Letter: The Pope and King Billy (1990)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Pope and King Billy

Sirs,

The article The Lies That Kill' (Socialist Standard, July 1990) on the celebrations of the 300th anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne in Northern Ireland was topical. However, it did the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain no good to rehash historical error, even if it is convenient.

The comment on the third paragraph on the second page of the article which refers to the Treaty (or league) powers, of which the Pope was the head, that armed, provisioned and financed King Billy when he landed in Ireland has no historical fact. Even the way the historical myth is written is out of the normal context. It is normally associated with the landing in England in 1688 when the Pope Innocent XI was on the Papal Throne but this is erroneous too (see page 202, New Cambridge Modern History, Vol VI).

While it is a popular tale to abuse the Orange conception of the Battle of the Boyne the Pope did not have a Te Deum sung in St Peter's to mark William's victory. Indeed Pope Alexander was disturbed at the report that a Te Deum was sung in Austria where the Hapsburgs ruled—one of William's allies on the continent.

David Boyce 

Hamilton, Scotland.

Reply:

If the purpose of David Boyce's remonstrance is historical accuracy, then is argument is worthy of examination. If it is intended to refute the contention in the article that the fictions, lies and historical rubbish that the opposing sides in Northern Ireland use to deceive the working class, then it is less worthy.

It is less worthy because, however valid the two points he makes may be, they represent a small part of our indictment of the viciously anti-working class and anti-democratic Orange Order. This organisation has consistently promoted the lie that Unionism and Orangeism represent a shield for workers who are protestants. It has. by its fascist-like posturings and its triumphalism, promoted hatred and division within the working class. It was founded on the lie of class collaboration and its contemporary existence epitomises the hypocrisy and distortion that forms one side of the substance of the lies that in Northern Ireland today bring death and destruction.

Mr Boyce raises two objections to the article: (1) That there is no basis in fact for the contention that King Billy was armed, provisioned and financed by the Treaty or League powers: (2) That the story of a Te Deum being sung in Rome in celebration of William's victory is a popular myth.

For his second contention he offers no evidence beyond his personal claim. Even so, it can be accepted that definitive evidence is impossible to find. James Connolly made the claim in Labour. Nationality and Religion and The Reconquest of Ireland and cited as one of his authorities the protestant historian, the Reverend Robert Murray's Revolutionary Ireland and Its Settlement. Among other historians who have backed Connolly are Beresford Ellis in History of the Irish Working Class and Klopp in The Fall of the House of Stuart. The latter cites Avaux and Macpherson as his authorities for reporting that the Catholic Austrian Court had ordered public prayers for the success of King Billy's expedition in Ireland.

Mr Boyce supports his first contention by a reference to Volume VI of the New Cambridge Modern History. The substance of the particular article is the English Revolution in which there is a footnote quoting a Von Pastor:

It has been said that Innocent XI supported or had some knowledge of the expedition. but the documents generally adduced for this are forgeries. It was impossible for Innocent to associate himself in any way with a Protestant against a Catholic prince.

None of the more prominent Irish and Anglo-Irish historians, past and present, support Von Pastor's contention that it was impossible for a Pope to support “a Protestant against a Catholic prince". Most of these writers make generous use of continental European historians and some of the latter say that Innocent XI was referred to as "the Protestant Pope” because of his close identification with William of Orange. Murray quoted Koch and Schoell's Histoire abrégé des traités de paix as follows:

The Pope supported the Imperial Alliance, for he aimed at the humiliation of France and he cared little whether this was brought about by Roman Catholic or Protestant means. Instead of a religious crusade headed by the Pope and the Emperor, Louis is met with the Grand Alliance, signed at Vienna, between William as Stadholder of Holland and Leopold, on 12th May 1689 against the policy of France. William bound himself to secure Germany against future aggression by Louis and Leopold undertook to support William from attack in Holland. England and Spain were also to join this League.

Mr Boyce must accept the factual evidence for the Grand Alliance, whose existence effectively refutes Von Pastor's version of events.

Editors.

Background to Northern Ireland: "A Protestant Government" (1972)

From the September 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ulster Unionists weren’t too happy about the 1920 Government of Ireland Act for, although it provided for Partition, it clearly intended that this should be only temporary. Fortunately for them the Republicans in the South didn’t think much of it either and stood by their January 1919 Declaration of Independence under which an all-Ireland Republican government had purportedly been set up. The 1921 Treaty which ended the resulting Anglo-Irish War made Partition likely to be much more permanent than originally intended and the Ulster Unionists settled down to govern their own six-county statelet.

The Belfast parliament was not just a glorified county council. It had some real political power since it had at its disposal armed force: the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), a para-military police force along the lines of the old Royal Irish Constabulary which had been set up in the 19th Century to help hold down the Irish peasantry. This was soon supplemented by a much larger force of part-time auxiliary policemen, also armed and all Protestants (the RUC at least had some Catholic members), called B Specials.

The Belfast parliament also had the power to legislate on law and order in the six counties and one of their first measures was to pass the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act of 1922. This notorious Act, which was renewed annually for some years before being made permanent, allowed the government to detain people and intern them without trial, to ban meetings and newspapers and — the clause one South African Prime Minister said he’d scrap all his own repressive legislation for — arrest a person who does anything “calculated to be prejudicial to the preservation of peace or maintenance of order in Northern Ireland and not specifically provided for in the regulations”. The immediate political problem which faced the new Unionist government was that a third of its subjects — the Nationalist, Catholic minority — were opposed, sometimes violently, to its very existence and would have preferred to be governed by the newly-established Southern Irish ruling class in Dublin. They had to be subdued — by terror and intimidation. Already in 1920 there had been a vicious anti-Catholic pogrom in Belfast, when Catholic workers were driven out of the shipyards, their homes burned and their wives and children sent fleeing South. In other parts too of the about-to-be-established “Northern Ireland” Catholics were driven across what was soon to be the Border. After Partition the B Specials and the Special Powers Act were to be the permanent weapons of anti-Nationalist, anti-Catholic intimidation.

But not even this was a sufficient guarantee to the Belfast capitalists and their politicians in the Unionist party that some day by some means the Northern Nationalists might not succeed in re-uniting Ireland — behind the dreaded tariff walls. The normal rules of political democracy had to be set aside. Before Partition the British government had introduced proportional representation in Ireland, first for local and then for general elections. The Ulster Unionists never liked this for the very reason that it would give the Northern Nationalists representation in proportion to their numbers! They resolved to abolish it at the first opportunity, and did — in 1923 for local elections and in 1929 for general elections. This paved the way for the further gerrymandering of local council boundaries, particularly in areas with Nationalist majorities such as the town of Londonderry and the counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone. Derry was the most notorious example: here a two-thirds Nationalist majority among the electorate was turned into a two-thirds Unionist majority on the council. This was not only because Derry had an important role in Orange mythology, but also — and more importantly — because it was the centre of the Ulster shirt-making industry which, like Belfast heavy industry, was geared to Britain and its export markets. In fact at the time of the 1924 Boundary Commission the Derry shirt manufacturers specifically argued against being transferred to the Free State on the grounds that this would cut them off from markets behind possible Irish tariff walls.

From some points of view Northern Ireland itself was one big gerrymander. The Belfast capitalists were primarily concerned with keeping the link between industrialized East Ulster and Britain, but were prepared to take in other areas so long as they had a Unionist, Protestant majority. The full nine counties of Ulster had a slight Nationalist, Catholic majority which was obviously unacceptable. But once Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan had been conceded to the Free State the Unionists had a two-thirds majority in the remaining six counties, despite the fact that Fermanagh and Tyrone too had Nationalist majorities.

So, right from the start, Northern Ireland was corrupt from a democratic point of view. Not that the Unionist politicians who ruled continuously from 1921 ever bothered to pretend otherwise until a few years ago. Lord Craigavon, its first Prime Minister (who as James Craig had before the war been a leader of the planned Ulster Provisional Government with its armed UVF), openly declared in 1932, “Ours is a Protestant government”, and in July 1934 told the Belfast parliament, “We are a Protestant parliament and a Protestant State” (quoted in Divided Ulster by Liam De Paor).

Such sentiments were repeated by subsequent Northern Ireland Prime Ministers including Lord Brookeborough, the man who once boasted that he did not “have a Roman Catholic about my own place” and who remained Prime Minister until 1963.

One of the reforms introduced in Britain after the second world war was “one man, one vote” in local council elections. Previously only ratepayers and their wives had been able to vote while under certain circumstances a businessman could have more than one vote. The Ulster Unionist government in Northern Ireland chose not to implement this reform for the crude reason that it would have enfranchised more Nationalists than Unionists. It was estimated that this left at least a quarter of adult men and women without a vote in local elections.

