Northern Ireland: Back to power-sharing (2007)

From the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

What thirty years of death and destruction in Northern Ireland brought?

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 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.

Who better to end conflict than those who had created it? It was the First Minister in this new legislature, Ian Paisley, then a clergyman in a church of his own invention and busily engaged translating biblical inanities into mantras of political hatred, who was the principal architect of conflict for the last forty-five years.

If he had reason to hate the traditional IRA it might have been because they had publicly renounced armed struggle in 1962, thus threatening the political fabric of an Orange hegemony which was based on the threat of the IRA. Paisley’s religion and its associated politics were nourished by hatred of catholic nationalism and official Unionism’s updated response to the new political climate harboured the promise of a peace that would leave Paisleyism – the brand of bigotry that bore his name – redundant.

Ironically, Paisley’s anger at the threat of peace was shared by those republicans who abandoned the new pragmatic IRA; effectively, those on the catholic republican side who mirrored the hate politics of Paisley and his cohorts.

First killings

When the first shots and explosions in the Northern Ireland conflict occurred the Provisional IRA did not exist. On the 27 May 1966 a three-man gang of protestant paramilitaries went into the catholic Falls Road area with the intention of assassinating a well-known republican. They missed their target but they availed of the opportunity to shoot and kill a drunken catholic called John Scullion.

The circumstances of the second killing demonstrates that, despite Paisley’s bigoted ranting, inter-denomination movement in the Belfast ghetto districts had not yet reached crisis point. At 2 a.m. on Sunday 26 June 1966 four young catholics felt safe enough to go for an after-hours drink in a hard-line protestant area when they were attacked by loyalist killers; three were shot, one fatally. Later the police arrested and charged three members of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).

Thereafter politico-religious zealots, some directly associated with Paisley, carried out explosions at four reservoirs serving Belfast and a member of Paisley’s religious sect was killed by his own bomb while attempting to blow up an electricity generating station in Ballyshannon, in the Republic of Ireland. Paisley’s close associate and fellow director of the Puritan Printing Company – who, incidentally, stood as a Protestant Action candidate against the World Socialist Party in the late 50s – was convicted on explosives charges.

By now the touch-paper of violence had been well and truly lit. The Unionist Prime Minister at the time, the condescending Captain Terence O’Neill, and several subsequent Unionist Prime Ministers tried to take the heat out of the situation with puny reforms limited by the spectre of a bellowing Paisley demanding their political heads for ‘selling out the protestant people’ but the mass torching of homes had become a grim nightly diversion of the lumpen proletariat on both ‘sides’ . The sectarian police force was overwhelmed and the British Labour government, that had allowed the pot to boil over the years, sent in the army.

Another terror element

This was the period of the so-called Cold War and in the higher echelons of the British army there were those who adhered to the ‘Eastern School’ of military strategists. Their thesis was based on the notion that the balance of terror represented by nuclear warfare made conflict between the two major power blocs improbable. Instead, ‘the enemy’ would make war by proxy, exploiting areas of local conflict and potential conflict.

The main protagonist of this doctrine was Brigadier Frank Kitson, then a senior officer serving with the British forces in Northern Ireland and responsible for key elements of army strategy. Kitson had served in Aden where the practice of army sponsored gang-and-counter-gang operations had been operated unsuccessfully against the two opposing nationalist forces fighting the British there. The evidence of collusion in sectarian killings levelled against the army over the years in Northern Ireland are consistent with the working of such a policy.

The entry of the British army brought another element of terror into the Northern Ireland conflict. Not only was the army bereft of any ultimate political objective, it was heavily influenced by some officers who perceived a local conflict in absurdly wider terms, and, despite the evidence of then current happenings, its intelligence base was that of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), a notoriously anti-nationalist paramilitary police force.

The IRA (later called the Official IRA), wanted no part in a sectarian war and to its credit initially refused to release weapons to its Belfast and Derry members to use against protestant workers who were loyalists. In the wings a small group of republicans were endeavouring to create a movement that would offer armed resistance to loyalists. Their efforts were sustained by the bigoted posturing and naked aggression of Paisley, the partiality of the RUC, and the crass stupidity of the military strategists.

