The Failure of Civil Rights (1969)

From the October 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Report from Belfast

Few people with an ear to the ground in Northern Ireland could have escaped the growing evidence of murder, well organised and equipped, lingering in the political shadows. Yet when the murder guns added their fury to the flying stones, bottles and petrol bombs during the mid-August days of terror, most people were struck with a condition of profound shock beyond the limits of anything they had previously experienced.

It was not simply the fact that eight people had died and hundreds of others had been injured. Rather was it the realisation that the agents of death, people consciously organised to extend the more-or-less usual stone-throwing into an orgy of killing, were so many. Even more were people stunned by the absolute assault on their illusion of physical security; huge buildings and rows of working class houses burned fiercely, often without the attendance of a single fireman and the cherished notion of the ubiquitous power of ‘law and order', whether hated or admired, was dispelled — for its admirers by its impotency and for its haters, by identification with the mob.

In a violent society eight human lives are but a week-end road accident statistic and people in the familiar role of fleeing refugees are constant T.V. fare that merely plucks the conscience to offhanded sympathy. But the dead were not Jews or Arabs; the queues of terrified refugees, whose homes had provided illumination for the carnage, were not Vietnamese, Biafrans or any of those 'foreigners’ usually engaged in the practice. They were Belfast people: people who spoke as we do . . . walked the same streets . . .  knew the same problems.

The strife was confined to working class areas. The back-to-back houses of Derry's Bogside—among the most miserable slums in Europe — Belfast’s Falls Road, Shankill Road and Ardoyne area. Those who died, those who were wounded, those who were burned or terrified out of their homes were members of the working class. It was members of the working class, too, that did the killing, wounding and burning. No upper class casualties were reported.

The Catholic worker puts the blame on the Protestant worker and the police. The Protestant worker puts the blame on the Catholic worker. The politicians, too, viciously and vigorously, reflect the bitterness and prejudice of their supporters: each blames the 'other side' as well as the police, B Specials, Paisleyites and the I.R.A.—some of the more fanciful even advance the notion of an international anarchist or communist conspiracy.

It is pointless here to deal with the accusations and counter-accusations that have mostly been tailored to the prejudices of the people making them. As Socialists, we are less concerned with the battles than we are with the material conditions that brought them about. By this we do not mean the various provocations, demonstrations, government bans, lunatic clergymen, police viciousness that go to make up the events of Northern Ireland’s recent history. We don’t so much want to know who pulled the trigger—rather do we wish to examine the reason for loading the gun.

That reason is to be found in the facts of working class life in Northern Ireland today. It is to be found in unemployment, in slums, in homelessness and all the other poverty features of working class life. These are the things which breed the notion and the reality of discrimination, that create divisions within communities, that determine the economic priorities that go to make up the stock-in-trade of all the politicians and political parties claiming ability to run an insane economic system in a sane way.

It is the failure of the politicians and their parties that drives the workers in despair to street protests and demonstrations. But the people who organise and partake in these demonstrations are as ignorant of the economic facts of capitalism as the politicians whose failure creates the desire for direct action. What they fail to understand is that the system we live under, the system which they vote for at elections is by its very nature incapable of meeting working class needs; that poverty, slums and unemployment, are a natural and permanent feature of the capitalist scheme of things; that the politicians, even if they are eager to, simply cannot solve these problems. Their job is to administer the system of capitalism, to legislate conditions for the smoothest possible functioning of the system and to ensure that the rights of property are preserved and protected. The political complexion of the party running the system is irrelevant; while society is organised on the basis of profit rather than human needs, the system dictates to the party in power.

Ironically, the protesters and demonstrators see the problems against which they militate in the same terms as the politicians who run capitalism. Their '‘demands” are always “realistically” anchored to the standards prevailing among the more fortunate section of the working class. Never would they dare to 'demand' for the workers they claim to represent the mode of life enjoyed by members of the owning class. In other words they accept capitalism; they respect its title to ownership of the resources of the earth; they bow to its class structure. What concerns them is not the fact of slavery but the condition of the slave.

In the case of the Civil Rights movement, the struggle for the establishment of standards for all members of the working class based on the conditions of those workers who have jobs, homes and votes has tended to divide the working class and facilitate the Unionist clique in their efforts to play on the old fears which their political forbears manufactured to suit the needs of the propertied class at the turn of the century.

