Eoghan Harris

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the 2000s he supported the Fianna Fáil–led government of Bertie Ahern.

In 2006, during an RTÉ Television debate Harris stated that the leaders of the Easter Rising were "suicide bombers, I mean suicide terrorists".

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 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.