In July 1970 the army put a ring of steel around part of a nationalist area in west Belfast, declared a curfew, brutally confined people to their homes and killed four civilians. The curfew lasted over the week-end during which houses were systematically searched . On the Monday the media showed the destruction the troops had wrought. That destruction could be said to be the birth pangs of the Provisional IRA; the republican sectarians now had an army and a surfeit of recruits.

It would be naive to believe that the reckless move on the part of the army – a move which could only give emotional muscle to those promoting a return to militant republicanism – was an act of military stupidity, but in the background there were events which explain why the London government, which, as always, were the puppet masters of the generals, permitted the move.

The previous month had seen the return of the Tories – the Conservative and Unionist Party – to power in Britain. This gave the Ulster Unionists – the Tories’ political cousins – a more sympathetic ear at Westminster and in Northern Ireland the Ulster Unionist Prime Minister, James Chichester Clarke, was in serious trouble and inevitably Ian Paisley was prominent among those creating that trouble.

Go, so I can take your place

Paisley had led a strident crusade against Clarke’s predecessor, Terence O’Neill, because O’Neill had shown a willingness to remove some of the notoriously undemocratic practices used to consolidate Unionist political hegemony; practices which affected the working class in general but which catholic nationalist leaders nourished as purely anti-catholic grievances.

Paisley had raised the slogan ‘O’Neill Must Go!’ and it found sufficient response among the backwoodsmen of the Unionist Party to force O’Neill’s resignation. Now his slogan was ‘Clarke Must Go!’ The legend for Clarke’s proposed exit was because the writ of the sectarian Unionist Party did not run in some nationalist areas of Belfast and Derry. Again, Paisley’s activities were causing tremors within the Unionist Party whose Standing Committee was summoned to debate Clarke’s fate. Five days before that debate was scheduled to take place the army carried out its ruthless attack temporarily removing the sting from the Paisley threat.

Others who took on the Prime Ministerial role and later the role of First Minister had to ‘Go! before the present incumbent – Paisley – got the job.

By now, of course, the Provisional IRA’s murder campaign was in full swing endorsed by the notion that they were fighting a war to drive out the Brits but inexorably they were drawn into tit-for-tat sectarian killing. Additionally, they murdered catholics and protestants in any way tenuously associated with the British administration – numerous in an economy where public money underwrote some 60 percent of all jobs. Especially ruthless and cowardly, the Provisionals forced non-combatants to fight their dirty war by forcing them by threat to themselves or their families to deliver bombs to determined targets.

The IRA and the protestant paramilitary gangs as well as the duplicitous ‘security’ forces were killing people with military ordinance. Paisley brought death and disorder by threats and phantom battalions of red-bereted ‘defenders’ and midnight squadrons of men waving their government-issued firearms certificates.

Now 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 have 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

A Framework of Deceit (1995)

From the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the wake of the republican and loyalist ceasefires in Northern 
Ireland the British and Irish governments finally produced their
 long awaited Framework document. The buzz phrase contained in the document is “parity of esteem” — but they don’t
mean between the rich and the poor!

Some years ago, when the so-called constitutional parties in Northern Ireland failed yet again to work out a formula for their participation in the government of the province, some of the parties invited the British government, in concert with the government of the Republic of Ireland, to offer guidelines for a system of acceptable government.

The period since then has seen a number of summit meetings between the Prime Ministers of both countries and between the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, Patrick Mayhew, and Dick Spring, the Irish Deputy Prime Minister. In the background, advising, and being advised by their chiefs, a bevy of senior civil servants, constitutional lawyers and experts in political draughtsmanship laboured away over a very hot potato.

In early February, against the encouraging background of months of relative peace following the republican and loyalist cease-fires, the public waited expectantly for the promised Framework document. Peace, or at least the ending of slaughter on the streets, had created an atmosphere which younger people in places like Belfast had never experienced before, a marked drop in tension and fear brought people out at night; news was about a new-hoped-for prosperity as money appeared on the commercial horizon to underwrite the “peace dividend”.