True, the C.R.A. tried to avoid this at the outset but the Unionist bosses, through the medium of their Party's police, the R.U.C., more and more succeeded in confining C.R.A. activities to Catholic areas and branding those activities 'Catholic' and 'subversive'. It was then only a short step to police violence as demonstrators refused confinement to Catholic areas and Unionist politicians, both ‘extreme' and 'moderate', verbally or by silence, encouraged the more violent Orange extremists into the punch-up between the police and the civil rights demonstrators. History—the political manoeuvreings created to suit the needs of the propertied class, expressed in Ireland in a particularly torturous complex of religious subterfuge—had ensnared the Civil Rights movement: to the Catholic they were now an organisation struggling to win for the most downtrodden section of the Catholic working class the conditions enjoyed, or endured, by the more prosperous section of the Protestant workers. To the latter they seemed a threat to the illusion of his security. Not that they wanted to, but because they failed to understand the real nature of the problem, C.RA. had been forced into the role of another sectarian movement.

Of course the Civil Rights organisations could protest this analysis: they could indicate many speeches and statements in which leading members of their movement made it clear that Protestant workers, too, would benefit from the implementation of the Civil Rights programme in Northern Ireland.

This is true. Not only that, but a few of the Civil Rights spokesmen—sometimes played down by the more 'respectable' elements of the movement—even expressed the Northern Ireland problem in class terms and declared the need for social revolution. Even the latter, however, played the game in accordance with the rule laid down by the political gamesmasters of capitalism. They led the workers on to believe that their poverty—and homelessness and unemployment are expressions of poverty, as is the lack of a local government vote —was the result of Unionist government.

Inevitably, given this thesis, the struggle at local level deteriorated into a slang-match on the relative misery of Catholic and Protestant applicants for jobs and council houses—with, very often, Civil Rights spokesmen extolling a Catholic workers' service to the armed forces of capitalism in support of his claim!

It might be argued that at least the Civil Rights movement have achieved the Unionist Government's commitment to some reforms. Let us examine this accomplishment.

A 'points system' for allocating local government housing. This may ensure that the number of houses which are available will be distributed according to a given formula which purports to measure 'need'. It might rule out religious discrimination in the allocation of houses; it will certainly not rule out the fact of discrimination for no legalistic formula can access personal needs and when there are two applicants for one house, one of them must be discriminated against. Nor will a 'points system' solve the housing problem. The root of that problem is this: in capitalist society, homes, like everything else, are produced for profit and not the needs of the homeless. Those with money don't have a housing problem; it is only the members of the working class that need to enlist the assistance of government and local government councils in an effort to find a place to live.

What is required is not a 'points system' for the allocation of houses but a Socialist system of production for use in which the vast resources of society can be brought to the task of providing homes for all.

And what of that other 'great reform', the extension of the local government franchise? Socialists obviously will greet this as a welcome broadening of the basis of local democracy. But will it solve any working class problems? Certainly, if there was mass understanding of capitalism’s inability to solve the problems of the working class allied to an understanding of the Socialist alternative to the capitalist scheme of things, the additional votes might help Socialists to achieve an earlier local government platform to assist in the final assault on capitalism at central government level.

But the working class does not suffer from the fact that workers who are not ratepayers have no votes in local government elections. The poverty and degradation of working class life stems from the worker's position in capitalist society and the working class have the electoral strength now to overthrow capitalism and institute Socialism. It is not the lack of votes that delays the change; it is the misuse of the overwhelming superiority of those votes which the workers already have. The Civil Rights movement, like all movements for the reform of capitalism help to ensure the continuing misuses of those votes by directing the attention of the working class away from the real source of their problems. Part, too, of the tragedy of the bitter struggle led by the Civil Rights movement for puny reforms is that these have been won at the cost of even greater divisions within the working class—divisions which help to keep capitalism, the very basis of all working class problems, longer in power.

Richard Montague

A Bit of Sanity in Belfast

Every Thursday evening from 8 to 10.30 p.m. the Belfast Branch of the WSP holds informal discussions at the branch room, 13 Queen’s Square Belfast (beside Albert Clock). You are cordially invited,

Enquiries and free specimen Socialist literature from General Secretary, WSP, 13 Queen’s Square, Belfast.