Local councils also had other opportunities to discriminate against Nationalists and Catholics. Certain jobs and houses were reserved for Protestants and particularly for supporters of the Unionist party.

The Catholic minority gave its political support to the reactionary and clerical-dominated Nationalist party who were often known as “Green Tories” and, in Belfast and one or two other towns, to various Labour parties — “Irish Labour”, “Republican Labour” and even on occasions “Northern Ireland Labour”. The Nationalist party lost much of its support at the 1969 Northern Ireland general election to various Civil Rights and Labour candidates who later formed the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), at the moment the main political party supported by the Catholic minority.

The Unionists retained the support of the Protestant workers and small farmers by continuing to stir up sectarian hatreds and fears. It was a measure of the backwardness of politics there that “REMEMBER 1690”, "NOT AN INCH", "NO SURRENDER” and the like were, and still are, powerful political slogans. The Unionists successfully tricked the Protestant workers into believing that there was some special advantage for them in Northern Ireland being part of Britain rather than of Ireland. The Protestant worker came to believe that he was privileged as compared with his Catholic fellow worker and that any extension of civil rights to the Catholics would be a threat to his supposed privileges. This was a great illusion, but one which has retained mass Protestant working class support for the Unionist party, the Northern Ireland counterpart of the British Tories. The average Protestant worker has never even advanced to the limited-enough trade union and reformist consciousness represented by support for a Labour party. The Northern Ireland Labour Party, despite protestations of loyalty to the Crown and even of support for the Special Powers Act, has always remained a small minority party.

The Protestant worker never has been in any privileged position. He has always suffered from the working-class problems of poverty, slums and unemployment. And indeed it was only because of this that Unionist local councils were able to bribe a few of them with the occasional job or house in preference to a Catholic worker. One of the more pathetic Northern Ireland scenes has always been to see on the twelfth of July the Protestant slums of Belfast adorned with the unintentionally ironic banner, “THIS WE WILL MAINTAIN”.

The trade union movement in Northern Ireland is largely an extension of that of the rest of Britain and is the one mass organisation which unites both Protestants and Catholics, though there are two “transport and general workers’ unions” in the docks, one Protestant, the other Catholic. As in the South trade unions suffered more legal restrictions than in Britain, at least until the recent Industrial Relations Act. This Act does not apply to Northern Ireland (so making here, somewhat ironically, the part of the whole British Isles with the least restrictive trade union laws), but the 1927 Trades Disputes Act passed as a punitive measure after the British General Strike still applies and on one occasion the Special Powers Act was used against trade unionists. The main effect of this Act has been to make trade unionists who want to pay the political levy to finance the pro-capitalist Labour Party “contract in” (but Socialists don’t object to this since it is more democratic than the British system whereby those who don’t want to finance the Labour Party have to “contract out”).

This situation — where a corrupt Unionist clique ruled continuously by lies and threats and, despite having majority support, undemocratic practices — was accepted by successive Westminster governments, Labour as well as Conservative, until the whole system began to break down in 1968 and 1969.

As long as the Southern Ireland government pursued a protectionist policy the demand for a United Ireland, which most Catholics in the North supported, really was a threat to the material interests of the Belfast capitalists. Accordingly, those interests demanded that the Unionists continue to stir up sectarianism as a means of retaining mass support for Union with the British market. But when, from about 1960 onwards, the Southern Ireland government finally abandoned protection and sought, and eventually got, free trade with Britain (including Northern Ireland), the Irish Nationalism of the Catholic minority was not such a threat and the way was open for more friendly relations between Belfast and Dublin. This change was symbolized by the resignation in 1959 of De Valera as Prime Minister and his later election as figure-head President of the Irish Republic and the resignation in 1963 of Lord Brookeborough as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.

De Valera’s successor, Lemass, began to speak of the North as “Northern Ireland” instead of the previously obligatory “Six Counties”, thus conceding it a certain amount of legitimacy. In the North the Nationalist MPs agreed to become “her majesty’s” official opposition and Brookeborough’s successor, O’Neill, authorised flags on official buildings to fly at half-mast on the death of Pope John in June 1963, a startling sight in a city like Belfast where the slum walls were daubed with the slogan “NO POPE HERE”. In January 1965 Lemass travelled secretly to meet O’Neill in Belfast; the following month O’Neill slipped off to Dublin. In December the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement was signed. It appeared that the future held out the gradual disappearance of the sectarian bitterness which had been a feature of Northern Ireland political life since the 1880’s, a hope seemingly confirmed by the failure of the 1956-62 IRA campaign against the North because of lack of support from the Catholic minority.

But this was not to be. The Unionist government could now without danger have abandoned its corrupt and undemocratic practices and O’Neill — the first Northern Ireland Prime Minister not to claim to be governing a Protestant State for a Protestant People — did urge this. But it was no easy task for the Unionist political machine to suddenly turn off the hatreds it had assiduously cultivated for the previous eighty years. In fact nearly every prominent figure in Northern Ireland life — judges and Church leaders as well as politicians — is on record as saying, not so very long ago, what the Rev. Ian Paisley now says.

When a Civil Rights movement arose to demand the end of the various corrupt and undemocratic practices — the gerrymandering, the restricted franchise, discrimination over housing and jobs, the B Specials and the Special Powers Act — the Unionist government, with present Ulster Vanguard leader William Craig as Home Affairs Minister, reacted as it had done towards all previous opposition movements supported by Catholics: it saw it as a threat to the existence of the Unionist statelet, as a Republican plot to be ruthlessly crushed. It was a fatal mistake which within four years led to the overthrow, by a British Tory government, of fifty years of Unionist rule in Northern Ireland. In any event, almost the whole Civil Rights programme — with the exception of the repeal of the Special Powers Act, but even this would probably have been replaced by something less comprehensive but just as effective had not war broken out between the Provisional IRA and the British Army in February 1971 — had already been conceded. In fact the franchise in Northern Ireland is now wider than in the Republic: it gives votes at 18 while the South still sticks to 21.

So Northern Ireland too is now back where it was before the first world war: ruled directly from Britain. The fifty-year stretch of Ulster Unionist rule over the six counties of North-East Ireland stands out as an episode in the development of capitalism in Ireland, as a means of preventing the Belfast capitalists from having been cut off from the rest of industrial Britain behind the tariff walls of an agricultural Ireland. The fear of the effect this would have had on profits has been the material basis of Belfast’s steadfast Unionism and "Loyalty”. The Unionists, as the saying puts it, were basically more loyal to the half-crown than the Crown.

Adam Buick

For an exposure of the Southern Irish Capitalist Republic see last month’s issue.

Northern Ireland: Is it Peace? (1998)

From the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who have given into the utterly absurd contentions that induces members of the working class to give allegiance to flags and patriotic vapourings may feel injured or elated by the 10 April Anglo-Irish Agreement, but in terms of working-class life it is irrelevant except in that it might restrain the opposing patriots from slaughtering one another.

History is a sequential process, each chapter being an intermix of the past and the present. People do not take those political decisions that then become history with the freedom of an artist choosing a colour from a palette; on the contrary, though political decisions may be fashioned to serve the dominant economic interests, prevailing ideas handed down from the past play a vital role in the acceptance or rejection of such ideas.

Irish history, dominated as it was by the interests of its historically powerful neighbour, Great Britain, and the old imperialist strategy of deliberately introducing and promoting division, is especially convoluted. The most relevant historical milestone is the partitioning of Ireland in 1921 under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act which created Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland). The Act that legalised partition had no democratic basis in Ireland, north or south; in the elections of 1918 Sinn Fein had won a majority of seats (though on a minority vote of the people of all Ireland); then—as now with the two Sinn Fein MPs, Adams and McGuinness—but refused to take their seats in the Westminster parliament.

Instead they chose to establish an Irish parliament, or Dail, which the British promptly declared illegal. The following year, in Co Tipperary, what the British called “the troubles” and the Irish called the Anglo-Irish war broke out when an IRA column shot dead a policeman escorting a donkey laden with dynamite being brought to a quarry.

Immediate and terrible war

For two years, thereafter, a guerrilla struggle ensued and a war of terror and counter-terror raged throughout the country until the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, initiated peace negotiations in 1921. Out of these the British imposed the partition settlement which retained the six north-eastern counties of Ireland as a self-governing entity within the United Kingdom while allowing the twenty-six remaining counties to constitute a “Free State” while still being a British dominion. The Irish delegation to the peace talks later claimed that Lloyd George and Churchill enforced acceptance of this proposal under the threat of “immediate and terrible war”.

In the new Irish Free State, division surfaced within the IRA arising out of the acceptance of Partition and the imposition on the Irish Dail of an oath of loyalty to the British monarch. Civil war resulted which lasted until 1924. The conflict was rooted not simply in the economic interests of the nascent Irish capitalist class, whose interests Sinn Fein represented, but in the ideological fictions promoted by Irish republicanism in order to enlist the support of the working class and small farmers in the struggle for an Irish capitalist republic.

