The politics of madness (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Provisional IRA’s guns have been almost silent now for some seven years. The spin doctors of republican terrorism have now got their snouts in the political trough – two of them government ministers mouthing the same sort of nostrums and excuses as their erstwhile unionist opponents. The power of Sinn Fein over their paramilitary first cousins in the IRA has been demonstrated by the fact that, despite the opportunist manoeuvrings of their political wing, their cease-fire has held largely intact.

It would have been a bold political prophet who would have predicted in 1970, when a few die-hards of the pure faith of Pearse and Connolly established the Provisional IRA – in contradistinction to the more quiescent policies of the Leninist “Official” IRA – that the new movement would achieve such lofty peaks in the small range of Northern Irish politics.

Today, the mouthpieces of the Provos have become the epitome of political respectability. People like Adams are welcome guests of the Irish government. They can speak man-to-man with Blair and they are been in the White House. Now, internationally recognised political celebrities, they can be heard arguing the case for what they contend is the road to a permanent peace.

Slaughter of the innocents

Of course, there was a price to pay. Thousands of people have died, most killed by the Provos. The lives of many young men and women have been marred by years of imprisonment. Still others have been tortured and murdered on the authority of kangaroo courts. Additionally, the quite fearsome atmosphere of hatred and division that stalks Northern Ireland at present is in no small way the product of the IRA’s violence – the alleged purpose of which was to establish unity between the people of Ireland irrespective of religion.

In the recent elections that division was emphasised: Most of the Catholics who voted did so for Sinn Fein, allowing the republicans to claim that they were now the larger of the two nationalist parties. Sinn Fein celebrated with an orgy of flag-waving triumphalism remarkably reminiscent of the behaviour of their traditional enemies. Adams and his political cohorts are astute enough to know that a resumption of IRA violence would dramatically reduce their electoral fortunes and scupper their strategy for becoming an effective all-Ireland political force. There was another vital point that might have made some thoughtful republicans see their electoral victories as somewhat Pyrrhic. What they had done to the moderate nationalists of the SDLP, the virulent forces of Paisley’s miscalled “Democratic” Unionist Party had done to the more accommodating representatives of Trimble’s Ulster Unionist Party.

The leader of the traditional Unionist Party, David Trimble, is an Orangeman with a past. In the early seventies he was associated with the neo-fascist Vanguard Unionist Party. A few years ago he danced a victory jig with Paisley on the Garvaghy Road while the police forcefully cleared a path for the Orangemen to march. But Trimble is a lawyer with strong political aspirations and, as the leadership of Sinn Fein were becoming aware that there was no real future in violence, Trimble was coming to the view that there was political kudos in the politics of accommodation.

John Hume, the leader of the SDLP, and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein were already working on the detail of that accommodation. At the same time, while declaring in the House of Commons that talks with republicans would upset his digestive system, John Major’s emissaries were in secret talks with the Provos – without Adams advising Hume or the British telling their “peace partners” in the Irish government.

Eventually, the various strands of a possible agreement was arrived at and presented jointly by the British and Irish governments as a framework for peace. Weeks of frenetic discussions ensued in which the real social problems of the majority of the people were never mentioned. The discussions were about flags, about the religion of the members of the police force that enforces capitalism’s laws, and about reflecting the close co-operation at governmental level already existing between capitalist enterprises north and south of the border.

There was much talk by the republican side about “equality of esteem” but it was pure political vapour, the same absolute rubbish that Sinn Fein’s military wing thought justified the slaughter of the innocent for nearly thirty years. It was wholly unrelated to the lives of working class people irrespective of religion or whether they lived north or south of the Irish border. Inequality is a vital part of the mechanics of capitalism; Sinn Fein’s perception of equality of esteem simply means that they want workers who are Catholics or nationalists to share equally in the inequalities of capitalism as it exists in Ireland.

Hotchpotch of ambiguities

The so-called Good Friday Agreement was a hotchpotch of ambiguities written in convoluted language calculated to deliberately obfuscate disagreements and placate the more threatening opponents of compromise. Worse, it was a sectarian charter, institutionalising the very bigotries that has traditionally helped to feed conflict and division in the province. Both sides would give a little and take a little and life would go on with the majority of the population still enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous capitalism. There were to be rewarding political positions for yesterday’s hard men and women with all the trappings of low-grade power and a generous modicum of economic affluence. For some, the struggle was paying off.

