, and Spanish Democracy (2001), and The Basque Country (2007)