In fact the solution imposed by Britain suited the three sides to the Irish conflict at that time. The British, whose interests in Ireland were now largely strategic, would retain control over Northern Ireland with indirect control over the Irish Free State. The emerging Irish capitalist class, whose interests were reflected in the IRA struggle, would have the law-making processes they wanted to nurture their fledgling industries, and the Unionists in the north would retain their access to the British home market and enjoy the benefits of Empire Preference for the north’s shipbuilding, engineering and textile industries.

If history was simply a reflex of material interests, the matter may have ended there but, as Marx pointed out, while we make our own history, that history is contained to a greater or lesser extent by the dead hand of the past. The Northern Ireland state had been tailored by the architects of division to ensure the widest possible territory consistent with what was hoped would be a permanent Protestant majority that could then impose on the Catholic Nationalist element of the population a permanent quasi-democratic dictatorship.

Protestant and Catholics united

From the outset, the Unionist government of Northern Ireland whipped up anti-Catholic bigotry in order to keep a firm control of their Protestant voting fodder and the Catholics responded by refusing to co-operate with the Unionist state. Bigotry, political gerrymandering, draconian legislation and an armed police force backed by an armed, exclusively Protestant, auxiliary police were the weapons of the Government. Inevitably, the Catholic minority, already churlish and antagonistic towards the state, were driven into new heights of hostility.

Northern Ireland was born in violence. Sectarian murder and arson were the accepted weapons of the upper class Unionist gentlemen who took over the running of the state. As long as it was the poor, the grossly impoverished working class, Catholics and Protestants who were hurting one another, it was a tolerable strategy that helped to foster the fallacious notion that simply being a Protestant in the new state was a guarantee of privilege.

That Protestant members of the working class were subject to the same mean lifestyle as their fellow Catholics was made manifest in 1932, when the state was eleven years old. Faced with massive unemployment, the government decreed that unemployed people who were single would not get any unemployment benefit; instead, they should apply for admittance to the workhouse.

Together in poverty, the single unemployed united in an unemployed movement; in Belfast they marched up the Lisburn Road to the workhouse which, of course, could not admit them. The government called out the armed RUC to face down the workers; it tried desperately to divide them on religious grounds and, failing to subdue them with police thuggery or sectarian cajoling, it surrendered and re-instituted the miserable pittance to all the unemployed.

In the three years that followed, the loyalist organisations like the Orange Order and the Apprentice Boys, whose leaders were frequently members of the government or members of the government party, worked hard to re-establish the hegemony of sectarian division and, in 1935, in the midst of a desperate economic crisis, yet another vicious sectarian clash occurred, requiring the intervention of the British military.

Momentous event

Before the commencement of World War Two the IRA inaugurated a bombing campaign in England and in the early nineteen forties there was a further upsurge of violence in Northern Ireland. In 1956 the IRA embarked on yet another campaign of terror which was largely confined to the border areas. After a spectacular start, this fizzled out and, for the first time ever, the IRA, in 1962, admitted defeat.

Acknowledging the growing accommodation between the northern Catholic Nationalists and the Northern Ireland state following on the introduction of “welfare” capitalism—which the post-war Labour government had forced the reluctant Unionist leaders to accept—the IRA statement accepting defeat condemned the northern Nationalists for “selling their heritage for a mess of pottage”. For the first time in the twentieth century the gun had been taken out of Irish politics.

In the growing spirit of toleration, Nationalist politicians accepted the role of official opposition in the Stormont parliament and, against the background of a new Anglo-Irish Free Trade agreement, the Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland met his southern Irish counterpart in Stormont.

But if the politics of reality was forcing events forward, the dead hand of the past was actively provoking reaction and the prime instrument of that reaction was the demagogic hot-gospeller, Ian Paisley. When Catholics and liberal Protestants combined in a struggle for Civil Rights they were opposed by a ranting Paisley and a coterie of fanatical bigots who used the fascist tactic of the counter-demonstration to provoke civil disturbance.

Ironically, Paisley and his bigoted ilk exacerbated a conflict that created the material conditions for the emergence of the Provisional IRA and for nearly thirty years of internecine warfare. He and his political and religious cohorts have greeted every effort to find an accommodation between the warring parties with accusations of treachery and “sell-out” directed at his fellow Unionists. He has mounted campaigns and crusades down the years the purpose of which is allegedly to “save Ulster” from treachery and now, following the “peace” agreement signed between the main representatives of Unionism and Irish Nationalism, he is bellowing his denunciation with the claim that this is Ulster’s most calamitous crisis–which seems like a confession of past failures.

“The Agreement”, which is the simple title given to the document which is being widely circulated in Northern Ireland and which has been picked over in detail by the media since 10 April, betrays the utter futility of sectarian politics and paramilitary terrorism. Bigotry and violence, including state violence, have killed some 3,500 people and injured a further 40,000 and, apart from the gangsters and ghouls who have found opportunity for gain in this mayhem, it has not advanced the condition of any section of the working class.

“Some gain and some pain”

Socialists would be fools if they did not hope that this agreement succeeds in bringing an end to the violence, in ending the killing, the maiming and the torching of peoples’ homes; in ending, too, a political ambience in which only the absurd politico-religious posturings of the conflicting factions is regarded as valid political debate. The promoters of the Agreement, the British and Irish governments claim that it represents a reasonable compromise between the parties and the political spin masters have coined the phrase, “Some gain and some pain” for all.

Paisley and his hate-mongers as well as the Orange Order and the corresponding lunatic fringes of Irish nationalism are mounting campaigns to encourage a “No” vote in the impending referendum. Given that these people see the alternative to the Agreement as a fight to the finish, one would think their lunacies would be rejected out-of-hand by the electorate on 22 May.

Richard Montague

[In our next issue we will analyse the position of the main participants in the aftermath of the 22 May referendum.]

Catholicism in disgrace (2006)

From the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Canada, the United States, Australia and elsewhere, but especially in Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church stands in disgrace, following the plethora of revelations about the activities of paedophiles and other types of abusers among its clergy. Obviously the structure of the Church and the often uncanny power its priests and bishops have over a subservient laity must make it a target for paedophiles and sadists. But the real and utterly appalling shame of the Church was its subsequent treatment of the abused and its frenetic efforts to cover up by lies and other deceits the contemptible behaviour of its servants.

Was it purely coincidence that the greatest abuse outside Ireland took place in Canada, the US and Australia, in mainly Irish Catholic areas and under the tutelage of the Irish Christian Brothers and Irish priests? Here we look at the historic role of Catholic priests and of Catholic institutions in Ireland over the centuries and for the source of the awesome power and the cavalier attitude of a now-disgraced Church.

The Roman Catholic Church (and, to a lesser extent, its Christian derivatives) arrogated onto itself the role of arbiter in things appertaining not only to matters of what it called ‘morality’ but to all forms of human behaviour and even juridical practice. Canon Law was the ultimate determinant superior to all other legal forms.

As feudalism yielded to capitalism in Europe and modern nation states were freed from the political hegemony of the so-called Holy Roman Empire, the Popes and their cardinals were forced to concede to widening democratic forms which were historically anathema to Rome. Still, even in countries where Roman Catholicism had been politically and morally overshadowed by various forms of Protestantism, different Popes cautioned against democratic concessions to the people.

According to Pope Leo XIII (Encyclical, Immortale Dei ‘On the Christian Constitution of States’, November 1885) canon law is effectively superior to the civil law, having derived from Jesus Christ through Peter and the apostles to the Church:

“In very truth, Jesus Christ gave his apostles unrestrained authority in sacred matters together with the genuine and most true power of making laws, as also with the duplex right of judging and punishing which flow from that power.”

By then, of course, such nonsense was a fatuous Popish aspiration which was in conflict with the material conditions of life in most of Europe. The power to make and enforce laws and the right and the power to punish in pursuit of such laws was now in the possession of the bourgeoisie and its god was profit.

Ireland

Ireland nestled on the western flank of Europe, its natural development frustrated by its proximity to its powerful neighbour, England. According to legend, Ireland had been Christianised by St Patrick in the fifth century AD but, as in many other places, the Christian proselytizer appeared to have fashioned the new faith to suit the territory, or the native Celtic tribes adjusted it to suit their customs. Druidic Ireland might have accepted the Christian God but it did not give up its Druidic ways nor did it submit to the authority of Rome.

Effectively, the Celtic Christian Church was set within the organisational norms of the clan system. Each clan elected its own bishops and priests, which meant that there were a great number of clan-nominated bishops whose episcopal authority was the writ and the power of the clan.

