A-Infos (en) Ireland, Anarchist journal, Workers Solidarity #94 - On the road with an Irish pirate by Ciaran Murray

Clandestines, The Diary of an Irish Pirate Exile by Ramor Ryan AK Press 
€13.45 / £9.00
While it can be hard to come across political documents that inspire, 
entertain and amuse, Ramor Ryan‘s Clandestines succeeds in doing just 
that. Some may know Ryan from his articles in “We Are Everywhere” and 
“Confronting Capitalism” but Clandestines is his first published book. 
It is, for the main part, a travel diary and a readable mixture of 
personal memoir and political essay written over his many years as an 
anarchist activist. The book covers his journeys to a broad gamut of 
societies in struggle, from Berlin to Northern Ireland, Nicaragua to 
Turkey and many places in between.
The book is full of true, fantastic and at times audacious tales seen 
through the eyes of an Irish anarchist who is experiencing an 
irreversibly changing world first hand. The world Ramor traverses sees 
the collapse of “communism” in Eastern Europe, a growing sense of 
revolution in South America and the birth of a modern anti-globalisation 
movement. While at all times political yet personal, Ramor frequently 
forays into his relationships with activists, friends and strangers he 
picks up along the way, each who provide the reader with their personal 
affections and experiences.

What follows is something that reads like a modern hybrid of Behan’s 
Borstal Boy and the Canterbury Tales, with Ramor compiling the 
characters’ stories as he goes along, and using them to meaningful, 
insightful, and, at times, touching effect.

While the book could have fallen into an unintelligible journal of 
wholly separated and abstract events, Ryan brings events and people 
together and finds a common theme, of the shaping of these characters 
from the historic and social pressures of a rapidly changing world.

From the Kurdish guerrillas, to the Sandanistas, to the female 
bartender he meets in Cuba, Ramor documents people and communities 
coming to terms with a new, neo-liberal, world order. In Berlin, he 
experiences the life of a radical squatter and the regular running 
battles with local police associated with it. In Northern Ireland, he 
encounters the massacre of mourners at a republican funeral, and a 
community drawn together to cope with a violent and sectarian society.
In Turkey, he finds the volunteers of the PKK in training, young men and 
women willing to give up their lives for their idea of a Marxist 
revolution, and a feeling that if the world wasn’t ready for revolution 
they, at least, were. In South America he watched the Sandanistas take 
power in Nicaragua, while the FMLN were on the brink of overthrowing the 
government in El Salvador and the radical movements in Guatemala and 
Honduras gained ground.

Whether read as a travelogue, political document or collection of 
nostalgic memoirs, “Clandestines,” is a book that anyone with an 
interest in late 20th Century politics will understand, and enjoy.
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