But there were those who felt aggrieved either because they had been left out, or wanted more or were so poisoned with hatred of their opponents that they disdained the idea of any compromise even if it contained the possibility of ending the killing. Paisley, the bellowing fundamentalist firebrand, and his “Democratic” Unionist Party were outraged. Theirs is a peculiar conception of democracy in which the majority, always providing it is a Protestant majority, has the right of absolute political domination over the those who are not Protestant and Unionist. The calibre of the DUP can be gauged by their silence when, during the recent election campaign, Paisley put his sanction on line dancing, making us aware that God didn’t like it and that it was the road to eternal damnation.

Still, the DUP went to the Assembly, sat in the Chamber with members of Sinn Fein, took the generous salaries, in some cases substantially incremented by local Ministerial salaries and in others by the generous salaries of Westminster MP’s. Being a party of principle, however, they refused to sit at the cabinet table with Sinn Feiners but did sit with them on Assembly committees and, of course, in many local government chambers.

Paisley, as always, was demanding the political head of anybody who would countenance the remotest idea of co-operation with republicans. Together with the Orange Order and the majority of Trimble’s own Westminster MP’s, they were frantically engaged in promoting the idea that Protestants were being increasingly denied their traditional “rights”. The “rights” referred to are mainly areas of largely cosmetic privilege or blatantly sectarian discrimination designed to kid working class Protestants that they were a privileged section of the community. The main stumbling block, however, was the failure of the IRA to decommission its weapons.

The weapons issue was, and is, a vital ploy in the power struggle between the Paisley Unionist and the Trimble unionists for the hearts and minds of the Protestant community. IRA guns are, in the main, silent; some of their arms dumps have been inspected and sealed by the body of international commissioners established to oversee paramilitary arms decommissioning and there can be little doubt that most of the rest of their arsenal in the Republic has been compromised.

On the threshold of the last election, in the hope that his action would forestall advances by the Paisleyites, Trimble announced that if the IRA did not show some evidence of actual decommissioning by the end of June he would resign his position as First Minister of the Assembly. Obviously Trimble was not really concerned at the trickle of arms the IRA might have conceded in order to allow him to retain his post. The gesture was intended to save him from his erstwhile supporters and, since he is the most accommodating Unionist leader, it might have seemed reasonable for the IRA to throw him a political lifeline in the shape of a few kilograms of Semtex or some ageing guns.

But just as Trimble is the prisoner of his backwoods supporters, so are Adams and the Sinn Fein leadership hostage to those wilder elements in the IRA who see any act of decommissioning as an act of surrender. Trimble must know that the IRA guns are a threat now only insofar as they might get into the hands of the political nutters of the Real IRA who want to continue killing and dying “for Ireland’”. He must be aware that Sinn Fein’s ambition is to win sufficient seats in the Republic’s Dail to enable the Party to become a participant in a future coalition government in the Republic. Ensconced thus, in government in the South and remaining a major player in the North, would extend Sinn Fein’s influence and power to a point previously undreamed of.

If the Northern Ireland Assembly is killed by the decommissioning issue, it will be a major impediment to the plans of the Sinn Fein leadership and a death knell to the political ambitions of the Trimble Unionists. Ironically, both parties need each other in the further pursuit of their disparate objectives. It is a need that underwrites the madness of what passes for politics in Northern Ireland.

Paisley has won a resounding victory, another one! The difficulty with Paisley’s victories is that each one seems to reverse the fortunes of his cause. It is more than thirty years since he and his bigoted cohorts started the battle to “save Ulster”. Over the years his party has gathered strength and now boasts that it is the true representative of the Unionist. But as the party progressed, the cause regressed because it is a throwback both in religious and political terms to the grosser lunacies of the sixteenth century.

Richard Montague

Countdown to Murder (1996)

From the March 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent resumption of violence by the IRA has brought forth the predictable, worn-out denunciations and justifications. For socialists, the twin ‘issues’ of nationalism and political violence are surrounded on all sides by capitalist hypocrisy and nonsense

Some time before the 9th February, the Army Council of the IRA met somewhere in Ireland. These seven people, representing the minuscule Irish Republican Army, decided to recommence their war with a massive bomb in London. Effectively, this decision resulted in the death of two men and the injuring of scores of people none of whom had any power of decision in relation to the political situation in Ireland.

The seven members of the Army Council based the legitimacy of their right to kill other human beings on the result of elections held in Ireland in 1918 when, with a minority vote of the people of Ireland, Sinn Fein won a decisive electoral victory and an endorsement of its claim to speak for tile people of Ireland. Even the name that the 1996 Army Council used in its statement ending seventeen months of ceasefire was a throw back to the twenties and as fictious as the historical myths on which tlie IRA and Sinn Fein base their claim over the lives of others.