Eventually in the 12th century Pope Adrian IV in a bull Laudabiliter gave authority to King Henry II of England to invade Ireland and “enlarge the bounds of the Christian faith to the ignorant and rude and to extirpate the roots of vice from the field of the Lord”. In the “Lord’s Field”, as perceived by Rome, the easy moral attitudes and forms of social organisation enjoyed by the Irish were proscribed and as the historian P. Beresford Ellis points out, “The Irish clergy had embraced feudalism (the social system underpinning Roman Catholicism) a system repugnant to the ordinary Irishman long before it was enforced in Ireland”. Whatever the wishes of the Church, the de facto imposition of feudalism in Ireland would take another five torturous centuries.

Outside that area of Leinster, known as “The Pale”, on the eastern side of Ireland, the native Irish clans resisted the incursion of English authority. Initially, within the Pale bishops and abbots, in accordance with the feudal system, became barons under the crown but later Anglo-Norman clerics were rewarded with appointments to Irish livings – inevitably to the chagrin of the native clergy.

In the centuries that followed ownership of land and other forms of property were increasingly denied to the native Irish. But England was still a Catholic country and thus priests and bishops in Ireland, while being denied the more influential positions within the Church, did not suffer any other forms of proscription from the government. Outside the Pale the power of the priest and the Church within the atrophying world of the clans prospered, especially within the province of education.

The war of the two kings

It is argued that it was this ‘prospering’, the strength of the Church and its priests in Ireland, that withstood the force of the Reformation when England became Protestant. Certainly, after the Reformation, and especially after the defeat of the English Catholic Stuart, King James II, in 1691, the Catholic Church and its priests were to suffer legal proscription and vicious persecution. Ironically, James’s defeat in Ireland was at the hands of the Central European powers organised under the terms of the Treaty of Augsburg, and the commander of the victorious forces was William, Prince of Orange, James’s Protestant son-in-law – the famous King Billy, who, despite the subsequent persecution of Presbyterians as well as Catholics by his government is immortalised in the folk memory of Ulster loyalists.

This persecution of Irish Protestantism’s largest denomination as well as Catholics ‘and other dissenters’ was the result of the Establishment of the Episcopalian Church, which made the practice of other religions illegal and subject to severe penalties, including confiscation of property. Later, in 1719 Parliament passed an Act of Toleration granting relief from the Penal Laws to Presbyterians but the Act made no concessions to Catholics. In the years following the formalisation of laws against the Catholic Church and its members some 5,000 Catholics became Anglicans, but the overwhelming majority of the native Irish were mere ‘tenants-at-will’ on smallholdings without either security of tenure or fixity of rents; in fact they were outlaws in the land of their birth.

It was in such conditions that the Catholic Church and its priests, not always speaking with the one voice, gained overwhelming influence over the minds of the people. All forms of agrarian unrest, inevitable under persecution, were roundly condemned by the Church. But the priests were close to the people, their only articulate ally and, almost in spite of the contempt of the hierarchy for the peasantry, their influence over the minds of the people became more telling. The English government was a brutal foreign power visibly persecuting priest and people. Inevitably the Church, in the form of its priests, became the powerful institutional stabilising factor in the bitter lives of an inarticulate, harassed and brutalised people.

Excommunicated IRA members

The Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829 gave formal legal recognition to the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland; by then the power of the Church and its religious fraternities was awesome. It wasn’t only in matters of birth, marriage and death that the power of the church was evident; almost every sort of activity, business, political or sporting had the ubiquitous priest and in the structure and content of education the power of the Church was paramount.

As the Church-supported Irish National Party fell into decay before the burgeoning power of Sinn Fein after 1905, clerical influence was transferred to the latter party though the official organ of Irish Catholicism condemned the Republican Rising of 1916 as ‘an act of brigandage’ and supported the British execution of the rebel leadership. Similarly, during the subsequent guerrilla war (1919-22) the Church condemned the IRA and excommunicated its members, but in the main the old priestly stalwarts were there to lend support and comfort – and, perhaps, save the Church from its own error of judgement.

The guerrilla war ended with a British government-enforced partitioning of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. For the zealots and bigots of Catholicism and Protestantism it seemed a red-letter day, for it lent to each in their respective areas virtually untrammelled political and social influence.

In the north the political agents of the linen lords and the industrial capitalists declared that they had a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people, while the Protestant churches cosied up to a system of sectarian discrimination designed to hurt workers who were Catholics and fool workers who were Protestants into believing that their slums and their miserable life styles made them superior to their even more miserable class brethren.

Surrender

In the south, all the political parties surrendered to the arrogance and deceits of the Catholic Church and its institutions. The minds of the young were given over to priests, nuns and Christian Brothers for an ‘education’ unquestionably based on a morbid, insular Catholicism. As if that was not bad enough, as we now know, in many of the institutions run by Catholic religious orders children were being physically and sexually abused and the Church was tolerating this abuse.

The scandal of the Magdalene laundries, which was highlighted by BBC, ITV and to its credit RTE, demonstrated the quite remarkable power the priests had over an acutely educationally deprived people. The laundries were operated by the Sisters of Mercy (sic!) who brutally exploited slave labour to carry out their function. The slaves were young women who had been abandoned in pregnancy, or who showed promise of behaviour alien to the views of their families. In many cases a priest requested or persuaded a child’s parents to abandon their child to these institutes of brutality and slavery for ‘the good of the child’s soul’. One old woman who had only been released in the late sixties from this dreadful servitude told a television audience how the priest had approached her parents when she was young and advised them that their daughter’s good looks could “present an occasion for sin”.

When a young doctor who in his practice had experienced the ravages of tuberculosis became Minister of Health in the Coalition government of 1948 he promulgated a Bill to give free medical care to expectant mothers and children under the age of five. The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin wrote to the then Taoiseach complaining that such state interference could not be tolerated in a Catholic country. In France, Italy or any other Catholic country such absurd temerity would have been laughed at; in Catholic Ireland both the Bill and its political sponsor were dropped.

But the bishops could not control the airwaves nor could they control Irish capitalism’s demand for widening of the education curriculum. Irish Television still placates the bishops with a silence for the Angelus; it is an acknowledged embarrassment but as in all other countries the value-system and vulgarities of global capitalism’s unitary culture overshadows the morbid doctrines of the Church and sometimes even exposes its institutions for the moral cesspits they are.

Richard Montague

A hundred years of Northern Ireland (2021)

From the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

A country, whose prospects and longevity many people must have doubted at the time of its inception, is set to have its one hundredth anniversary commemorated this year. Northern Ireland is preparing to celebrate its centenary in summer 2021 and by extension, the current version of the British state (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) will also mark 100 years of formal existence. For most countries, plans for such events are generally non-controversial and can engender a range of emotions varying from enthusiasm to indifference in the citizenry depending on how patriotic people feel and the level of identification they have with ‘their’ country. This is not the case for Northern Ireland and the ‘celebrations’ are likely to be quite muted. Indeed, for one of the governing parties in Belfast, Sinn Fein, its core, defining objective is the permanent elimination of the state.

Something else that is noteworthy is that in the other three nations that make up the UK, there appears very little awareness or interest in the significance of this coming event with the news agenda and public concerns dominated by COVID and the practical implications of Brexit. Furthermore, the centenary of Northern Ireland must logically mark a centenary for the state existing south of the border but no parallel or corresponding ceremony of any kind is at the moment planned for the Republic of Ireland. The peculiar position of Northern Ireland makes this an issue of interest to socialists. For most countries, there is a tacit acceptance of the legitimacy of the state amongst the population even if for purely pragmatic reasons. Because of the pervading national consciousness, there usually is a consensus of support for these commemorations even if many individuals are not actively involved. Given socialists’ antipathy to all nationalist ideologies, the reasons behind the ambiguous attitude to the usual bout of flag-waving and anthem-bellowing that usually accompanies such events is worth exploring.

The invention of the state of Northern Ireland, while not a temporary measure per se, was never really intended to result in a permanent new entity. It was set up as a matter of political expediency, as the only solution to the irreconcilable demands of Irish Nationalists and Unionists on the island of Ireland. For the British government of the time, it seemed the only workable outcome to what had been an intractable problem even though its arbitrariness and shortcomings were always evident. The border was never envisaged to be a full international frontier between two sovereign nations but an internal line demarcating two clashing ethnic groups living in a part of the United Kingdom. Its creation had all the hallmarks of a desperate government grasping at any solution to remove, even in the short term, an exasperating irritant.

