Seán Russell: Why I Don’t Believe He Should Be Commemorated

The defence sometimes made is that Russell was not an ideological Nazi. That is irrelevant. You do not have to wear a swastika to be a collaborator. Material support for a genocidal regime makes you part of its war effort. We understand this much regarding Israeli collaboration. I don't know why it’s lost when the subject is the more reactionary sections of the IRA during the Second World War rather than modern states, movements and companies. 

While the IRA and Republicanism has a complicated history that should be acknowledged honestly, even the reactionary bits, remembering and acknowledging is not the same thing  as commemorating and honouring. 

Russell is sometimes defended as a sincere Irish republican who was simply using Germany for Irish ends. But anti-fascism does not allow that defence. Fascism is not something that can be harnessed for any other ends than furthering fascism. It's primary goal above all else is the destruction of the left, the crushing of trade unions, and the murder of minorities. To accept its arms and its military support is to become a party to it, whatever your private motives. Seán Russell accepted the help of the Third Reich.  He died on a U boat of a bleeding ulcer. He should not be honoured.

While it is true that Seán Russell joined the Irish Volunteers 3 years before the rising and participated in the 1916 rising and was second in command at the Metropole Hotel. While it is true he also sought arms from the Soviet Union, while it is true that Erwin Lahousen of the Abwher claims that Russell resisted attempts to convert him to Nazi ideology, the following things cannot be ignored. 

• Under his leadership Irish republicanism entered its most conservative era ever from the start of it peaking in the 1950s well after his death. These conservative elements collaborated against our class and against our women readily with De Valera. 
• Under his leadership, Nazis like James O’Donovan gained prominence and they attempted to enlist Eoin O’Duffy. 
• In 1936 he wrote to the German Ambassador to the US to apologise on behalf of the Irish people as distinct from the state for the state refusing to grant landing rights to the Luftwaffe and offered his cooperation in any future military conflicts. 
• He went on his American tour without army council permission and at the same time was accused of misappropriating IRA funds and was court martialed. 
• He formed a hostile takeover of the IRA with other more conservative dissidents in 1938 which resulted in the resignation of Tom Barry, John Joe Sheehy and Tomás Óg MacCurtain from the IRA
• Tom Barry later stated that Russell and friends claimed they had secured funding from The German American Bund to carry out their bombing campaign on Britain. 
• Around this time Russell met with the Abwehr and intelligence agent Oscar Pfaus. 
• Abwehr agent Carl Rekowski (Known as “V-Rex”) helped him skip bail in the US, Abwehr agent “Professor” Franz Fromme helped arrange his escape from the US to Berlin via fascist Genoa. 
• Russell received a hero’s welcome in Nazi Germany and accommodations usually reserved for visiting heads of state 
• He trained with the Abwehr for 3 months and his sabotage plan was actually planned by German military intelligence. This was the objective of Operation Dove. 
• His liaison was SS-Standartenführer, Edmund Veesenmayer who was interested in the possibility of a Nazi government in Ireland in the case of a German victory over Britain. 
• He also met with Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop. 
• A statement issued by the IRA before Russell's death claimed that "German forces should land in Ireland, they will land as friends and liberators of the Irish people". The Third Reich was also praised as the "energising force" of European politics and the "guardian" of national freedom.

This is all in spite of most republicans condemning the Nazis throughout the war, An Poblacht particularly. This is in spite of the likes of Frank Ryan valiantly fighting fascism in Spain. While it is true that Frank Ryan was in Germany with Russell this was under duress having been handed seriously wounded out of a prison in Francoist Spain to the Abwher.  There has long been debate about Seán Russell's political leanings and an attempt to paint him as a political neutral. This is propaganda to whitewash a very embarrassing part of Irish Republican history because to understand a man’s true intent you watch his hands not his mouth. 

The argument is often posed that “in order to call him a Nazi collaborator you would also have to call him a communist” dependent entirely on the fact that he went to the Soviets for arms before. 

However, when in America he did not meet with socialist associations, barely met with the Irish American Diaspora for support, he didn’t work with Soviet intelligence even though they were well entrenched in London at the time, the evidence of his hands and his actions speak a lot louder and a lot more recent in his story than a visit to the Soviet Union circa 20 years before his death aboard a German U boat. As does his appointment of reactionary elements within the IRA itself that had a tangible legacy of undoing social progress our socialist forebears bled for alongside the cause of Irish freedom. 

It doesn’t matter to me that several socialist republican and republican groups commemorate him, even if there is a lull im not going to stand by with my mouth shut while his commemoration is being revived by other more recent groups. 

I’ll remember local hero Frank Ryan and the 6 other Limerick men who fought fascism in Spain, rather than a Dublin collaborator, if it’s all the same to the rest of ye.