Cathal Goulding was a lifelong revolutionary and political agitator. A former IRA chief-of-staff, he became one of the Provisional IRA's most outspoken opponents.
He was a teenage Fianna Eireann member in the late 1930s, an IRA man in the 1940s, a leading activist and member of the IRA leadership in the 1950s, chief-of-staff throughout the 1960s, a key figure in the violent splits that led to the formation in the 1970s of what became the Workers' Party and in the growth of that party into a parliamentary force in the 1980s.
In the 1990s, however, he refused to take the further step made by some of his former comrades who left the Workers' Party to form Democratic Left and ultimately serve in a Fine Gael-led government.
Goulding regarded DL as having compromised its socialism in pursuit of political power and remained active in the Workers' Party until illness limited his involvement in recent years. He recently described the merger between the Labour Party and Democratic Left as the ultimate betrayal of the Irish working class.
Born in 1922 into a proud Dublin working-class republican tradition, Cathal Goulding's personal political journey began over half a century ago. His grandfather had been a Fenian, his father fought in the 1916 Rising, but when Cathal Goulding was a young man the IRA was close to non-existent after years of demoralisation, splits and lack of any progress in its aim of national unification.
Nevertheless he joined Fianna Eireann as a teenager in the 1930s with his friend, Brendan Behan. In 1945 he was among 25 to 30 men who met at O'Neill's pub, Pearse Street, to try to re-establish the IRA in Dublin. Goulding was then, according to The Secret Army: The IRA by J. Bowyer Bell, "a small, intense, happy-go-lucky young man". He was a painter and decorator by trade, who ultimately spent 16 years in British and Irish jails.
Within the small group interested in reviving the IRA in Dublin, Goulding was among the most enthusiastic, and in 1946 he persuaded local leaders from around the island to come to Dublin for a national meeting.
He quickly attracted the attention of the police, was tailed by the Special Branch, arrested in the company of John Joe McGirl of Leitrim and 10 others, and received a 12-month sentence. Shortly after his release he was running IRA training camps in the Wicklow Mountains.
In 1950 he married Patty Germaine, and they had a son, Cathal Og. He separated from his wife, however, and had another son, Paudge, with Beatrice Behan, the widow of Brendan Behan. In 1971 he began living with Dr Moira Woods and her six children from previous marriages. They subsequently had two sons, Aodhgan and Banban.
In early 1953 Cathal Goulding set off on his first known military action in the company of Sean Mac Stiofain, who would later be a key opponent when both led different wings of the divided republican movement.
He, Mac Stiofain and Manus Canning of Derry successfully stole 99 rifles, a mortar, a machinegun and other weapons from the British Officers Training Corps School in Essex. However, police who spotted the three in their overloaded van on the way back to London stopped and arrested them. They each received eight years' jail.
Goulding as a result missed the IRA's failed Border campaign during which many key men were arrested and many failed jailbreaks were organised on their behalf. In 1959, shortly after his release, he became a member of the IRA Army Council and its quartermaster-general. In 1961, with the organisation again decimated by imprisonment, demoralisation and splits, Goulding became chief-of-staff.
By 1962, with little but military failure behind it, the republican leadership was moving towards ideas of the left, to social and industrial agitation rather than military action. The IRA continued to exist and occasionally to train, but Goulding and his associates were more concerned now with the fight against capitalism and imperialism rather than against Britain and its unionist allies.
Through much of the 1960s Goulding's was the dominant view, and he led the movement towards a Marxist standpoint on social and economic issues. He played the major role in developing Sinn Fein's left-wing political activism on issues of social justice.
He was also instrumental in bringing about alliances between parties of the left in the Republic in the 1960s which led to activists from Sinn Fein, the Labour Party and the Communist Party of Ireland working together on campaigns such as that of the Dublin Housing Action Committee.
But tension between the official policy and the traditional militarists remained throughout the 1960s. And Goulding's new political interest did not prevent his being arrested in February 1966, together with Sean Garland, for possession of a revolver and ammunition.
THE tensions within the IRA erupted with the violence in the North of 1968-69. The IRA was ill-prepared for the violence, and members in the North felt the leadership had let them down.
The leadership for its part became more committed to forming a united national liberation front with other radical organisations. An IRA convention voted in December 1969 to adopt a political policy for Northern Ireland. The dissenters withdrew, however, and formed the Provisional republican movement.
In the succeeding years Goulding became a key exponent of the revolutionary Marxist outlook of the Official movement. The Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Fein, however, became the dominant force in republicanism, and the early 1970s also saw a further break away from the Officials with the formation of the IRSP and its military wing, the INLA.
His cuttings file from this period gives the impression that Cathal Goulding spent much time at gravesides, giving orations on comrades killed by the British army, the Provisionals or by the IRSP. It was on these occasions that he elucidated the thinking of his movement.