Origins

The origins and validity of the state of Northern Ireland have been long studied and debated. In the early years of the seventeenth century, during the reign of James I, the organised and large-scale colonisation of a part of the island of Ireland, the northern province of Ulster, by people from northern England and southern Scotland was initiated. By the end of that century, the majority of the people in the province were British settlers and their descendants; Protestant in religion compared to the native or indigenous Irish who were invariably Catholic. However, and a point that would achieve great significance subsequently, the colonists were not uniformly distributed across the nine counties that would constitute the province but tended to be concentrated in the six more north-easterly counties. So as a result of this mass immigration, from the eighteenth century onwards, Ulster began to diverge significantly from the rest of Ireland in terms of economy and society. For a start, the province became much more prosperous than the rest of the country. It was regarded as being more dynamic and innovative than the South and a seedbed for new technologies, new industries, radical political ideas, and more modern social conventions. In some respects, it occupied a position in Ireland that California is reputed to have in the United States, being the part of the country that leads the way in adopting future trends. Indeed, during the nineteenth century, the local city of Belfast had overtaken the traditional Irish capital of Dublin in population and economic importance.

Because the whole island was governed from London (and became constitutionally united with Britain in 1801 to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland), the divergence between the two parts of the country was initially not a troubling issue for the government in London. However, as the nineteenth century progressed, a growing sense of Irish nationalism began to develop amongst the Catholic population who predominated in most of the southern part of the island. This led to a demand from them for the political separation of Ireland and Britain and the creation of an independent, all-island nation. This was resisted by the local Protestant majority in Ulster who believed their prosperity was vitally linked to remaining within the UK. After a considerable period of political turmoil, that had started in the mid to late nineteenth century, the solution finally adopted by the London government in 1921 was the formation of two regimes on the island of Ireland. The southern state, initially organised as a dominion state in the British Empire, would eventually become the fully independent Republic of Ireland; and the northern state was a devolved administration, with its own Parliament and government in Stormont, but subsidiary to Westminster and remaining within the UK.

The delineation of the border between the two states was a matter of much political passion at the time and fundamentally settled by sectarian considerations. Northern Ireland would consist of those six counties of the nine-county province of Ulster that would ensure a secure Unionist (at the time regarded as being synonymous with Protestant) voting majority and with a large enough land mass to be sustainable and not just to become a small British enclave on the island of Ireland. This meant the borders of the state were defined not by any geographical or historical landmarks but by the religious allegiances of the people. It resulted in a northern state with a two-thirds Protestant population, who generally welcomed its creation and sincerely believed it guaranteed their very continued existence, while simultaneously containing a one third, Nationalist and Catholic minority, some of whom bitterly resented the imposed new arrangement and yearned to be reunited with their southern co-religionists.

For the first fifty years of its existence, Northern Ireland could be regarded as performing quite satisfactorily although having to weather occasional periods of Republican violence against the state from elements of the discontented Nationalist minority. Whilst being fully democratic in terms of contemporary liberal European norms, (regular elections, a free press, independent judiciary, etc.) it had an authoritarian, majoritarian flavour in its conduct towards the minority Catholic population. Its leaders and senior government ministers tended to be drawn from the wealthy, large land-owning, Ascendancy class, many with some military background and intimately connected to the leading members of the Tory party in London at the time. Its single greatest achievement and ‘selling point’ was that it considerably outperformed the South in economic terms and thus ensured a better standard of living for all its citizens, though Catholics were always relatively disadvantaged. Its improved prosperity was partly due to its own local efforts, the significant amount of funding it received from the British Exchequer and the idiosyncratic and inept economic performance of the South under the leadership of its anachronistic leader, De Valera. This superior performance was important to the Stormont regime who always recognised the implicit economic rivalry it had with Dublin and realised that its continued secure existence was in part predicated on exceeding its southern neighbour. In fact, both North and South had a superficially antagonistic but mutually beneficial co-existence. In public propaganda, both justified the need for their survival by reference to the religious intolerance and bigotry that they claimed was prevalent in the other jurisdiction while absent in their own. However, the Republic had one trump card in that game of bogus moral high ground of tolerance; while Northern Ireland had a significant and growing Catholic minority who remained a distinct entity, the Protestant population of the Republic was always much smaller and declined so rapidly after 1921 that its remaining residual elements had no choice but to accept assimilation in the state.

While the Unionist leaders in Stormont were aware of the growing challenges posed by the Civil Rights movement that had begun in the mid-1960s, there seemed a certain complacency present regarding the future of the northern state. Coming up to its fiftieth anniversary, preparations were made to mark the event which was to be known as Ulster ’71. It was planned by then local Prime Minister Terence O’Neill before he resigned in 1969. Like all such ceremonies, its aim was to demonstrate ‘progress’ and to establish the forward-thrusting modernity of the state to the citizens. Also, it had the long-standing aim for Northern Ireland to showcase itself to Great Britain, to remind the mainland that it was still there and was a useful and important component of the whole nation. Notwithstanding its achievements, some Unionists tended to be defensive and insecure about how Ulster was perceived by the British public and anxious to display their worth to their compatriots in Britain. Looking back there is a poignancy to the events shown in the films that were made of Ulster ’71. While conveying an air of superficial optimism about the future, that year of 1971 really marked the end of Northern Ireland in the form it was originally intended to have. Within 18 months, the Stormont parliament was permanently prorogued, the Government of Northern Ireland ceased to exist and was replaced by direct rule from London. After 1971, there was 25 years of the Troubles followed by another 25 years of an uneasy peace. Today, irrespective of its formal constitutional arrangement as an integral part of the United Kingdom, the province is more linked to its Southern neighbour than at any time in its history. The UK government currently accepts that it is not possible to rule Northern Ireland without the tacit support of Dublin.

Changing demographics

Looking at it now, Northern Ireland has changed considerably since its creation with the decline of its traditional Unionist ruling class and the underpinning social structures of the Unionist-minded population. Demographically it is now very close to 50/50 between Protestants and Catholics and while this distinction is still important, it is not the all-defining criterion of yesteryear. A recent development is the increasing number of people identifying as ‘Northern Irish’ rather than the previous binary choice of British or Irish. Partly as a legacy of the Troubles, it is one of the poorest parts of the United Kingdom and also significantly lags behind the Republic in terms of average income per head. It must be an open question as to whether its continued presence as one of the nations of the UK is deemed essential to the capitalist class, as represented by the British government. Moreover, its future is very dependent on the outcome of Brexit in the years ahead. As part of the final arrangement between the UK and the EU, Northern Ireland remains within the Single Market and this necessitates some checks and barriers to trade between it and the mainland, marking a weakening of the Union to some degree at least. It has the strange feature that British firms are now ‘exporting’ goods to other firms that are meant to be in the same country! In passing it is ironic to note that this Northern Ireland protocol (undoubtedly a contrived political device that Boris Johnson has embraced for a short-term advantage) has been implemented almost 100 years after the creation of the Irish border itself by a previous London government as a similar stop-gap solution.

More immediately, any move towards Scottish independence will mark a major fracture of the UK and have profound implications for the province which has always had a stronger cultural connection to Scotland than to England. A poll on the border is always a possibility and the outcome of such a referendum is difficult to predict because of the volatility of the situation. Politically, Unionism, at least compared to the early years of the twentieth century, is considerably weaker now than it was then but that doesn’t necessarily mean a united Ireland is any closer let alone inevitable.

So what might socialists make of Northern Ireland achieving and marking its centenary? Any anniversary celebration by a state is usually an exercise in promoting the relevance and validity of that state to its citizens and their future and furthering ideas of patriotism. Unlike most countries where (unfortunately) most the workers readily identify with the remembrance of important historical events, Northern Ireland’s history means that is unlikely to happen in the usual sense. Traditionally minded Unionists will naturally be eager to celebrate the event while the staunchly nationalist element of the population will probably ignore it. More profoundly, socialists do not accept the division of the world into countries as the most sensible arrangement for society. Fundamentally countries exist to promote the interests of the local (capitalist) elites. Why and how they are ‘different’ to the countries that adjoin them is in many cases a result of historical events that now have no contemporary resonance or meaning. Northern Ireland has always been denounced as an artificial state by its Nationalist detractors, created solely to ensure a certain political outcome, but all countries are really just artificial constructs. Their populations are the sum of previous waves of migrations that have occurred and the sometimes arbitrary delineation of their frontiers just reflects the outcome of historical military engagements. For socialists, the fact that they still exist and can successfully claim the allegiance of their citizens shows the power of carefully fostered ‘identity’ politics. So, while Northern Ireland has its own peculiarities, its predicament over its centenary reflects much wider issues.

Fostering nationalist ideas and inculcating a faithful consciousness in the population have always been central functions of governments everywhere. But they are aware that such activities must be undertaken with care. Capitalists need nation-states to exist but they also need the freedom to trade profitably with the capitalists of other countries. While governments need a loyal citizenry, excessive and unchecked xenophobia can damage the interests of capitalism in that country by promoting a desire for foreign adventurism. History has proven many times that war is a risky business for those who engage in it. This may explain the curious phenomenon that, with arguably the most nationalistic government in London for over a century, there is such a subdued approach being taken to this centenary event. The Johnson government recognises that post-Brexit, the drawbacks in needlessly antagonising the nationalist segment of Northern Ireland and in turn the Dublin government, can have unpredictable repercussions for trade with Europe.

