Office sharing in Northern Ireland (2024)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The accession of Michelle O’Neill to First Minister of Northern Ireland is a significant change in Northern Irish affairs.

Sinn Fein have long maintained that the First and Deputy First ministers are co-equal, and the Good Friday Agreement, which cements national identities into the constitution of the statelet, envisages a permanent diarchy between Unionists and Nationalists . But, this is the first time since the foundation of Northern Ireland 102 years ago, that a non-unionist politician is, at the very least, first among equals.

This is not an open-and-shut situation of demographic victory looming for Nationalists: Unionist parties got marginally more votes than a notional Nationalist bloc; and the cross- community Alliance Party – which counts as neither – saw its vote-share increase as it gained 9 seats, giving it 17 in the 90-seat Assembly. Sinn Fein themselves could only claim 29 percent of the vote, but they are very much the largest party in the Six Counties.

The largest Unionist Party, the DUP, had been using the Good Friday Agreement to stall the creation of the new Executive following the 2023 elections, by refusing to nominate a Deputy First Minister. This was rump Unionism flexing its muscles, and demanding to meet the government in Westminster to show who, despite the ballots, is really in charge. Their nominal complaint was the Northern Ireland Protocol, which imposes some customs controls between Ulster and the rest of the United Kingdom.

Indeed, as our pamphlet Ireland Past Present and Future  notes, much of the tension behind the various conflicts was very much over the question of trade barriers and tariffs:

‘Towards the end of the nineteenth century the southern capitalists and the Irish Nationalist Party were becoming increasingly voluble about ‘English and other foreign capitalists squeezing out the home manufacturer and producer’ – an emotive distinction between the ‘foreign’ and home-based exploiters, despite the fact that the latter, due to their fledgling status, were, if anything, even more rapacious than the former.’

But:

‘By the time the southern capitalists found the strength and influence of political assertiveness, the friction between the Ulster capitalist class and its English counterpart had largely passed. Ulster was virtually integrated into the British economy, dependent on its economic link with Britain for much of its raw materials and its market – not only on the British mainland but, under the system of Imperial Preference, throughout the colonies. There was no talk now of independence: Ulster was soundly British! This was the patriotism of the northern capitalists; and their pensioned political hacks would rummage the cesspits of religious bigotry and hatred to ensure that the working class got the message.’

What the DUP got

What the DUP won from the UK government was a Command Paper that affirmed that Ulster remains integrally part of the UK single market, and mitigates some of the effects of the Northern Ireland Protocol (but not all of them, checks remain, and EU law continues to apply, but democratic assent of the Northern Ireland Assembly is required). The agreement also creates: ‘A new legal duty for ministers when introducing primary legislation to consider whether it would affect trade between Northern Ireland and other parts of the UK because it would diverge from EU rules as applicable in Northern Ireland’ (The Northern Ireland Protocol and Windsor Framework House of Commons Research paper) meaning EU law will continue to be implemented across the UK, except on the same terms that a toddler accepts their bedtime because they want to, not because they were told to.

The economy of Northern Ireland is largely agricultural, its manufacturing base has diminished significantly from the days when the shipyards dominated: but substantial engineering and manufacturing remains, so maintaining access to UK markets and seeing off EU competitors will be important for many.

Also, we need to be clear, that the infrastructure of Unionism, those ‘pensioned political hacks’ means that the largely symbolic warm words about Ulster remaining British remain important; many people owe their position of influence to that story (just as much as many pensioned political hacks in the Nationalist movement do to the counter-story). The economic needs of Northern Irish capitalists do not immediately translate into political policy, but have to move through the political weeds of a century of conflict and sectarian domination.

Referendum?

O’Neill predicts a border poll by 2030. And, indeed, the Good Friday Agreement does commit the Westminster Government to hold one when there is good evidence that there would be a yes vote for reunification. We can confidently predict a degree of Nelsonian blindness on this matter, and although the courts could be called upon to intervene, they are unlikely to do so on what is quintessentially a political question.

There are signs that an incoming Labour government would be no more willing to call a referendum than the current Tory administration, with Labour spokespeople waffling round what their position would be on any such poll – fully aware that their position in Scotland is for the Union, and any change for Northern Ireland would likely ripple over the sea for new calls for Scottish independence.

Significantly, the UK government has argued that, although the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to call a referendum on independence (that power is firmly reserved to Westminster), this is not undemocratic, since Scottish people can vote in Westminster elections. The same arguments will be wheeled out for the Six Counties (which the Westminster government fervently avers is no different from any other part of the United Kingdom).