Most surprising of all was the apparent transformation in the attitudes of the paramilitaries. Being the harbingers of peace, the republican and loyalist paramilitaries were given centre stage and, remarkably, the apologists for yesterday’s killers showed more understanding of the situation, and more tolerance of their opponents, than the allegedly pragmatic politicians had ever displayed. The big names in local politics, the political ratbags whose words built barricades, were pushed into the wings as it seemed yesterday’s hard-men could make the dream of peace a reality. Impatiently, people waited while the media speculated on the date for the eagerly-awaited Framework document.

It was at that point that the Murdoch newspaper, the Times (which, in pursuit of Murdoch's devious ambitions, has, over the least few years, played a sinister role in trying to undermine what passes for democracy in Britain) threw a bomb into the peace process.

Low-grade bible-basher

This took the form of selective leakings of the Framework document and was calculated to ensure that the latter was stillborn. That it was a malicious act of treachery against the British government by a well-placed Unionist in Britain became quickly clear, as did the identity of the person concerned. What was not commented on was the recklessness of the act which, if the less-pragmatic mob had acted predictably, could have resulted in an explosion of loyalist violence. But the streets in loyalist Ulster remained quiet while Paisley vied with his competitor colleague, Trimble, in an orgy of ignorance and bigotry that clearly repudiated their claim that they could work out a formula for coexistence with the nationalists.

Ironically, loyalism’s erstwhile hard-men urged reflection and restraint and the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Hugh Smyth, politically associated with the hard-men, displayed more dignity in his overtly working class demeanour and more realism in his comments than the respectable scions of Ulster Unionism and the holy hypocrites of the misnamed “Democratic” Unionist Party.

The Unionists had to make a rapid deployment into rank bigotry to avoid being outflanked by “Doctor” Paisley. He, of course, was bellowing “No!” and “Never!” at John Major and the Irish Prime Minister without leaving Belfast. With the purblind aggression and violent bigotry that has marked his rise from low-grade bible-bashing to gauleiter of his own Ku Klux Klan, he again backed himself into a corner of immovable intransigence, dragging the competing Unionist Party with him. The media had a field day and Gerry Adams probably dusted his portrait of Paisley, who has done more for Republicanism than a dozen IRA battalions.

When the Framework document finally did appear it wrapped a morsel of political comfort for everyone in complex but conciliatory prose. It did, however, spell out in clear and unequivocal language what the British government called “various political realities”. These include: 

" the present reality, in fact and in international law, of the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, affirmed in the Northern Ireland Constitution Act 1973. It is the clear position, as set out in the 1973 Act and the Anglo-Irish Agreement, that the current constitutional status of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom will not change, save with the consent of a majority of the people of Northern Ireland clearly expressed. This guarantee is reaffirmed in the Joint Declaration ” (Frameworks for the Future, page 14).

Further guarantees from the British government and from the government of the Republic regarding Northern Ireland’s future as part of the United Kingdom are to be found throughout the document—indeed, the undertaking is repeated over and over again as it has been ad nauseam by successive British governments over the past quarter of a century—a guarantee accepted by the Irish government, the SDLP and even now, albeit indirectly and grudgingly, by Sinn Fein. But even as the British Prime Minister was handing out the document to the press. Paisley’s “democratic” Unionist Party was condemning it and challenging the probity of yet another British government. After quite a remarkable bout of speed reading, spokespersons for the Unionist Party were boxing themselves into the same corner as the DUP and, as the day wore on, the character of John Major was diminishing by the minute.

The Framework document does not, nor is it intended to, address any working class problems. When Thatcher and Fitzgerald signed the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, Thatcher said, with an honesty bordering on contempt for the people of Northern Ireland, that it was not concerned with facts but only with perceptions. Similarly, the complex and torturously repetitive language in this latest document is meant to soothe Unionist fears while assuring “parity of esteem” to nationalists.

Not indifferent

Normally, the day-to-day schemes for the political administration of capitalism are only of passing interest to socialists whose task remains the same in any nominally democratic organisation of the system. On the other hand, we can not be indifferent to the slaughter of our fellow-workers nor does political terrorism create the best climate for rational consideration of democratic change. Hence our interest in the Framework document and our hope that it will succeed in ending permanently the division and hatred which has plagued Northern Ireland since the inception of the state.