So Northern Ireland has proved the sceptics wrong and got to the big one-zero-zero. Whether or not it makes it to its 150th anniversary or its bi-centennial or whatever is, in a sense, a matter of indifference to socialists. The same sentiment applies to all other countries. We seek a different world system.

Kevin Cronin

Stormont follies (1971)

From the May 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The political death of Chichester-Clark, descendant of the infamous feudal gangster Sir Arthur Chichester (not, according to some historians the greatest scoundrel in his family tree) came suddenly. His political demise came in the fashion of his similarly useless kinsman, now Lord O’Neill of the Maine.

Both men were politically assassinated by their “brothers” of the Orange Order and the permanently governing Unionist Party.

O’Neill’s undignified exit was prefaced by a series of disorders, and public-utility explosions that enabled enemies within his own party to stampede his erstwhile “friends” in the Cabinet on the “Law and Order” issue.

The police and other government agencies "knew for certain” that the explosions were the work of the IRA but after O’Neill had gone a conscious-stricken Protestant fanatic leaked information to an Opposition MP that revealed the gelignite gang to be none other than the supporters of the Unionist “Law and Order” brigade. It is worthy of note that when one of this gang was brought to Court and convicted, his sworn statement implicated some of the “respectable” people who, again following events that shook even this trouble-armoured area, helped to rout Chichester-Clark on the self-same “Law and Order” stampede.

Chichester-Clark could not be missed. He was an utterly useless, colourless individual who had displayed sense only in being born of forbears whose cruelty and greed preserved him from the rigours of having to make a living. His final panic-stricken act was typical of the man; he scurried off to Maudling in London for more ink for his rubber-stamp parliament. His request was refused and even his friends could not bear the indignity.

With old Chichester back on the lands of our fathers his few “friends” and many enemies met in secret conclave and decided that differences could be buried with principles.

A former Minister of the O’Neill government, Harry West, who became a Unionist “hard-liner” and a bitter opponent of the government after O’Neill sacked him for being financially involved in land transactions inconsistent with his role as a Minister, became a “soft-liner” overnight. He had been invited by the new Prime Minister to take a place in the New Cabinet (or, as some might call it, Westminster’s Old Cupboard!) despite the fact that the British Home Secretary had made it clear to the new boys that they would simply carry out the same policy instructions he had foisted on the outgoing Cabinet. The plums of office similarly induced another “hard-liner”, “Mr. Burns”, into a more pliable condition and a position in the government.

The new Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner, is regarded as a Wonder Boy in some local circles. The fiction arises from his sojourn in the Commerce Ministry of the O’Neill government where he is alleged to have performed remarkable deeds in attracting foreign capitalists to Northern Ireland to set up business and create employment. An excellent personal publicist, he publicised the capitalist and his fifty-jobs, attracted by the promise of cheap labour, cheap government factories, tax and rate concessions and massive capital grants, but the outgoing capitalist and the one hundred redundancies was inside stuff.

Faulkner was at the helm when his Ministry pumped nearly ten million pounds into the Cyril Lord Carpet empire. Lord went burst and was forced to go to live in a luxury villa in the Bahamas. He was at the helm also when a couple of wide-boys from London pumped hundreds of thousands of “government” lolly into their pockets in the infamous Zenozip affair. This was the one occasion when some of the crooks got caught and landed in prison, an MP resigned, and hundreds of workers went back to the dole. Then there was Dr. McDonald and his BSR factory playing financial ping-pong with Faulkner and his opposite number in Eire and again catching Faulkner with his purse strings open.

What a skipper! But he is no worse than his crew, “Hard-liners” gone conveniently soft and once nauseating “moderates” like Robin Bailie gone “hard” — why the new Cabinet even includes a failed Labour politician, David Bleakley, a Bible-thumping apologist for the worst excesses of capitalism in Northern Ireland, including the Special Powers Act, who, twice rejected at the ballot box, comes in by appointment as Minister of Community Relations!

Will Faulkner and his unholy crew succeed where O’Neill and Chichester-Clark failed in bringing back the previously-enjoyed condition of uneasy peace which prevailed in Northern Ireland in the pre-O’Neill era? To guess at the answer to that question — and it is very much a matter of guessing! — we must take a brief look at Unionism in the past and examine some of the events which brought about its present predicament.

The Unionist Party has maintained the governmental stewardship of capitalism for 45 years by promoting bigotry and hatred between Protestant and Catholic members of the working class.

For reasons often outlined in the Socialist Standard, capitalism in Ulster at the turn of the century, threatened by the probable actions of a government representing southern capitalism and the possible loss of direct access to the British market, used the Unionist Party and took the advice of the British politician Lord Randolph Churchill to “play the Orange Card” by “respectabilising” the Orange Order and promoting the most blatant religious bigotry.

Protestant workers were not the beneficiaries of a vociferous anti-Catholic government. On the contrary, the Unionist Government and the Orange politicians fought elections on anti-Popery. The Protestant workers were, by and large, as downtrodden as their Catholic brethren but if they made jobs or homes an issue at elections the Unionist politicians construed it as treason. Only “The Border” and the maintenance of a “Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people” was acceptable as a legitimate bone of electoral contention.

By the mid-sixties, however, the needs of Ulster capitalism had changed and the issues which separated it from its Southern Irish counterpart had considerably diminished.

It became politically and economically expedient for the Unionist Party to soft pedal on some of the issues that previously pre-occupied it and even to eject some of the more fundamental bigotries that had brought it to power and maintained it there.

The Unionists of the “New” Ulster showed as much contempt for the working class, and particularly the Protestant workers, as their predecessors had shown — and particularly for the Catholic workers.

No attempt was made to bring the battalions of the Protestant workers into line with new governmental thinking. Such an attempt, of necessity, would have required the Unionist leadership to have had the courage to repudiate the bigotry and hatred on which they had built their “principles” and politicians, and especially Unionist politicians, are not made that way!

Simultaneous with the so-called “liberalising” of the Unionist Government — and, indeed, in no small way because of it — the forces of opposition to Unionism (which were largely Catholic) began to organise and campaign for civil rights. In our view most of these “rights” were not worth demanding — as the continued exasperation of the minority, now that they have received them, demonstrates — but as Unionism yielded before the pressure of Westminster and the pressure of the streets so the Protestant workers, conditioned by traditional Unionism and the Orange Order to the belief that “Yielding to Papists” was a betrayal, began to turn upon the Unionist government.

The new Faulkner government is now engaged in a political tight rope exercise. On the one hand they cannot retreat on the so-called reform programme; on the other hand they hope by administrative wangling of these “reforms” — especially those dealing with internal security — and the inclusion of some Orange bully boys in the Cabinet to placate the recalcitrant Protestants who retain the hard, bitter poison of traditional Unionism.

At the moment of writing they have had some success. The purblind stupidity of some Republican elements and the fact that the infamous Royal Ulster Constabulary’s political CID are the guiding intelligence behind the British Army in Northern Ireland has meant that well-armed military thugs are almost continually involved in violent oppression, searches and ceaseless provocation of the Catholic working people in the slum areas of Belfast. Inevitably there has been reaction and, tragically, these Catholic workers are being pushed in the direction of the various militant Republican movements.

But Paisley, Craig, Boal, Smith and the other plain exponents of “Kick the Pope” Unionism are not impressed by the Government’s anti-Catholic posturings and their support among the Protestant workers is widespread.

They have brought down two Prime Ministers and already Paisley has let it be known that he loves Faulkner even less than he loved Chichester-Clark!

We must acknowledge that Faulkner and his government have been set a heavy task and are beset by enemies on all sides. Where the Catholics don’t despise him they detest him and, among thousands of working class Protestants, if he is not distrusted he is held in contempt.

And we can not wish him luck for he is chief among those Unionists who have championed the division and vicious exploitation of the working class in Northern Ireland.

Richard Montague

Bigotry – as good as gold (2010)

From the April 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard 

One MP who won’t be going back to Westminster is the Reverend Paisley.

A month off his eighty-fourth birthday, Ian Paisley announced his impending retirement as the Member of Parliament for North Antrim in the British House of Commons. If he has not retired a very rich man he must have been exceedingly profligate for during much of his political career he was one of Europe’s biggest political earners on salary and expenses simultaneously from the European Parliament, the British Parliament, the various Northern Ireland Assemblies. Additionally, of course, he had invented the Free Presbyterian route to heaven, incorporated it into an established religion catering for anti-Papist bigotry where he enjoyed the paradoxical role of ‘Moderator’.

