It is seven years ago this month (October) since the television screens throughout the world flashed their dramatic pictures of that historic confrontation between the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Civil Rights marchers on Derry’s Craigavon Bridge.
Seven years! Arson, murder and mass intimidation have prospered in the years between and the vaunted ‘reforms’ and ‘freedoms’ that gave courage to the protesters and demonstrators have all fallen victim to the gunmen, military and para-military.
And what was it all about in those heady days of sixty-eight? Well, the various species of loyalist politicians will tell you that it was a devious criminal conspiracy organized by the Irish Republican Army with the ultimate aim of destroying the Ulster State.
That the Civil Rights Association was, in part, the brain-child of the IRA is unquestionably true, but it is equally true that the Provisional IRA who were undeniably the people who ‘brought down’ the Stormont Government, had not then been invented. In fact it was the political and social posturings of the then IRA that fertilized the egg of discontent within the movement, and it was the subsequent military rapacity of the British Army that played midwife to the Provos as a serious guerrilla force when they attempted a military solution of the ‘no-go area’ problem in July 1970. (…)
Whatever the future may hold for us, whether the Unionists get full parliamentary control again or share their ministerial salaries with the SDLP; whether the Province becomes ‘independent’ or part of an all-Ireland federation, one thing we can confidently predict. The great majority of the people, Catholic and Protestant, will remain ‘second-class citizens’ with ‘a reasonable standard of life’ only a pipe-dream for themselves and their children.
Alternatively, of course, there is Socialism and the prospect of a world-wide society of production for use; a society in which people will use their skills and energies to produce an abundance of all the things they require to guarantee every member of society the material basis for a full and happy life and where every human being will have free and equal access to his or her needs. In Socialism there will be no need for gunmen or bombers, of either the state or free-lance variety, for there will be no material basis of conflict and the skills of violence will be as irrelevant as those of bankers, salesmen or lawyers.
[From the article, Ireland seven years on, by Richard Montague, Socialist Standard, November 1975.]
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