Violent Belfast (1969)

Book Review from the November 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Holy War in Belfast, by Andrew Boyd. Anvil Books 8s. 6d.

Belfast has a tradition of sectarian disturbances which is still alive as the fence the Army has put up between the Protestant and Catholic slums shows. Andrew Boyd gives here a simple blow-by-blow description of major riots that took place in 1857, 1864, 1872 and 1886. He has added a couple of hastily-written chapters which are supposed to bring the position up to date, but his book really ends in 1886.

That was the year Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill was defeated. It was also the year the Orange Order became respectable. Up till then it was a secret society of poorer Protestants whose parades were nearly always accompanied by disturbances. Their aim seemed to be to provoke the Catholics whenever the occasion arose. As such they were regarded as a nuisance by the government and for many years Orange marches or the display of Orange banners were prohibited. Many of the clashes described by Boyd were between police and Protestants.

The pattern is familiar: raving Presbyterian ministers, gun-fights, mob violence, intimidation, barricades, murder, arson, looting and battles with the police. In nearly every case the aggressors were the Orange extremists. In every case it was the poor, Protestant and Catholic, who suffered the consequences of this violence in terms of death, injury, homelessness and unemployment.

Inflamed by the anti-popery of their preachers, the Protestant workers feared that Home Rule would mean domination by the Catholic majority in the rest of Ireland. The landlords and the rich capitalists knew this was so much nonsense but they had a very real economic interest in encouraging hostility to Home Rule. The landlords wished to protect their right to exploit and oppress the Irish peasants while the capitalists wanted access to the profitable markets of the British Empire. To protect their economic interests they decided, as Churchill’s father Lord Randolph Churchill put it, to play the Orange card. Catholic-baiting and anti-popery became the stock-in-trade of the Unionist Party which emerged in 1886 from the anti-Horne Rule elements in Ireland.

Since 1920 this Party has itself ironically enjoyed a measure of Home Rule over six counties in the North East of Ireland. Lord Craigavon, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, declared that they now had a “Protestant government for a Protestant people”, a statement not calculated to encourage the “loyalty” of the non-Protestants who made up a third of its subjects. To deal with those who were likely to be “disloyal” the government soon passed the notorious Special Powers Act; set up a special para-military police force of which the equally notorious B Specials survive; abolished proportional representation in elections and gerrymandered local council wards—all really needlessly since the Unionists had a built- in majority if they could continue to play the Orange card successfully.

Today, however, this has become an embarrassment — with the need to attract overseas investors and with full free trade between Ireland and Britain (including Northern Ireland) due in 1975—and some Unionists are trying to repudiate their past. But this will not be easy since not only do many of their followers still hold to the bigotry their masters once taught them but the records show that what Paisley says today nearly every leading Unionist—Minister, MP, aristocrat, judge or churchman—said yesterday.

For the record (since the publishers do not disclose this) Boyd is a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party and is obviously out to discredit the Orange Order and the Ulster Unionist Party. That’s easy, a great deal easier than defending the NILP, which is but a second unionist and loyalist party with an unrivalled record of opportunism including support for the Special Powers Act.

Adam Buick

Rent Rows (1965)

From the November 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just before I joined the Socialist Party, I was friendly with Albert, a member of the Communist Party, a man with a wife and two young children, who has been in the army during the last war and like many others, had come back to an appalling housing problem. Albert and his family lived in two small rooms, and in between his battles with the local housing committee, he would lead all sorts of militant actions—such as “squatting”—and would urge my support in the “day-to-day struggle”. He was evicted from many a vacant property (and sometimes from meetings of the town council too) before he was eventually granted a house on a new estate.

Not a very tolerant man, he was furious when he heard of my decision to join the SPGB “They never do nuthin’," he shouted contemptuously, and refused to speak to me ever again. Albert has long since moved out of the district and I wonder just what his political views are today—also whether his present home is a council house.

Certainly in those earlier days this would have been the limit of his horizon —what he would have called “doin’ sumthin’” —and we can agree that a council house is preferable to a disused army nissen hut. But it makes a pretty poor comparison with what society is really capable of producing. And there is another unpleasant aspect which these day-to-day strugglers seem to overlook, and that is the role of the local authorities as landlords. They can be just as harsh as private owners, particularly if you fall behind with the rent, and they are not so restricted legally when it comes to the question of rent increases.