According to the IRA and Sinn Fein the results of the 1918 election remain valid today — more than three quarters of a century later — because the British government of the time used violence to frustrate the establishment of a politically independent Ireland by Sinn Fein who, in accordance with the peculiarities of what passes for democracy in capitalism, had been given a mandate to establish an Irish republican state.

Transfixed in time

Based on this logic the IRA and Sinn Fein see the changing population of Ireland as transfixed in time without the right to waver from the decision of its dead generations. Those dead generations were essentially conservative and reactionary; largely Catholic, they would have bitterly opposed womens’ rights, abortion, divorce and many other issues that Sinn Fein supporters currently espouse.

As for Sinn Fein itself, in 1918 a primary object of its vision of independence was the legislative right to afford trade protection for a fledging southern Irish capitalism. Again and again, from its establishment in 1905, Sinn Fein leaders had reiterated the importance they placed on the question of protecting the south’s nascent capitalist industries. Indeed it was the implications of this very policy for the northern capitalists, whose highly developed industries were dependent on the British home market and Empire Preference that fuelled much of the conflict and which was translated by the politicians into nationalistic and religious bigotry.

Sinn Fein might still emphasise its national capitalist credentials for its American backers but at home it uses the lexicon of the Left. In essence, its strategy for employment, housing and education is to demand — ironically, from what it sees as the British occupying power in Ireland — massive financial intervention. In other words, it has reserved the right to change completely the policies on which it fought the 1918 elections and yet insists that the people of modem Ireland have to abide by the electoral decisions of their grandparents!

The Army Council

Given the power which the IRA reserves for its Army Council, the power over life and death for anyone on these islands — or indeed, further afield, if these mysterious seven people so decide — it is fair to ask who are they and how did they come by their awesome power.

The secret lies in the interpretation Sinn Fein and the IRA put upon the results of that famous election in 1918. Sinn Fein became the government of a mythical Irish Republic, a new 32-county independent Irish state and the IRA became the army of the Irish republic. The new ‘government’ reserved the right to delegate its powers to the army’s controlling body, the Army Council of the IRA. With the luxury of perpetual power without the inconvenience of accepting any of the subsequent electoral verdicts of the people of Ireland, north or south, the IRA, which, at some points in its history has numbered only a score of largely inactive members, can elect seven people, unknown to the general public and even to republican supporters, who have power over the lives of people and power to repudiate any democratic decision of the people.

It is the current Army Council, seven people who can seriously believe they have rights over and above the whole people of these islands or of Ireland alone, who have decided to revert again to the bomb and the bullet. That people who can accept such nonsense can wield such power is frightening but, despite the selective and blinkered condemnations of politicians and opinion formers — whose grossly undemocratic powers are, also, frightening — what passes for freedom and democracy in capitalist society has usually been founded on force and, always, capitalist peace is, at best, an accommodation between conflicting interests.

John Major and his pompous representative in Northern Ireland, Patrick Mayhew, were indignant about the decision of the IRA Army Council to end the ceasefire. Both pointed out, as we have so often done in the past, that the Provisional IRA have no democratic mandate to wage war. This, of course, can not be challenged but when Major and Mayhew make the claim it is on the back of the assumption that Britain has a democratic right to wage war in Ireland — for, of course the role of the British Army in Northern Ireland has been to resist a challenge to British power in Ireland. When, it is reasonable to ask, did a British government seek a mandate from the people of Ireland, or, even, the people of the UK, to rule Ireland and to wage war in pursuit of that rule?

Violence

Pressed to a defence of its violence, the IRA draws analogies with its opponents and, of course, the British and the Unionists have been as ready as the IRA to use violence, or the threat of violence, when it suited their interests. To the socialist, however, the claim that you are no worse than your opponents seems a poor defence!

Britain’s role over the centuries has been brutal in Ireland and at times almost genocidal. Neither the Irish nationalists nor the unionists have been shy about using violence and in the present century it was the threat of illegal armed violence by the Unionists and their friends in the British Conservative Party that presaged the nationalist violence of 1916 and 1919/22.

The ceasefire broke down because of the utter hypocrisy of the British Government and the Unionists and the absurd strategy of the seven people who form the IRA’s Army Council. The argument that they will not negotiate with men of violence used by interests that are themselves no strangers to violence is hypocritical and when viewed empirically, shown to be nonsense. When Unionists use this form of cant it simply means that they see the IRA as militarily defeatable; if they envisaged the IRA as having the potential for a military victory, ‘common sense’ would gain a new fashion within Unionism!