The ongoing tussle between ideologues, professional politicians and the interests of the wealthy will continue, using border and people’s identities as pieces in the great game. Today’s fervent Unionist may be tomorrow’s avowed separatist, should the winds of profit blow that way. For now, Sinn Fein ministers will ‘share power’ by picking up salaries that would have once gone to Unionists, and will get on with delivering goods and services to their constituents on terms that the propertied classes will allow so long as their interests continue to be served.

Pik Smeet

Brexit and the Border (2018)

From the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Irish Border question has reared its ugly head again.

The Border’s roots go back to a split in the 19th and early 20th century between two sections of the capitalist class in Ireland. In the South were fledgling capitalists who wanted protective tariffs behind which to develop. In the North were the industrial capitalists – the Titanic was built in Belfast – who didn’t want to be cut off behind tariff walls from free access to markets in the rest of Britain and its Empire.

At the founding convention of Sinn Fein in 1905 its leader, Arthur Griffith, put the case for the petty capitalists in the South:

‘If an Irish manufacturer cannot produce an article as cheaply as an English or other foreigner, only because his foreign competitor has larger resources at his disposal, then it is the first duty of the Irish nation to accord protection to that Irish manufacturer … Under the Sinn Fein policy … no possibility would be left … for a syndicate of unscrupulous English capitalists to crush out the home manufacturer and the home trader’ (Sinn Fein Policy, 1907 edition, p. 15 and p. 23).

The President of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce, J. Milner Balfour, put the point of view of the Northern capitalists in his evidence in July 1911 to the Committee on Irish Finance:

‘I think that any attempt to set up an independent Customs in such a way as to enable the Irish Parliament to create a Tariff between Ireland and the United Kingdom would be a very dangerous thing’(Minutes of Evidence, Committee on Irish Finance, cmnd 6799).

Dragging the workers into it

Both sides involved the working class in their dispute. The Irish Nationalists and Home Rulers, representing the petty capitalists of the South, relied on the Catholic majority on the island of Ireland. When Home Rule became an issue in the 1880s the Unionists, representing the big capitalists of the North, decided to play the ‘Orange card’, appealing to the Protestant majority in the North East, beating the Lambeg drum and declaring that ‘Home Rule is Rome Rule’. As a result the working class came to be divided on religious sectarian lines.

In the end the matter was settled by force of arms, in the Anglo-Irish war of 1919-21. The Treaty that ended this war set up an ‘Irish Free State’ in 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland, with the remaining six in the North East staying in the UK, but with their own parliament. Politically, the fears of both sides came about. ‘Home Rule’ did indeed turn out to be ‘Rome Rule’ while Northern Ireland became a Protestant statelet where the Catholic minority were victims of systematic discrimination.

At the beginning the Border did not have much economic significance despite its immense political significance as it had never been accepted by a section of the Nationalists and was vehemently insisted on by the Unionists. It assumed economic significance after 1932 when the anti-Treaty wing of the Nationalists under De Valera came to power and began to pursue the original Sinn Fein policy of economic nationalism. The result was a tariff war between the Twenty-Six Counties and the UK which went on until 1938 and which involved the erection of a ‘hard border’ with customs posts between the South and the North East of Ireland.

Anglo-Irish Free Trade

Successive Irish governments continued with the old Nationalist agenda of encouraging the development of Irish infant industries behind tariff walls. By the 1960s, however, both Ireland and Britain were keen to join what has now become the EU, but De Gaulle kept vetoing this. Instead, in 1965, Britain and Ireland signed an Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement which provided for Britain to abolish from 1 January 1966 all tariffs on Irish imports while Ireland would gradually reduce and eventually abolish tariffs on imports from the UK. From that point on, the economic significance of the border was considerably reduced. Even more so after Britain and Ireland both joined the EU in 1973 and its customs union (erecting a common external tariffs on imports from outside the EU). The border still existed but, following the 1998 Good Friday agreement had become less politically contentious.

It has become a bone of contention again because of Brexit or, rather, because of the British government’s political decision to interpret Brexit to mean withdrawing not just from the EU’s political institutions but also from the customs union and single market and its common standards.

Withdrawal from the customs union means that the UK would no longer have to impose the same tariff on imports as the remaining members of the EU, including Ireland, have to on imports from outside the EU into their country. In fact, the EU would have to impose the common external tariff on all goods entering Ireland from the UK, including from Northern Ireland.

Ghosts from the past

In contrast to a hundred years ago, neither the capitalists of the North nor those of the South of Ireland want an economic border on the island of Ireland. Both parts of the island are now more or less the same economically. Both are eager to attract overseas investment. In this respect there is still a difference – the rate at which profits are taxed in the two parts of Ireland. In the South the rate is much lower.