I am reminded of this by a recent report that Belfast City Council have decided to increase their house rents by up to 5/9d. a week. When it was debated there were noisy protests from tenants in the public gallery, but the decision went through. Albert would have acclaimed the protest as something concrete; he would have missed the point that this was one result of his previous struggles —council house building has been beloved of the left for donkey’s years— and perhaps the most important point of all would have completely eluded him. It is only workers who have to struggle for, live in, and protest about the rent of, council houses.

Eddie Critchfield

Crooked in every direction (1996)

Book Review from the February 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Straight Left by Paddy Devlin (Blackstaff Press, £8.95)

The vanity that induces someone to think that the public wants to know about their life is well to the fore in this autobiography. The story of a ghetto kid who saw a future in ward healing politics — which, for some undisclosed reason he associates with socialism — is told in a tidal wave of personal pronouns.

There is usually a story in the life of every working class youngster who finds diversion in cheating the reality of poverty and privation. When that life is lived in a Belfast sectarian ghetto, an extra dimension of religious bigotry and strife is added to life’s miseries which, in turn, heightens the need for those forms of escapism which Devlin’s portrayal of his formative years illustrates so well.

But bigotry is no joke and, in Northern Ireland, it frequently carries a gun or a bomb. Here it is composed of the naked viciousness of a primitive Calvinism which, while most reflected in the crude politico-religious vapourings of Paisleyism, has to some extent infiltrated all the Protestant denominations, and that particularly virulent strain of Catholicism which is essentially Irish.

Both, after the fashion of mainstream religion elsewhere, are on the march to what is effectively their end. In Northern Ireland, however, legend, tradition and very deliberately inculcated ignorance artificially respirates these evils into an ugly tribalism that represents the politics of the province. The inadequacies of capitalism, especially in housing, employment and education, act as a convenient catalyst for these malignant forces in the hands of bigots like Paisley and Adams and their religious or political fundamentalist cohorts — who. if local politics demanded any degree of intellectual integrity, would have long since been marginalised.

It is the consequences, political and economic, of this politico-religious mishmash that has formed the background to the mayhem that has given Northern Ireland a central place among the world's trouble spots over the past twenty-five years. Devlin played a central part in the events that led to the present troubles and, while he relates faithfully the bigotry and intransigence that made the Unionists into destroyers of their own cause, he fails utterly to appreciate the part which the false analysis of the Civil Rights movement contributed to the Northern Ireland tragedy.

The leaders of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NiCRA). rightly accused the Unionist government and party of maintaining a regime that discriminated against catholics in the distribution of jobs, housing and local government votes. The inevitable assumption among working class protestants was that they were privileged in these areas — which they were not — and that the demand for a fairer distribution of these needs with catholics represented a threat to their alleged protestant privileges.

Socialists see the imposition of poverty in any of its aspects (jobs, housing, education etc.) on any grounds whatsoever — even when it is given apparent legitimacy by being called ’selection’ — as a feature of capitalism. Within the ambit of that system’s production for profit ethos, scarcity is an inevitable feature. Capitalism cannot exist without poverty, without unemployment and without penalising those who, for whatever reason, do not offer the profit system the maximum surplus value.

However Devlin may protest his ’socialism’, he was at one with those in the NICRA who identified the problems in religious terms; the problems were, they argued, caused by Unionism. Certainly, corruption and maladministration resulted in the uneven distribution of capitalism’s miseries but the miseries themselves were the political and economic consequences of capitalism. Unfortunately, the NICRA analysis led to conflict on religious lines within the working class when an essential part of the solution lay in the unity of the working class.

Like many pseudo-socialists, Devlin has a recidivistic contempt for the lessons of history. The failure of good intentions, Keynesian 'magic' and reforming zeal to remove the social ugliness of capitalism should drive him to consideration of an alternative form of social organisation, such as socialism — defined as it was before its wilful perversion by earlier groups of ward healers who thought they could make a system based on exploitation of the working class function in the interests of that class. Such consideration would, of course, be an admission of failure and acknowledged failures do not write autobiographies.