In July 1971 he delivered a graveside oration for an Official IRA man, Martin O'Leary, killed by a bomb he had brought to Mogul Mines, Nenagh, Co Tipperary. O'Leary had been attempting to blow up the electrical transformer to cut the supply to the mines as an act of industrial sabotage in the course of a strike.
Surrounded by men in black berets, polo-neck pullovers and Tricolour armbands, Goulding said: "We stand for the building of a socialist State, a secular State, rejecting with equal force the domination of capital and the divisive viciousness of sectarianism."
He went on: "It is our earnest wish, as it was Martin's, that the full emancipation of the Irish people could be achieved by peaceful means, but unfortunately it is not within our power to dictate what action the forces of imperialism and exploitation will engage in to suppress, coerce and deny ordinary people their Godgiven rights, and when their answer to the just demands of the people are the lock-out, strikebreaking, evictions, coercion, the prison cell, intimidation or the gallows, then our duty is to reply as he replied, in the language that brings these vultures to their senses most effectively, the language of the bomb and the bullet."
As a result of this speech he was charged with incitement to cause explosions or to shoot people. He was acquitted, and was the last person in the State to face such a charge.
In February 1975, as the feud with the breakaway IRSP was at its height, Goulding warned IRSP members that the Official IRA reserved the right of "defence and retaliation". At the funeral of Sean Fox, an Official IRA member shot dead by the IRSP, he said: "By God, the threats and the assaults of a few power-hungry and confused malcontents will not stop us now."
THOSE who supported the Provisional and Official sides in the split still argue over the rights and wrongs of the positions adopted then. The Provisionals say the Officials' theories of Marxist revolution were more relevant to academic leftwing debates in Dublin pubs at the time rather than the reality on the streets in the North where Catholics, they maintain, were in need of armed defence.
In an article in this newspaper in 1978 Goulding traced the split back to 1962 when, after the 1950s Border campaign, a new leadership which included himself took control of the republican movement.
He said that, having reviewed the republican position, that leadership decided its objective was no longer "Get the British troops out of the North"; it was "Defeat imperialism and capitalism in all of Ireland". It also decided that a military campaign was no longer the means to achieve its aims and that instead they should build "a party of the working class".
After the split with what he called physical-force republicans in 1970, "unfortunately, in the highly-charged emotional and militant situation created by mass torture and internment in August 1971, many Official republicans got caught up in actions of a military nature". This ended, he said, with a complete Official IRA ceasefire in May 1972 following pressure from Sinn Fein the Workers' Party.
The subsequent split - when a group left to form the Irish Republican Socialist Party - occurred because those who opposed the ceasefire broke away, he said.
Goulding became a regular trenchant critic of the Provisional movement, saying that a "purely military campaign" was doomed to failure. His objection to the Provisionals was not based on any pacifism or moral opposition to violence per se. Rather he held a pragmatic view that militarism would not work, would damage the republican movement, fuelled sectarianism and was aimed at the wrong targets.
But while the Official IRA said it had disbanded after the declaration of a ceasefire in 1972, in reality it lived on into the 1980s and 1990s. As the Workers' Party attracted new young, left-wing people in the Republic, these became increasingly concerned at regular reports of Official IRA activity in the North including punishment attacks, racketeering and robberies. As the party enjoyed growing electoral success, these activities in the North came under greater scrutiny.
THE end of the Cold War challenged the pro-Soviet socialist ideology prevalent within the leadership. As the party discussed making fundamental changes in its policy position against the background of the regular reports of Official IRA activity, it ultimately split.
In 1992 six of its Dail deputies - headed by Proinsias De Rossa and including Pat Rabbitte, Eamon Gilmore, Eric Byrne, Pat McCartan and Joe Sherlock - led the breakaway Democratic Left. Alone among the deputies Tomas Mac Giolla remained with the Workers' Party.
Cathal Goulding remained active in the Workers' Party after the split although a long struggle with cancer and other health problems put some limitations on his enthusiasm. He spent a considerable amount of time in recent years living in a small house at Myshal, Co Carlow, beside Mount Leinster.
His reputation as a tough military and political operator masked a wicked sense of humour. He regaled comrades with self-deprecating jail stories and accounts of revolutionary adventures that went wrong. He kept his sense of humour to the end.
A few months ago he was admitted to a Dublin hospital with chest pains which he recognised for what they were. Asked by a doctor to grade the pains he was feeling on a scale of zero to 10 he replied: "I'm having a heart attack. I'm not a jury in the Eurovision Song Contest."
His long-time associate, Sean Garland, described Goulding yesterday as an absolutely dedicated campaigner who never gave up on the cause of socialism. "I have no doubt that future generations will recognise Cathal Goulding's massive contribution to genuine republicanism and socialism," he said.