 

For Paisley it has been a Rags-to-Riches career but whereas some parents leave their children riches in the form of money or property, the wealth that Paisley inherited was of a different coin. It was the vulgar, religious fundamentalism of both his parents. Ironically, in a place where history has injected religious bigotry deep into the culture of the working class it was an inheritance with the potential to be as good as gold

 

In the late 1950’s and early sixties Ian Kyle Paisley surfaced in the media breathing fire and brimstone, proclaiming the Pope to be the anti-Christ and distilling a malignant politico-religious gospel of separateness and division. For most his bellowing exhortations made him a figure of fun, a religious clown; but the media which would have ignored him if he had been talking sense gave him space and Paisley had an acknowledged genius for manipulating the clever dicks of the press.

 

His behaviour was so outrageous his bellowed vapourings about ‘old red socks’ – Paisley humour for the Chief Executive Officer of the Catholic Church – were absurd and his buffoonery initially embarrassed middle class and aspiring middle-class Protestants. But in the acres of Protestant slumdom, where the ruling Unionist leadership spoke the same bigotry at election times, Paisley’s taunts about the Unionist aristocracy – the Party leaders who then lived in the sort of house that Paisley now lives in – were being heard.

 

The basis of division

The captains of Ulster industry in the early decades of the 20th century had reacted violently to the idea of their political incorporation in an all-Ireland state where the IRA’s political arm, Sinn Fein, proclaimed the ‘first duty’ of the state to be the build up of native capitalism behind tariff walls and import quotas. Such a policy would have been ruinous to the well-developed industrial capitalism of the north that had effectively been nurtured within the political structure of British capitalism and remained dependant for its market on what was then called Empire Preference.

 

This was the core issue that had created division between the two parts of Ireland. Ulster capitalism had developed with British capitalism after the Industrial Revolution, Throughout the rest of the country economic development had been inhibited by an especially restrictive type of landlordism. When a native bourgeoisie did emerge in the latter part of the 19th century its political demand, articulated first by the Irish Parliamentary Party and later by Sinn Fein, was the legislative freedom to protect its fledgling capitalism from, in the words of Sinn Fein ’English and other foreign capitalists’.

 

The issue was a conflict of interests between the Ulster capitalists and their market requirements and a burgeoning southern capitalism but, inevitably, it was the working class that provided the foot soldiers and took the casualties. So truth and lies were mulled in a vile concoction of hatred to motivate the troops.

One side of that vile concoction represented Ian Paisley’s knowledge of history which he welded onto a particularly virulent brand of religious fundamentalism as a tribal battle cry. It was not a new weapon; Lord Randolph Churchhill, Edward Carson, Lord Craigavon and their political ilk had used it successfully.

 

Gutter politics

But these were new times. The British Government had made known to the Unionist government its embarrassment when the architect of South Africa’s Apartheid laws, Hendryk Frensch Verwoerd, responded to British government criticism by saying he would give up his restrictive legislation in exchange for the British tolerated Northern Ireland "Special Powers Act" .

 

Paisley probably saw this as a compliment but in the higher echelons of Unionism religious sectarianism was becoming considerably less strident. The effects of the 1966 Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement, the post-war decline of heavy industry – severely felt in Northern Ireland – and the enticements of the impending European Union were reflected in a diminution of the old bigotries. Elements in the governing Unionist Party, like the Prime Minister, the aristocratic Captain O’Neill, were less inclined to don the gutter raiment of sectarian politics. But that gutter and its political opportunities were still there and gutter politics was a Paisley speciality.

 

The easing of the political climate between the two Governments in Ireland became manifest when Captain O’Neill invited his southern counterpart, Sean Lemass, to visit Stormont. However, the delicacy of the rapprochement was pointed up by the fact that O’Neill’s cabinet colleagues were not told about it beforehand,

 

Paisley got word of the impending visit, probably from elements within the police, and when Lemass’s car arrived at Stormont he attacked it – with snowballs! That was the evening’s main item of news!

He seemed impervious to embarrassment. On one occasion the courageous Methodist preacher, Dr Donald Soper, addressed an outdoor meeting in Northern Ireland. Paisley attended and threw a Bible at him. Soper, a graduate of Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park complimented Paisley for keeping his hat on as a protection against roving woodpeckers!

 

Border campaign and IRA surrender

In 1956 the, then, Leninist-influenced IRA, under pressure from a new republican terrorist aspirant in Ulster, commenced a ‘Border’ campaign in a blaze of glory. IRA personnel raided a British Army barracks in Armagh and removed a substantial quantity of military ordinance under the noses of careless squaddies. It was the IRA’s single victory in a desultory, attritional saga which continued until 1962

 

The end was inglorious and remarkable: the IRA virtually surrendered; it called the failure of the nationalist population to give it support ‘selling its heritage for a mesh of pottage’ – a reference to British ’welfare’ capitalism – and announced the further pursuit of its aims by constitutional means. It should have been a momentous occasion for Ireland. Finally, after decades of intermittent warfare the gun was being removed from politics.

 

The IRA, pursuant of its undertaking to become a constitutional political organisation, established Republican Clubs pledged to fight constitutionally for universal suffrage in local government elections, as well as an end to gerrymandering of local government ward boundaries and religious discrimination in employment and housing.

 

Unionist control of an area of Ulster politically tailored to ensure that Protestant hegemony would be permanent in the new state of Northern Ireland had been established by the threat of terrorist violence in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Unionist overlords like Lord Craigavon and his political playmates at Stormont showed a contempt for the working class irrespective of its religious identity. When protests about social conditions could be labelled ‘Catholic’ they were disregarded; if similar protests emanated from a ’Protestant’ source it was countered by the argument that the protesters were disloyal and were playing into the hands of the IRA.

 

The government could handle the insignificant military threat of the IRA. It had the largely Protestant paramilitary police backed-up by the ’B’ Specials, an armed Protestant militia. What it couldn’t handle was any rational defence of its social deficiencies, its sectarian discrimination and its draconian laws. Without the threat of the IRA political debate could prove dangerous. The government’s unstable Minister of Home Affairs responded to this new democratic challenge; he simply banned the Republican Clubs making them an illegal organisation.

 

But whereas there had been an insignificant response to the IRA’s Border campaign from within the northern nationalist community the campaign for Civil Rights found a ready response not only among nationalists but including the broad Left. O’Neill’s attitude was conciliatory but he was a prisoner of reaction within and without his own Party and the most violent opposition to the demands for elementary democratic rights was orchestrated by Paisley and his cohorts who have the effrontery to pose as ‘Democratic’ Unionists.

 

In the fashion of the movement for black liberation in the US, the chosen weapon of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was the organisation of protest marches. Similarly, like the Ku Klux Klan and race bigots in the US, Paisley and his fellow bigots used the tactic of the counter-demonstration and the Home Affairs minister banned or restricted Civil Rights’ demonstrations ‘to prevent civil disturbance’.

 

But, of course, there was civil disturbance; the Civil Rights people could not allow themselves to be neutered by the threats and the violence of Paisley, the mob or the clearly partial brutality of the police. Television brought its graphic pictures of violence to the capitals of the world; Paisley’s violent ranting became a media export without embarrassment to him or his followers, and it was becoming incumbent on external agencies to ‘do something’ about Northern Ireland.

 

Almost single-handedly Paisley had let the genie of sectarian violence out of the bottle and, Ironically, created the material conditions for the re-emergence of the IRA, this time supported by the people who had previously rejected it and its political objective and who now saw it as a weapon of Catholic defence against loyalist pogroms.

 

A Pyrrhic victory

Northern Ireland is governed today by a coalition of political parties organised within the D’Hondt system effectively devised to provide for norms of compromise within a power-sharing system. Effectively, however, power resides in the coalesced numbers of what was Paisley’s DUP and the IRA’s political arm, Sinn Fein. under the compulsion of the failure of each to achieve its primary purpose.

 

Together they stand as a memorial to the decades of violence they visited on the people; together – the cowards loading the guns and the fools firing them – they gave us the thousands of corpses, the tens of thousands of maimed. Together they built the ‘Peace’ walls and the ghettoes where the coloured rags of opposing tribal identities mark brands of hatred and yesterday’s foot soldiers draw their dole and envy the trappings of power which their leaders now share with their erstwhile enemies

 

For the socialist, Northern Ireland makes a good case study for those promulgating the notion that political violence is the ultimate weapon in the struggle for socialism; that ‘revolutionary situations’ can be created out of the political chaos of capitalism. But working class consensus, not division, must be the foundation of a socialist society in which the dynamic is human co-operation. Traditionally, socialists have responded to those who cite minority violence as a possible reaction to the achievement of socialism by saying ‘peacefully if we may; forcefully if we must’ . When we see the aftermath of political violence we must fervently hope that we never ‘must’.