The DUP have been campaigning for Northern Ireland to have the power to align corporation tax with that in the South rather than being tied to that in the rest of the UK. This shows that their public humiliation of Theresa May when she was first in Brussels at the beginning of December to sign a deal on the matter was politically motivated, a reflection of the sectarian backwoodsmen and women that they are. They no longer represent the interest of capitalists in Northern Ireland. On this issue they don’t even represent the views of those who voted in the referendum as a majority in Northern Ireland voted Remain, i.e., to keep the status quo with no change to the border.

The problem is that hatreds stirred up by rival sections of the capitalist class in the past cannot be turned off just like that. They have a tendency to continue beyond their usefulness to those sections and come to haunt their successors, causing political problems. In the case of Ireland the Theresa May government has found this out the hard way, especially as they chose to do a deal with the DUP to get a parliamentary majority. Sinn Fein, too, is a prisoner of dogmas inherited from the intra-capitalist disputes of yesteryear – if their 7 Westminster MPs took their seats they could counter the 10 DUP MPs, but they refuse to do so as they are not prepared to go through the empty formality of swearing allegiance to ‘the Crown’.

Trade and tariffs are not really an issue for the majority class of wage and salary workers. These – and the politics associated with them – are capitalist issues of concern only to the capitalist class which that class can be left to settle itself. The trouble is that, in such intra-capitalist disputes, the working class suffer collateral damage in the sense of being stirred up against each other. In Northern Ireland this impeded the development even of ordinary, reformist Labourite, let alone revolutionary socialist, politics. For years there was only one issue in every election, towards which parties had to situate themselves – the Border. It really would be a tragedy if the sectarian conflicts of the past were to be re-ignited by short-sighted political decisions, as happened in the 1960s.

Borders are borders separating one capitalist state from another and have always been a nuisance for workers, impeding their free movement. Creating new borders, or reviving old ones, only makes things worse. And, besides, is a step away from the socialist aim of a world without frontiers.

Adam Buick

Greasy Pole: Theresa - Strong And Stable (2017)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

We were told that Theresa May decided, flushed with optimism, to hold a general election on June 8 when she was hiking with her husband through Dolgellau, a small market town lying at the base of the Cader Idris range in Snowdonia. Dolgellau was once a woollen town but it was taken over by the automatic looms. Now it relies on tourists, who walk and climb or stay at the hotels there. When May was a small toddler a group of Socialist Party members climbed to the summit of Cader Idris, where one of them who was pregnant stood deeply awestruck by the view. That evening in the hotel there was a lot to be discussed – such as capitalism’s abuse of the world’s beauties, like the political conceits of the system’s rulers to the misery of its people. For May it is rather different now from her relaxed stroll through Dolgellau.

Speaking Out

One who would have been particularly interested in that discussion was Ed Balls, whose book – Speaking Out – has recently been published. This is an account of his political experiences including a previous election when, according to Balls in an advisory mood: ‘What we badly need in Britain is a return to the sort of leadership exemplified by Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and Gordon Brown as a Chancellor…’ without speculating on how this proposed combustible partnership might have operated. Speaking Out is about Balls’ time as an Oxford undergraduate, then as an economist at Harvard followed by the Financial Times and a place at the Treasury until with the election of the Labour Government under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown a succession of ministerial posts preceded the defeat of that government and had him emerging as shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.

PMQs

That was when he achieved a kind of notoriety appearing on the TV screens exchanging insults and indecipherable hand gestures with David Cameron during Prime Ministers Questions – which entailed the exposure of Cameron to lasting scorn among the fans by mistaking West Ham for Aston Villa. Those broadcast clashes earned Balls a reputation as a left-winger inspired by a passion to help establish a more equal society. Except that he denied this with his very own words: ‘But being Labour doesn’t mean that I can’t also believe in a market economy which creates wealth and good jobs . . .  you couldn’t build a stronger economy on a fairer society through opposing business; it had to be a partnership between the dynamism of business and the helping hand of government. And my arrival from the Financial Times, the pink-papered global business newspaper, to work for Labour in 1994 was one symbol of that change they were pursuing’.

Osborne

This was a preamble to Balls’ next, heavily publicised, ambitiously gratifying, personal appearance on TV when as the news came in late on polling day he picked over the tastier morsels with George Osborne. It was not comforting for Theresa May – but then how was Osborne to react when one of her first responses to becoming party leader was ruthlessly to eject him from being Chancellor of the Exchequer – even if he could then take his revenge as editor of the Evening Standard? And in any case May herself had never hesitated to make enemies. Apart from her infamously informing the Tories that they were better known as The Nasty Party there was the matter of her costly tastes in clothes, like a ‘Deliciously Soft Escada Cashmere Coat’ priced at £1950 and her revealing underwear such as headlined by the Express as ‘The Day Theresa May’s Boob-Busting Bra Sparked Twitter Meltdown’.