If you can stand the dreadful political ignorance of someone who suggests that the SDLP is/was associated with socialism, that the Northern Ireland power-sharing Executive of 1974 is a model for the (socialist?) future and that the Workers Party is a Marxist organisation, then the rest is interesting and factually instructive about events in Northern Ireland especially since 1968.

Richard Montague

Northern Ireland: Our first election campaign (2004)

From the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was the early Sixties. Things were looking good in Northern Ireland. The province was as near to an economic boom as it ever gets; there had not been any serious sectarian rioting since 1935 and an IRA campaign that had commenced on the Border in 1956 was petering to an inglorious end with a statement from that organisation admitting the lack of support it had received from the Catholic nationalists of the north.

The World Socialist Party of Ireland had offices at Donegall Street in Belfast. There we spent a few late nights debating whether or not we should embark on our first electoral campaign. Money was an  important consideration: £25 deposit – which, of course, we expected to lose; election addresses, 10,000 with the equivalent of 4 pages in each, around £65; posters, say, £35. The estimates were a  headache for a small group. We probably needed over £200. And then there was the work: delivering the  Election address, putting up the posters, holding two or three open air meetings every night for some  sixteen nights.

There was the big consideration, too. The main core of our small membership lived in the widespread Belfast 15 area which constituted the constituency of Duncairn. It was the only constituency we were in a position to contest. Traditionally, it was a fiercely loyalist area, revered by Unionists because it was the  power base of Lord Carson who led the fight against Irish Home Rule with an illegal army (the UVF)  pledged to make war if necessary on Britain in order to stay British.

On the credit side there were all those meetings, those posters, the very comprehensive Election Address. Had to be worth it. We sat at our map of the constituency, marking out the sites for our meetings. Nowhere near pubs on Saturday evenings. First meeting of each evening at the hot spots, last meetings in the posher places where bigotry, like family skeletons, is usually well concealed.

The Loyalists would associate us with the Republicans because Republicans often showed their ignorance of socialism by claiming to be socialists. That could be dodgy. There were two small Catholic enclaves in the constituency and there would not be any Catholic candidate. The danger here was twofold: the priests might speak out about “atheistic communists” or we might earn support because the Catholics, like the Protestants, might associate us with Republicanism.

On the first evening of our campaign we left our offices, which were marginally outside the constituency. We had a minibus, festooned with posters and with the single speaker of our crackling public address system affixed to the top. Our first meeting was to be at Adam Street, in a hard-line loyalist area, but to get there we had to pass through part of the Dock constituency, a tough nationalist area represented by Mr Gerry Fitt (now Lord Something-or-Other) where a mob attacked our van in the mistaken belief that we  were bent on frustrating Mr Fitt’s anxious political ambitions.

The pitch we had selected at Adam Street was at a corner outside a Brethren Mission Hall. But there was a surprise or us there: the authorities had an audience-in-waiting for us. There was an open backed lorry  (they were called “tenders”) fitted to accommodate fourteen or fifteen armed policemen, as well as two police cars and a cop motorcyclist.

Hardly had our meeting started when an irate ‘Brethren’ came out of the hall and shouted up to the speaker about the noise of our loudspeaker. His aggressive manner gave the distinct impression that he’d prefer a ruction to an apology, indeed, he seemed nonplussed when our speaker apologised, made a reference to a clap of thunder and agreed to move our vehicle further down the street. People stood at their doors, obviously not best pleased but there was no active hostility and, when we dealt with the single question that was put to us, about “communism” in Russia, there was even a mild flurry of interest.

After our last meeting, we were packing up to start distributing our Election Address. As we were  removing our banners from the vehicle, the officer in charge of the police approached to confirm that the  meetings were finished for that evening. Laughingly, he referred to the incident at the Mission Hall and then told us that, within his experience of Northern Ireland elections, our behaviour was unique. We seemed, he thought, anxious to avoid trouble. We emphasised our educational role – and mentioned the integrity of our skulls.

Our revolutionary fervour might have been cooled the following evening for the armed force of the Crown was reduced to a single cop on a motorcycle. In the light of subsequent events, it would be wrong to mention this cop’s name, suffice to say that he seemed at pains to remain aloof and unfriendly towards us.