Richard Montague

From Orange Law to Whitelaw (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

March 22nd. Mr. Brian Faulkner in London being talked to by his Tory overlord, Heath. Press says talks “crucial”. Ten hours talking . . . Brian walks out peeved. Brian comes back . . . talk . . . talk. 

March 23rd. Faulkner is back in Belfast giving the bad news to the rest of the gang at Stormont. Northern Ireland tense . . . waiting. Dark clouds over Stormont. Faulkner goes back to London. 

March 24th. The news is out! Stormont is “prorogued”, the semantics of anti-“backlash” strategy. Everybody knows that Westminster is not only the assassin but the undertaker! Orange law is dead; Wullie Whitelaw, Heath’s Ulster hatchetman, takes its place with near-absolute powers. Real change is alleged. 

Trauma . . . anger . . . suspicion . . . fear . . . bitterness . . . hope — all are elements in the emotional shock-wave that hits Northern Ireland. What does it all mean? Whitelaw or Orange law? We say there has been no change: capitalism still rules.

So often over the past few years in Northern Ireland have we seen the unexpected occur in a continual succession of nine-day wonders that have knocked many of the sacred cows from their sacrosanct pedestals . . . so many of the things which the cynics said “will not happen in our time” have happened.

The lessons are many but, primarily, they show two things: they show the speed with which political change can occur and the ability of the great majority of people to reconcile themselves to that change and they also show that whatever amount of apparent change occurs in the administrative organs of the system, they leave, wholly and totally, the real problems that affect the working class intact and undisturbed.

If, like the “Left” the Communists, Labourites, P.D., official I.R.A., etc — we were sufficiently ignorant of the real nature of capitalism, and the alternative to that system, Socialism, to take sides in the major dispute in Ireland concerning how capitalism should be organised or by whom, then we could take either side — almost with equal “justice” — and have an excellent case for rapping our opponents: But we are not “Leftists”, concerned with administering social aspirin to a society suffering the horrible economic cancer of capitalism. We are Socialists, holding to the demonstrable fact that only the surgery of social revolution, carried through with the weapons of democracy and Socialist knowledge, can bring about real change. As such we are not concerned with taking any “side” in the political struggle in Ireland (or elsewhere), a political struggle that has emerged from, and was caused by, the earlier internecine struggle within the country’s propertied class, and are, thus, absolved from the hypocrisy, the lies, the contradictions, the prejudices as well as the deliberate exploitation of working class blood and tears for the accomplishment of purposes that bear no relevance to working class interests.

We have seen anglophobic Irish nationalists demanding “British standards of justice”, sometimes even when the military stalwarts of that “justice” were engaged in the crassest brutality against them. We have seen “Loyalists” of the Unionist Party, and its fringe lunacies, denounce those same British standards while boasting their loyalty to Britain. We have seen the “Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people” take in a tame Catholic to its ranks in a lame attempt to convince the world that it was not a Protestant Parliament. And we have seen the British Tory Government sack the local Tory bigots, with all the implications of disgrace, and establish a dictatorial overlord to implement the aforementioned “British standards”!

And we could go on . . . and on . . . but, why? Nothing really has changed. Nothing, that is, that really affects the life of Paddy Murphy, Catholic, workingman or Jimmy Brown, Protestant, workingman. The regime of the alarm clock, the job, the dole, the poverty, the slums, even, the violence — real and intended — goes on and all the happy slogans of reform are turned on their head as their diametrical opposite draws the cheers of the leaders who first taught you the slogans of reform. “One man — One vote”? No! Now we have Whitelaw — and no votes! Abolition of the Special Powers Act? Now we have the infamous Act administered by the British Army with a repressive ruthlessness that sometimes makes even the RUC appear playful! Jobs? Homes? These are now the governmental preserve of the Heath administration and its wanton failure in both fields in Britain can hardly inspire confidence!

Because, so often, we saw the viciously-contorting face of Brian Faulkner vomit its blood-curdling hatred at those whom he opposed; because we lived with his lies and hypocrisy and his leadership of a group of self-seeking political gangsters prepared to stop at nothing to maintain their power and privilege, we may see in the ignominous dismissal of the foul Unionist coterie some victory. But there is no real victory for the working class, even in the satisfaction that some of them may see in the political demise of Faulkner and his cohorts. For these people, like Heath, Wilson and Lynch, or, if they achieved political power, the leaders of the IRA, the Ulster Vanguard or the professional “moderates” of the Alliance Party, are the mere political servants of capitalism.

It was to maintain capitalism in such a manner as would make most effective its exploitation of the working class that Unionism and Nationalism became political forces in Ireland. It was the immediate needs of capitalism in the nearly part of this century that exploited the divisive influences historically bound-up with class society in the country and brought forth the slogans of bigotry and patriotism, hatred and prejudice — the inane Orange battle-cries and the futile Nationalist shibboleths. The poison of sectarianism and nationalism was used by the contending factions within capitalism to rally the working class in the North behind the continuance of union with Britain, in order that the Northern capitalists could maintain their free access to the British markets, and the working class in the South behind the demand for “freedom” from British rule, so that the political servants of the developing capitalist class in the South could take legislative steps to protect a weak native capitalism from the competition of foreign, mainly British, capitalism.

With the changing of conditions affecting capitalism in both parts of the country the old friction of interest between the Northern and Southern capitalists largely declined. It was this decline and the closer economic integration of the UK-Irish economy, endorsed in the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement, that led to the closer co-operation of Northern and Southern politicians in the latter part of the Sixties and paved the way for the O’Neill-Lemass bun-worry at Stormont in 1965. Capitalism in Ireland no longer needed the unpleasant levels of bigotry and hatred that had been necessary to promote both parts of its divided interests nearly fifty years before. With as little scruple as had been employed when the weapons of hate and division had been first used, the political servants of capitalism attempted to throw them aside, and, in the process, to take credit for their integrity and political perspicacity! But, in Northern Ireland, the poison had been injected deep into the vein of working class life and the sheep baulked at following their leaders through the pens of hypocrisy to a tolerance based on the new needs of capitalism.

The rest is the history of the last four years: the story of murder, arson, brutality, torture and increased hatred and division when the working class paid with its lives, its freedom and endured privation and repression beyond the norm and the capitalist class saw its profits endangered and its lives discomfited. This was the background to Heath and his gang bestowing on Faulkner and his mob the old order of the boot!

Faulkner and his Tory hate-mongers were kicked out by their erstwhile friends of the British Tory party not because they were the Party that generated hatred and bitterness nor because they had set up an authoritarian statelet in which lies and deceit imposed the same miseries on propertyless Protestants as did hate policies and political coercion on propertyless Catholics. If these crimes had represented the indictment against Unionism, Unionist politicians would never have been allowed to relax their privileged backsides in the plushed splendor of Stormont. No, Teddy and his friends did not abandon Brian and his boys simply because the latter had been found out nor did the Leader of that other great act in capitalism’s political circus, the Labour Party, recommend dismissal on such grounds. Faulkner and his party had to go because they could no longer deliver the goods to the capitalist class in the form of a reasonably peaceful, docile, hard-grafting working class churning out goods for sale and profit without the expenditure of too much in the way of overheads for maintaining “law and order”.

A few points are worthy of note; the Party of acknowledged political gangsters whom Westminster have seen fit to dismiss are the same Party who were given power by Liberal Lloyd George’s Government of Ireland Act of 1920; the same Party that enjoyed the confidence and support of successive Tory governments up to the present Heath administration; the same Party whose political foulness was strengthened by the Labour government’s Amendments to the Governments of Ireland Act, in 1948 and whose corruption was beneath the cognizance of Harold Wilson until it became an expensive embarrassment in 1969.

And the alternatives for the future? Again it is worthy of note that Harold Wilson—who can doubt with the foreknowledge and connivance of Heath? — sat in counsel with “the gunmen and murderers” of the IRA in Dublin. It is worthy of note because capitalism will employ, and has employed, any trick, any hypocrisy, any instrument that guarantees its untroubled exploitation of the working class. And none of the contenders for power are any worse than those presiding over capitalism’s system of theft at present.

And the future for the working class? This we can predict with easy confidence. The continuation of poverty, insecurity, of going without . . . living in slums or letting the larder pay the rent or the mortgage . . . division . . . violence. In a word, no change! But, then, the working class knows its miseries and, ironically, while it seeks assuagement of political or religious problems it does not expect relief from its class miseries. Nor will it get it before it jettisons its inculcated nationalistic and religious prejudices and its notions that a society in which a minority class owns society’s means of living can provide the material basis of a peaceful, a full and a happy life for everybody.

Richard Montague