Clearly and unequivocally the Framework paper says its proposals are not going to be imposed on the province. It makes clear, also, that the local politicians are free to find among their own deliberations an alternative formula for government, always providing that such a formula meets the provisions for “parity of esteem” for all citizens set out in the Framework document. This latter provision is, in fact, the only matter that the document insists on and, in the light of this, the refusal of the Unionist parties even to discuss it implies that their objection is to this single inflexible obligation.

Even though its language is coaxing and reasonable, in its entirety, it seemed to us, there is a note of finality and Unionist politicians certainly have the right to feel apprehensive. It is their own behaviour, however, that could well trigger off the exasperation of the British government. We believe that whereas the Unionist political leaders seem to have learnt little, the small political parties that now speak for the loyalist paramilitaries are getting the message. Not only that but, unlike Paisley, Trimble and their political ilk, they see that message as the need to reach an acceptable accommodation with Nationalists and the southern government and they know that, if this is achieved, the northern state will endure for the foreseeable future and the concept of a unitary state will be overridden by reciprocal arrangements between north and south.

In such a situation it is easy to discern the possibility of those workers who support Ulster nationalism, as well as those who support Irish nationalism, coming to the realisation that nationalism does not offer any solution to our common working class problems and that, while you can have “parity of esteem” between catholics and protestants, or unionists and nationalists, there can be no parity of esteem between the capitalist class, who own wealth, and the wage workers who produce that wealth.

Richard Montague

The Reverend Bigot, I Presume? (1998)

TV Review from the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

When socialists have engaged reactionaries and fascists in debate before now, our critics on the left-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus have opposed us and, on occasion, tried to break-up our meetings. We have always insisted that the best way to effectively oppose reactionary ideas is to give them critical, public exposure to the socialist viewpoint.

Preventing free speech is neither democratic (and socialists are democrats–indeed the democrats) nor an effective way of preventing the spread of dangerous ideas and political illusions. While the left have been correct to assert the view that giving repugnant ideas exposure can sometimes assist them gain credence, it does very much depend how those views are conveyed. There has been no better illustration of this process than the recent Witness programme for Channel Four entitled “Dr Paisley, I Presume”, first shown at the end of April and then repeated due to popular demand in mid-May.

This was a programme in which one of Britain’s foremost bigots and racists was made to look the complete and utter fool many us already know him to be. It was entertaining, intelligently done, and merciless.

The focus of this programme was, of course, the Reverend Ian Paisley, or “Dr” Paisley to you. Dr Paisley was filmed—”fly-on-the-wall” documentary style–on a trip as a missionary to central Africa. The programme, though a one-off, took as its reference point the recent spate of serial documentaries previously commented upon in this column, such as BBC1’s Hotel about The Adelphi in Liverpool, or its series about Unijet’s holiday reps. Just like these programmes, it was not an overt assassination–it was much more subtle than that. It was the filming of a slow and painful suicide.

It’s a jungle out there

It would be a very brave or foolish person who would voluntarily submit themselves to the intrusion of a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary camera crew. If you have as many personal foibles and outrageous opinions as the Reverend Doctor Ian Paisley, then you would have to be very brave or exceedingly foolish. (It is likely, incidentally, that Paisley is both of these things, remembering that there is no intrinsic merit in bravery anyway as any failed kamikaze pilot could tell you.) Realising this, it is probable that most of the people watching this programme anticipated what was delivered by the programme’s makers–Paisley’s self-inflicted crucifixion. In truth, this must have been one of the easiest jobs in television.

How could it be otherwise when the object of this documentary, followed around by a journalist of Jewish origins at the head of the camera crew, would only address him as “the Jew” or “the Israelite” while insisting that everyone refer to himself at all times as “Dr Paisley”? And how could it be otherwise when Paisley communicated via walkie-talkie with this Jewish journalist with the opening line “Germany calling! Germany calling!”? The fact that he went on to explain such behaviour with the comment that “there is a little bit of the racist in all of us” did nothing more to help his cause. Neither did his patronising and self-serving attitude towards the Africans he met assist him much either.