On the third or fourth evening of our campaign, we held a meeting in a housing estate called Mount Vernon – now a hotbed of militant loyalist paramilitarism where a dog with a Catholic name could become seriously dead. Even back in those more peaceful times, we were somewhat apprehensive, strategically planning our meeting place at a spot from which escape could most easily be facilitated.

In the event, we had no trouble. A few people came out of their houses and flats to listen and, when we came to questions, the meeting lapsed into a question and answer session between one man and our speaker. None of us read any significance into the fact that the persistent questioner was frequently exchanging words with the motorcycle cop who had a one hundred per cent enforced attendance record at all our previous election meetings.

That evening, after we had concluded the last of our meetings, the cop approached one of our members and asked him if we had any literature additional to our Election Address. Whether by virtue of his personality or the nature of his job, the policeman seemed a man of few words but he became quite animated as he told us that he and his wife had discussed the contents of our Election Address the previous night. He didn’t think we would ever get it – Socialism, that is – but, “Jasus! wouldn’t it be great if we did!”

“It was me, you know, who was getting that fella to ask the questions at Mount Vernon”, he instructed us. “You understand that I daren’t openly . . .” Indeed, we understood.

After that we had a very friendly cop accompanying us each evening. He wasn’t an especially garrulous individual but he did talk occasionally and seemed to include himself in our activities when he said “we” – he even got to appreciate our shared sense of raucous humour.

There were three other candidates in the field, representing the Unionist Party, the Labour Party and a Paisley sponsored ‘Protestant Action’ candidate. The counting of votes took place in the magnificence of Belfast City Hall. Worth recording were the words of the Labour candidate, a decent man called Bob Stewart. He enquired about how we thought we “had done” and when we said we had no expectations of retrieving our deposit, he said, “I dunno; your Election Address was the finest piece of socialist documentation I have ever read”. When asked why he had stood in public opposition to us he opinioned that “I don’t think it’s your time yet”. Not too clever perhaps but, as we said, a decent man.

Then there was the highpoint of the evening: we got 824 votes and saved our deposit. We exited the august portals of the City Hall as though we were walking on air – wondering what it would be like after that first fateful election.

But there was another surprise for us. As we approached our van, illegally parked in May Street, there was a motorcycle cop in attendance. “Well . . .?” It had nothing to do with parking and the cop was well off his beat. He was genuinely interested in how our vote had gone and he told us that our total included the votes of himself and his wife.

Sometime later, one of our members had taken his kids to a public park on a Sunday morning. There were very few people about and, of course, in Belfast at that time Authority deemed that their remorseless God would be gravely offended by children playing on Sunday so officialdom locked the swings in the playground. But religious ingenuity had not devised a means of locking the slides so the few children there were presented with an occasion for sin.

Anyway, the motorcycle cop, now in mufti, arrived with his two children and while the kids sinned together on the unapproved slides, their fathers talked. He’d been a cop for seventeen years . . . life was fashioned around the job, mortgage etc. had misgivings now but what could he do? Our member nodded sympathetically.

In the afterwards, some of us saw him from time to time; he remained a traffic cop until the early Seventies when he was shot dead by an IRA ‘freedom fighter’ who, presumably, had an aversion to traffic cops.

By then, of course, freedom fighting had created so much inter-community division and bitterness in Northern Ireland that there was no place within working class areas open to consideration of ideas outside the foul patterns of religious and political sectarianism.

Richard Montague

Ireland: The World Socialist Party Carries On! (1977)

Party News from the February 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whether we operate as a party is, in the circumstances in which we do actually function, difficult to state. How does a party such as ours operate in circumstances in which overt activity could bring dire retribution at the hands of any of the three factions of thugs — IRA, Loyalists, or British Army/Police (the latter functioning under the euphemism "security forces")? All we can do is use personal contact: explain ceaselessly, tirelessly, frustratingly — sometimes even dangerously — that capitalism creates the material conditions in which all this can happen. Ironically, people as individuals are prepared now, more than heretofore, to listen, and (perhaps good for the future) the struggle here often highlights the correctness of our attitudes. But bitterness, hate and blind emotions combine against reason and, as I say, they have the guns and the bombs and they make telephone calls.