Unfortunately the politicians in Northern Ireland have learned little over the past twenty-five years, especially the Unionists — apart from ‘loyalist’ spokespersons thrown up by the paramilitaries. Paisley was rabble-rousing and Trimble was looking over his shoulder and trying to compete with Paisley and both were intent in translating the IRA ceasefire into a victory for old-style Unionism. Ironically, Unionism’s potential victory was in the willingness of the IRA, for the first time ever, to discuss the establishment of agreed and stable institutions in Northern Ireland which the whole of nationalist Ireland had traditionally proclaimed to be an ‘unstable political unit’.

Decommissioning of illegal weapons became the peg Unionism decided to hang its policy on — as though the problems that created the desire for weapons would disappear if the guns were out of the way. There was no ‘decommissioning’ of angry tongues; Paisley bellowed the sectarian nonsense which is his political stock-in-trade and, when wiser council was called for, Trimble was competing with Paisley at Drumcree!

Of course the IRA are murderers; killers of innocent men, women and children. But they are not alone; they are part of a grand conspiracy against real peace and democracy in Northern Ireland and the components of that conspiracy are the self-interested politicians who see in the possibility of peace the eclipsing of their squalid political careers.

And after the recent killings by the IRA, the predictable reaction — indeed the nearest thing the IRA may have had to an excuse — was the latent hatreds which its actions re-awakened especially among prominent politicians and journalists. It was hard to believe that the baying voices with the quite proper accusations of senseless slaughter and challenges of right were around a few years ago when Major and his ‘army council’, without any recourse to democratic consent, undertook the slaughter of the innocents of Baghdad.

Behind all the ideologies and conflicts that underlie all wars and all violence are the contradictions created among peoples by the divisive interests of capitalism. It follows that the only real ‘peace process’ is the struggle to end capitalism and institute a democratic system of social equality in which such interests could not exist. 

Richard Montague

The Irish scene changes (1997)

From the September 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

As we write, in August, Harold Wilson’s affirmation that a week is a long time in politics is particularly apposite to the political situation in Northern Ireland. The previous month most people here were anxiously scanning the daily news bulletins for some sign that would lend hope that the province’s Armageddon might not be at hand.

Everywhere the awful word "Drumcree” was spoken: cautiously, in anger and in whispers.The holy men of the Orange Order had to placate their god by marching down the "Catholic” Gervaghy Road and through other areas where their opponents would be put under police curfew so that they should not be offended when the Orangemen reminded them, with salutary intent, that they had beaten them in other places in the past.

Gervaghy Road was particularly sensitive for it was here two years ago that a flushed David Trimble, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, had skipped a victory jig with the arch bigot Paisley when the police had forcefully cleared a path for the Orangemen. Now the word was out: there would be no Orange feet on the Gervagghy Road. But the echo said: stop us at your peril!

Mo Mowlam, the new Labour Secretary of State was the mainstay of the popular hope of deliverance. What she lacked in ability and aplomb was compensated for by tremendous energy as she visited Residents’ Groups, Orange Lodges, politicians, clergymen and the dogs in the street with the old, failed argument that we should all be reasonable.The Catholic nationalists were especially impressed, however; British Secretaries of State didn’t usually call around for tea and a chat and the anger of the Unionists at this newly-forged friendship seemed to clinch the Catholic belief that Mo would protect them.

In the event, Mowlam, in what the Catholics not unreasonably construed as an act of gross treachery, supported the Chief Constable of the RUC in sending in hundreds of armed police, expensively equipped for dealing with the violence which they initiated. With a viciousness equalling their violence of the previous year, they cleared the road for the Orangemen to go in triumph for the worship of their god. Ironically, the Catholic god had to do with a makeshift mass on the street because Mo and the RUC refused them permission to go to their church.

While sensible people with motor cars or the price of a boat or plane ticket were making their way across the Irish border or across the Channel, the fiery battalions of stone and petrol-bomb throwers were already retaliating. Within a few days the cost, in monetary terms, of the legacy of lunacy that motivated both the Orangemen and those opposing them was around £20 million which was within an ass’s whisper of the cost of the same religious outing in '95 and ’96.

Twenty million deducted from the shrunken educational budget or the grossly under-funded NHS was an obvious matter for concern. Last year the offensively arrogant Sir Patrick Mayhew decided that additional “security" costs should be defrayed from the health and educational budgets—on the apparent assumption that youthful petrol-bombers would stop and think about the effect of their actions on their education. The real fear, however, was what the aftermath of Drumcree would lead to.