Paisley

Walking that day with her husband through Dolgellau Theresa May could feel easy about fixing the date of the election. She had cleared a number of rivals out of the Party, leaving her supreme to assure the voters that she alone would ensure Strong Stable Government. She would see off Jean-Claude Juncker along with those other tiresome European mediocrities. The Tories were a long way ahead with every opinion poll, leaving Jeremy Corbyn behind in what seemed a swamp of defeat. But as the campaign got under way another, profoundly unsettling, picture emerged. And when it came to that fateful day Jeremy Corbyn was returned in his constituency with 73 per cent of the vote and the Labour Party gained 30 seats. After all those confident boasts May’s party did not have enough MPs to set up a government. There was plenty of advice and predictions. In the end she turned up with yet another surprise by announcing that, along with her guilt and despair about the outcome of her campaign she would ensure that at least she could be at the head of a government, even if it entailed being in alliance with the Democratic Unionists – Ian Paisley’s original sprouting in Northern Ireland.

Crackpots

The DUP was formed in 1971 and has survived during various disciplines of militarism known as The Troubles. It is now the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly and its ten seats at Westminster make it the fifth largest in the Commons. But as it was typically known as ‘a coalition of crackpots’ it seemed unlikely that May would aggravate the chaos in her party by trying to survive as a government with their support. But that is what emerged from the chaos, with May as the titular leader of a minority government intended to operate on only ‘matters of mutual concern’, which left her enemies to speculate hopefully on exactly how it could fail. There is no lack of evidence that this will happen, if only in the recorded attitudes of the DUP leaders. One is in the Caleb Foundation opinion that the origins of the Earth – by god over six days – should be taught in schools. The party is hostile to LGBT groups and opposed to same sex marriage: ‘Peter will not marry Paul’. Northern Ireland is the only place in the UK where it is illegal to have an abortion, with a prison term of life for cases of drug-induced abortion. In December 2015 Arlene Foster became the party leader but in January 2017 she had to step down from the post of First Minister after presiding over a disastrous Renewable Heat Incentive Scheme costing the Budget some £400 million and ensuring that Theresa May’s effort to survive through an alliance with the DUP would look very unlikely. Which should divert us no more than on that long gone day on the Welsh mountain.

Ivan

What the People in Northern Ireland got for 30 Years of Death And Destruction (2007)

Latest post from the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back

It was a great day at Stormont. The great and the good from many countries were there including the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. Centre stage, of course, were Ian Paisley, yesterday’s ‘Never-Never’ man, now grinning like death in the apocalypse, and Martin McGuinness, yesterday’s IRA commander, expensively tailored and replete with effusive grin.

The event was generally acknowledged to be the formal end of Northern’s Ireland’s infamous thirty years of internecine warfare in which nearly 4,000 people were killed and some 60/70,000 injured.

Doubtless the fare was rich and the guests ate heartily. Paisley, Adams and their followers especially may have baulked somewhat at the political menu and the public exhibition of having to eat their words - admittedly. generously marinated in personal emoluments well beyond their past dreams of fulfilment. They could all be well satisfied with the price they got for their bloodthirsty ‘principles’.

Among the less great, the voting fodder who were afforded the democratic privilege of watching the circus on television, there was cynicism and utter disbelief but undoubtedly the overwhelming majority of the people of the province looked on the spectacle with differing measures of relief. If this collection of provocateurs and proxy killers was to be endured for peace - or what passes for peace in capitalist society - they would put up with it. The more thoughtful would have scratched comfort from the realisation that its not very different elsewhere.

Paisley’s DUP and the IRA’s Sinn Fein are together in government. Sane people can only hope that the electorate put them there because it was the despicable price that had to be paid for peace - for the game was always about power - even in Mother Erin’s British subsidised Fourth Green Field.

Ironically, Paisley’s antics over the last 40 years has done more to emaciate Unionism’s power base than the IRA; conversely, Sinn Fein is now an integral part of the political structures its murder campaign was supposed to destroy.

It is reasonable to ask what the working class got in return for its suffering for the victims - the killed and the killers, the mentally and physically maimed, the prisoners - were, as always, overwhelmingly of the working class. The media clarions our reward; we are going to get peace we are told. The agencies that were making war have gone into partnership - showing once again that peace and war emanate from the same source.

Meanwhile real power will not reside in Stormont, or London, or Dublin. It will reside in the cheque books of the billionaires and the multinational consortiums whose profit considerations will decide the priorities. Ultimately it is their writ that determines how we live in latter-day capitalism - even, indeed, if we live!

Richard Montague