Eoghan Harris (born 13 March 1943) is an Irish journalist, columnist, director, and former politician. He has held posts in various and diverse political parties. He was a leading theoretician in the Marxist-Leninist Workers' Party (previously Official Sinn Féin). Harris was a fierce critic of Provisional Sinn Féin, from which they had split, and became an opponent of Irish republicanism. For much of the Troubles, from the 1970s until the 1990s, Harris worked in Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) and was influential in shaping the current affairs output of Ireland's national broadcaster. Later he began writing for the Sunday Independent newspaper.
In the 1990s, he left the Workers' Party and was a short-lived adviser to Fine Gael leader John Bruton, before Bruton became Taoiseach; then an adviser to the Ulster Unionist Party. In the 2000s he supported the Fianna Fáil–led government of Bertie Ahern. Ahern nominated him to Seanad Éireann in 2007, where he served until 2011. He also continued producing some documentary programmes for RTÉ.
Harris was a columnist for the Sunday Independent until 2021. He was sacked after admitting to running a fake Twitter account, which harassed journalists he believed were sympathetic to Irish nationalism and Sinn Féin.
Harris is also involved in screenwriting work. He lectures at IADT Dún Laoghaire and teaches a screenwriting workshop.
Early life Harris was born in Douglas, County Cork, a village on the outskirts of Cork city, on 13 March 1943. He was educated at Presentation Brothers College, and subsequently at University College Cork (UCC), where he studied English and History.
Career Poblacht Chríostúil In the Cork Mid by-election in March 1965 he campaigned for Sylvester Cotter, who was standing for Poblacht Chríostúil. At this time Harris met his future wife, UCC student Anne O'Sullivan. The aim of the party was "to base the social and economic policies of our country on Christian social reform, as elaborated by the last six Popes."Party's basic Positions, The Irish Times, 29 March 1965.
Sinn Féin to Workers' Party Harris was a leading Irish republican in Sinn Féin in the 1960s, and was an important influence in the party's move from Irish nationalism to Marxism, a political ideology which Harris later said he abhorred. During the 1970 split of the movement into Provisional Sinn Féin and Official Sinn Féin, he was close to leading Official Sinn Féin members Eamonn Smullen and Cathal Goulding, the latter of whom was at the time Chief of Staff of the paramilitary Official Irish Republican Army. Alongside Smullen, who had spent many years in British prisons for IRA activities, Harris worked in the Republican Industrial Development Division, an organisation set up in 1972 by Seamus Costello to co-ordinate trade union activities, along with John Caden, Des Geraghty and others. He was or has claimed to be a key advisor to Tomas MacGiolla during the famous 1970 Sinn Fein Ard Fheis.
According to Henry Patterson in his book The Politics of Illusion, Harris's pamphlet Irish Industrial Revolution (1975) was influential in shifting the party away from republicanism. Harris continued to do media work for it as it became the Workers' Party. However, in 1990 he published a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Social Democracy in which he surmised that socialism would not survive the Revolutions of 1989. He called for a shift to social democracy and that the party should seek a historic compromise with the social democratic wings of Fine Gael and the Labour Party. The document was initially submitted by Eamonn Smullen on Harris's behalf for publication in the party's theoretical magazine Making Sense, but when this was refused, Harris and Smullen published it themselves as a publication of the party's Economic Affairs Department, of which Smullen was head. When the pamphlet began to circulate it was banned by the Workers' Party, and Smullen was suspended from his position on the committee. Harris resigned in protest and Smullen resigned subsequently, along with many of the members of the Research Section of the party. This was the prelude to a bigger split in 1992 when senior members alleged that the supposedly moribund Official IRA still existed and was implicated in criminality, and sought to move to some extent in the direction proposed earlier by Harris. The extent to which Harris was the genesis of the involvement from New Agenda to Democratic Left is a matter of dispute. Indeed he had arguably left the organisation completely by then but later claimed credit for its political development and continued stance on Northern Ireland policy.
In 2006, during an RTÉ Television debate Harris stated that the leaders of the Easter Rising were "suicide bombers, I mean suicide terrorists".