As you will know, our premises at Pim Street, Belfast, were severely damaged in an arson attack — directed solely against our shabby little office. It was a victory for something; but we counter-attacked with hardboard and asphalt and continued to hold meetings there every Tuesday evening — you can imagine our mixed emotions when we thought we heard a foot on the stairs! Next we had a visit — fortunately, perhaps, in our absence — from the “security forces”. Lacking a key, they smashed in the door and made a military-medal-deserving attack on our few pathetic chairs and our display of back numbers. A group of the same worthies later met three of us leaving the place and, resisting our efforts at conversion, attacked the weakest of us — my eighteen-year-old daughter. The Provo heroes gave our room the coup-de-grace and ended our heroics with a bomb on an adjoining property.

Left without an address, we are still looking for a suitable place here. The job is rendered more difficult than usual by the fact that on top of the previous considerations like rent and accessibility and willingness to lease to Socialists, we now have as our primary concern the question of security in an area in which contacts from either side of our infamous “divide” will not feel threatened. That, here, is a tall order indeed . . .

M.

(The above is extracted from a letter to the General Secretary of the SPGB by the Secretary of the WSP of Ireland. All comrades here send their warmest fraternal greetings to those who are keeping the struggle for Socialism alive in such conditions.)

Party News: Trip to Belfast (1983)

From the September 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

A report on a visit to a recent weekend education conference run by the World Socialist Party of Ireland.

With only 30 minutes left in which to cover 25 miles, hopes of catching the 1500 ferry from Holyhead were fading fast. We had been travelling 6½ hours; London was 250 miles behind us. Fate had, however, dealt the same blow to our comrades travelling separately in another vehicle. The Islington delegation had missed the boat. A further departure was due at 1715 on a different shipping line, but our tickets were non-transferrable, so we were unable to sail before 0300 the following morning.

The following afternoon, just across the Northern Ireland border, a young man was hitch-hiking to Belfast; of course, we invited him to join us. He got more than a lift, since by the time we reached our destination he had been well introduced to the principles of revolutionary socialism. Having greeted our comrades in Belfast, we prepared for the first evening of the conference. The Ulster People’s College is a richly decorated Victorian house in South Belfast. It was commented that Marx might have had a “buckle in his eye” to have seen workers enter such a place without at least tipping their hats. Inside, the lecture room was dominated by a beautifully made plaque proclaiming the socialist message: One World, One People.

The opening lecture was on The Socialist Alternative, which stimulated much discussion. Disappointingly, there had been no response from about twenty Leftist organisations who had been invited to attend a Challenge to the Left held the following morning, in which a panel of speakers argued that the Left has impeded the road to socialism. Then there was a lecture given on The Materialist Conception of History. This was particularly well attended (over 40 were there), partly due to a letter we had published the week before in the local paper, the Sunday News [LINK HERE]. One of the highlights of the weekend was a stimulating lecture delivered by a Belfast member, on the socialist analysis of Irish history. There were also talks on the politics of Reformism, and the economics of the recession.

On the last day of the school, a period was set aside for general discussion. This opportunity was used to plan future activities for the Belfast Branch of the WSPI, which has now been revived after more than a decade of difficulties arising out of the violent conflicts of the city. The Socialist Party of Ireland was formed by the joining together of Belfast and Dublin socialist groups in 1950. Its name was changed to the World Socialist Party in 1958, to avoid confusion with nationalist and reformist groups mis-using the term socialist. During the sixties, the Belfast branch fought elections for the City Council and the Stormont parliament. In the early seventies the Head Office was severely damaged by a bombing and then looted and vandalised by the “security” forces. It became impossible to find suitable premises and meetings had to be held in members’ homes until recently, when the Belfast and Armagh branches of the Party reorganised and a regular meeting place has been obtained.

After the weekend conference ended, we were taken on a tour of the troubled areas of the city. Contrary to the picture received through the British media, the violence is limited on the whole to the most impoverished areas. The recession has also played its part in reducing whole districts to bleak, sparse wastelands. The only significant difference between the Catholic slums of the Falls Road and the Protestant slums of the Shankill was in the graffiti that lines their walls.

Crossing the border on our return journey, we were stopped and questioned. We explained that we stood for the abolition of wage-labour and of the profit system. A line of traffic built up behind as we argued this out, and the onlooking soldiers started to fidget impatiently with their machine-guns. The guard finally said that he was happy as he was — checking cars all day for incendiaries, with the permanent risk of being shot, and living on his meagre income.