Would the IRA up the ante? Would the loyalist paramilitaries officially return to the killing game? The newspapers said people were hoarding essential supplies: the empty streets told the general fear.

Sudden change
Suddenly the Orange Order announced that its members would avoid those areas where its marches carried the greatest threat to the peace and a week later the IRA announced a cease-fire. It would have been comforting to think that both these organisations, neither of which is renowned for putting peace and the concern for human life before the historical fictions on which each bases its absurd posturings, had suddenly moved into the twentieth century; unfortunately, their subsequent "explanations” undermined any such optimism.

Unlike the Tories, the response of the Blair government to the IRA cease-fire has been swift and positive. The last government squandered the opportunity created by the earlier cease-fire because Major’s slim majority in the House of Commons left him hostage to the power of the Unionist parties at Westminster—and the Unionists opposed the idea of all-inclusive peace negotiations. Now the Unionists have lost their veto in the Commons and the British and Irish governments have made it clear that, if the IRA cease-fire holds, not only can Sinn Fein join the peace talks when they resume in September, but that, if those talks fail to come up with an agreed settlement before May of next year, the two governments will put their own joint settlement proposals to the people of Northern Ireland in a referendum.

Problems
It appears like a no-win situation for the Unionists parties. Paisley, echoed by his understudy, Robinson, had already announced the intention of the so-called Democratic Unionist Party to pull out of the talks as has, also, the insignificant UK Unionist Party. The powerful Orange Order has asked the main Ulster Unionist Party to withdraw, too, but David Trimble, perhaps with a greater understanding of grassroots opinion, has indicated that the Ulster Unionists are likely to participate— though, as a public relations exercise they will probably insist that their public exchanges with Sinn Fein take the form of "proximity” talks.

The problem for the Unionists is the intention of both the British and the Irish governments to ensure that, one way or the other, there are peace proposals to put before the people of Northern Ireland in a referendum next year. With certainty it can be said that those proposals will not involve any constitutional, change in the status of Northern Ireland though it is likely that new cross-border bodies with considerable power will be included together with internal legislation to protect the rights of the nationalist minority under some form of "partnership” local assembly. Trimble can hardly be unaware that however numerous the opponents of such proposals may be, the majority of people want to seen an end to conflict and this is especially true of the loyalist fringe parties whose armed wings previously represented a serious threat to any solution opposed by the Unionist parties.

On the other hand, Trimble may be comforted by the fact that Adams and his political playmates in Sinn Fein must be equally aware of the desire among their supporters for a lasting resolution of the Northern Ireland conflict. Even more comfort might be derived from the realisation that Sinn Fein, in consenting to enter open-ended talks with the Unionist parties, the SDLP, the Alliance Party and the five smaller parties (all of whom accept as a negotiating principle that Northern Ireland should remain with the UK as long as a majority within the province wish so to remain) is compromising its traditional stand which has always been that only a majority on the island of Ireland can determine the constitutional fate of Northern Ireland.

Another grave problem for Sinn Fein and one that is likely to undermine the raison d’etre of the IRA’s justification of their historic right to use physical force is the intention of the Irish government to put any settlement agreed between the parties in Northern Ireland, or of the two governments, to the people of the Republic of Ireland in a referendum to be held the same day as the proposals are put in a referendum to the people of Northern Ireland. By indulging in a bit of political aerobatics Sinn Fein and the IRA were able to claim that the last all-Ireland election, in 1918 (before the British-imposed partition of the country) endorsed the right of Sinn Fein to employ the armed force of the IRA to wage war to establish an all-Ireland Republic.

This peculiar justification theory is important to the IRA/Sinn Fein for despite the fact that the opposition of the Catholic Church to their activities has bred a strong streak of anti-clericalism within the Republican movement, they do accept that there is a "moral" distinction between killing as the heirs of the “legitimate government” of the people and what they would see, and condemn, as mere political murder. The prospect of the removal of this eighty-year excuse must surely create a telling dilemma for ardent Catholics like Adams, McGuinness and many of their cohorts.

But, then, if the peace holds. Unionist, Nationalist and Republican politicians in Northern Ireland, whether or not they engage in the impending peace talks will be faced with dilemmas. Of course the consequences are relevant in that the killing may be ended or may start again but the issues behind the conflict are completely and utterly irrelevant to the real interests of the working class.

Richard Montague