Inside RTÉ for the Workers' Party
During the 1970s until the start of the 1990s, Harris was for a time a central figure in shaping the current affairs output of RTÉ. He pushed the organisation towards a perspective heavily critical of Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA. It was stated in the November 1997 issue of Magill magazine that he set up an RTÉ branch of the Workers' Party called the "Ned Stapleton Cumann", which gave the party considerable influence in RTÉ. Michael O'Leary, then leader of the Labour Party, commented that RTÉ current affairs coverage was "Stickie orientated", a reference to the Official IRA, from which the Provisional IRA had split in the 1970s. Those who supported Harris within RTÉ became known as "the brood of Harris". The tensions within the organisation, between journalists such as Mary McAleese and Alex White on one side and the Workers' Party members on the other, led to major disagreements at the station and to criticism of what was perceived as its anti-republican political agenda. Harris recruited Charlie Bird (then a member of Official Sinn Féin) and Marian Finucane to RTÉ in the 1970s. Joe Little was also a member as named in The Lost Revolution: The Story of the Official IRA & The Worker's Party.Brian Hanley & Scott Millar p.371,373 Penguin 9781844881208
1990 presidential campaign The Labour Party and the Workers' Party jointly nominated former senator Mary Robinson to be their candidate for President of Ireland at the 1990 presidential election. While Harris's strategy proposal is thought, by some, to have been significant in the rebranding of Robinson, just how influential he was, remains a matter of much controversy. Robinson and her campaign team blamed him for a near-fatal change in tactics: having previously been non-combative in dealing with the controversies that had engulfed the recently dismissed Tánaiste Brian Lenihan, Harris pressured Robinson into going on the offensive on a live debate on the current affairs programme Today Tonight. This action was generally seen to have backfired horribly. Harris made three election videos for the Robinson campaign, and claims to have been responsible for a memorable line from her acceptance speech: "the hand that rocked the cradle rocked the system." Robinson won the election, becoming Ireland's first female President. However, Ruairi Quinn, credited him in his autobiography for the editorship of her three RTE broadcasts during that presidential election.Quinn Ruairi, Straight Left: A Journey in Politics pp.272-4, Hodder Headline Ireland ISBN 0340832967
1991 Fine Gael Ardfheis After the Robinson campaign, Harris was asked to work for Fine Gael by its leader, John Bruton. However, he received criticism from both within and outside the party in April 1991, when he wrote the script for a sketch for the Fine Gael Ardfheis in which a cleaner (played by the comedy actress Twink) interrupted the leader's speech. The sketch was criticised as being in bad taste and tacky, particularly in its references to a controversial incident that had made the news, wherein a female reporter from RTÉ had allegedly been groped by an inebriated Fianna Fáil TD. Its catchphrase Úna gan a gúna ("Úna without her dress" in Irish) was deemed sexist and demeaning to a victim of alleged improper conduct.
Northern Ireland peace process Harris, along with fellow Sunday Independent columnist Eamon Dunphy, became an outspoken critic of Social Democratic and Labour Party leader John Hume over Hume's decision to hold talks with Sinn Féin prior to an IRA ceasefire. Harris urged the Irish government, at the time led by his friend John Bruton, to end all support for Hume's peace efforts. He wrote, "If we persist with the peace process it will end with sectarian slaughter in the North, with bombs in Dublin, Cork and Galway, and with the ruthless reign by provisional gangs over the ghettos of Dublin. The only way to avoid this abyss is to cut the cord to John Hume". Hume argued that he was seeking to convince republicans to abandon violence. Harris praised the resulting Good Friday Agreement. Hume and David Trimble won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 for their efforts. Harris became an advisor in the late 1990s to Trimble, the then leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. He wrote some of Trimble's speeches, one of which included the line that Northern Ireland had been "a cold house for Catholics." He was invited to address the UUP annual conference in 1999, where he described the Belfast Agreement as "an Amazing Grace" and urged the UUP to make a leap of faith in Sinn Féin. They eventually did so, forming a power-sharing executive, although it was later suspended on the issue of the failure of the IRA to decommission its arms. Having coined the phrase "Fellow-travellers" regarding the Hume-Adams strategy which involved Trade Union negotiators from the ROI, the Redemptorist Order and the Fianna Fáil party he refused to withdraw any comments following the death of Hume. Dunphy, by contrast has done so.
Iraq War Harris strongly supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and is unrepentant about its morality, writing in the Sunday Independent that "hindsight history has no moral status". In May 2003, he wrote "Already, as I predicted in the lead up to the war, the neoconservative hawks have done much better than the liberals in getting down to the dynamics of opening up the gulf to democracy. Already, and this I predicted too, there is substantial hope for an Israeli–Palestinian settlement now that Saddam no longer scowls at Israel". Commenting in November 2003 about the English journalist Robert Fisk, he wrote: "Far from wanting to pour venom on Fisk, I think he does us a favour by being so forthright. For my money, his analysis of Middle East politics is a first cousin to believing that aliens take away people in flying saucers." He has also referenced the phrase "fisking" though Harris' own fact-checking record is a matter for dispute on several occasions including his political chameleonic journey.
Harris gave media training to Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi in advance of the invasion of Iraq, and wrote in the Irish Independent that: I first met Chalabi in Washington in March 2001, in the company of Richard Perle, a few months after George W Bush had been elected, and met later in London where I gave him some media training. We bonded from the start, and the basis of the bond was his instinctive feel for Ireland.
Chalabi was one of the sources of the false intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Relationship with Fianna Fáil In 1997, Harris denounced Fianna Fáil presidential candidate Mary McAleese, calling her a "tribal time bomb" and writing "if she wins not on a technicality but because so many people gave her their number one, then I am living in a country I no longer understand." McAleese won, and Harris later expressed regret for his sentiments and praised her presidency.See First Citizen: Mary McAleese and the Irish Presidency by Patsy McGarry, The O'Brien Press, 2008.