Lunch on the boat back was appropriately run on free access; after paying £4 each customers can eat as much as they want. Obviously it had been calculated that people would not be able to eat more than £4 worth. So much for the capitalist claim that with free access people would never stop eating. Then, stopping at a telephone box just outside Bangor, we found that a pile of leaflets had been left, against the privatisation of Telecom. It was not long before a socialist response was added, establishing this as our first propaganda and information centre of the area. . . . The red sunset cast its long shadow over the Welsh mountains and we knew that wage-slavery would recommence in a few hours. Visiting our comrades in Belfast had been a brief but beneficial exercise, confirming that socialism is not a mythical beast confined to one part of the world; everywhere capitalism exists and is a breeding ground for socialism.

Ian Churchlow

Belfast sights (1984)

From the July 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

It's only when showing someone around your home town that you become aware of things normally taken for granted—the attractive buildings become more beautiful and the slums more pathetic. Recently my perception of a few aspects of Belfast became vivid in just such a way when a visitor drew my attention to the basic lunacies of the city.

The first thing he noticed on our afternoon drive was the ever conspicuous presence of army and police patrols. His fear was obvious, as was his astonishment at seeing men walking about openly carrying rifles and strapped with pistols. He was amused however at one sight of these armed men. At traffic lights we watched as two young children played beside an army sniper lying in a doorway, looking attentively through the sights of his rifle while covering for his mates. The young soldier might have been lying in a trench on a battlefield, such was his posture and actions; the young children could have been playing alone in a park, so oblivious were they to the uniformed gunman lying a couple of feet away. It was a peculiar contrast.

When trying to explain the geography of Belfast 1 found myself almost automatically differentiating between the areas purely on the basis of their religious affiliation. “You are now in the Catholic Falls", or “This is the Protestant Shankill” would suffice as a description, and I would not normally have given it a second thought. After all, this is the shorthand most commonly used by the media. But my visitor was bemused at the casual way in which I informed him that we were suddenly in a completely different type of area. The tightly-knit streets were identical to those down the road, the monotonous housing estates just as run-down, the poverty just as obvious and—guess what—the people didn’t look any different. It was much easier when I had told him half an hour before that we were passing through that part of town where the wealthy people live. The avenues there were quiet, with long fences and hedges sectioning off the large, comfortable houses set in their landscaped gardens. Even the uninitiated visitor could differentiate between these types of areas.

But I had to come up with a more satisfactory means of distinguishing between the working class areas which, on the face of it, admittedly looked rather similar. Could I tell him some of the old differences which are supposed to make these two groups of people incompatible? One lot, it is said, sponge off society and have large families in an attempt to undermine the state: The other side are supposedly thrifty, hard-working and loyal. Possibly it is because they come from different traditions. My visitor had seen that whether or not they were hard-working or “spongers", they lived in the same poor housing and dirty streets, and that their common heritage was a decaying environment. My task was becoming difficult and my guest more impatient for some sort of obvious divide between the two communities.

I drew his attention to some of the graffitti on the gable walls, which serve as a guide to the sectional divide. On a wall of the Protestant ghetto were the telling words. "No Pope here". I told my friend that the last Pope had been offered a kitchen house in the street by the housing authority but that the local people had refused to let him in. I didn't have to tell him I was joking. A couple of streets down I pointed out another piece of loyalist assertion, “This we will maintain". He remarked that most of the houses were derelict and some had already been demolished. In similar ghetloes not a stone's throw away (and to prove this the neighbouring communities regularly throw stones at each other) I showed him gable artistry pleading for a “Free Ireland" and headed "Support the IRA". Even he could see that this was as contradictory as it was to talk about "Military Intelligence".

However, I had no difficulty persuading my friend that the problems in Northern Ireland could not be explained away by reference to the superficial religious differences between Protestant and Catholic. Of greater importance were the political ideologies which lead members of the working class, be they republican or loyalist, to accept lives of constant poverty and violence. The urgent need, we agreed, was for them to assert their common interests in a struggle against petty nationalism and religious bigotry, and for a society of harmony.

Brian Montague

World Socialist Party of Ireland