But where this documentary departed from those like Hotel and Reps was in the attitude engendered among viewers towards the victims of this arrogance and foolishness. It was possible to feel a great deal of sympathy towards the victims of the profit-hungry Britannia group who run Liverpool’s Adelphi, but Paisley’s victims were of a different type. The most pathetic victim of all was Paisley’s right-hand side-kick, the quintessential hen-pecked husband married to the Racist Reverend (only metaphorically speaking of course). Rarely outside of the Cabinet Room of Number Ten Downing Street has such a pathetic sycophant been given such timely exposure. Tending to Dr Paisley’s every whim and desire without apparently one questioning thought entering his head, here was a man who had found his true vocation in life as arselicker-in-chief to the Bullshitter General Persuviant.

This man (who we shall not name for fear of detracting attention from his under-exposed and misunderstood master) is in need of help and socialists are, naturally enough, here to help him and those like him. There are people all over the world just like this man, whose life’s ambition has been to turn themselves into human clones of Dolly the sheep. But luckily for them all, socialists have the wherewithal to reverse this terrible affliction and make these people truly human again. We have, one might say, the technology–and it is our duty to use it wherever and whenever it is needed. Let the Free Presbyterian Church be one of our starting points.

Dave Perrin

Cooking the Books: Is Ian Paisley a socialist? (2007)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is not often that the business pages of the capitalist press refer to socialism. Past experience suggests that when they do they make fools of themselves. A recent article in the Times ( 9 January) by Tim Hames confirmed this. “Northern Ireland”, he wrote, “is in danger of replacing sectarianism with socialism”.

If only this were true. Unfortunately socialism (common ownership,democratic control, production for use not profit, distribution according to needs) is not on the agenda there and in any event couldn’t be since socialism cannot be established just in one country let alone one province.

But this is not what Hames had in mind. After pointing out that state spending represents 60 percent of all spending in Northern Ireland, he went on: “The Rev Paisley and Mr McGuinness will find little difficulty making common cause in asking for ever larger public spending to be showered, equitably, on their constituencies”.

While it is true that politics in Northern Ireland is characterised by what on the continent of Europe is known as “clientelism” – where different politicians appeal to a different group of identified “clients” on the basis of getting material benefits for them in particular – Hames is wrong in thinking government spending and subsidies on and for the poorer sections of society is socialism. If it did then the Reverend Inane Paisley, with his client basis of poor Protestants, would indeed be a socialist. An absurd conclusion which is proof that the original proposition is wrong in accordance with the principle of logic the Ancient Romans used to call reductio ad absurdum.

Government spending on measures to help the poor has nothing to do with socialism. That’s reformism not socialism. At most Paisley is a reformist, even a “leftwing” reformist compared with the UK Labour Party which used to take up this position (now it cuts back on benefits for the poor).

But if Paisley isn’t a socialist, what about President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela? He features on the business pages more than Paisley. Following his re-election as President in December, Chavez announced plans to (re-)nationalise telecom and power companies in Venezuela. Horrified, the Times (9 January) declared: “Mr Chavez begins his third termtomorrow, promising to complete what he calls  Venezuela’s Socialist Revolution of the 21st century”.

More people would find it easier to regard Chavez as a socialist than Paisley, but this is based on another misconception about socialism – that it means government ownership. If this was socialism then all sorts of people just as unlikely as Paisley would be socialists.

Capitalist governments everywhere, whatever their political colour, whether political dictatorships or political democracies, whether “rightwing” or leftwing”, have had recourse to nationalisation. Very early on socialists, basing themselves on the experience of Imperial Germany under Bismarck, identified this as state capitalism since with government ownership the workers remained exploited and bossed. The 70-year experience of Russia under the dictatorship of the Bolsheviks confirmed this, as did the experience of the nationalisations carried out by the postwar Labour government in Britain.

Nationalisation – government ownership of industry – is state capitalism because it leaves all the essential features of capitalism intact: production for sale with a view to profit, surplus value produced by wage worker, monetary calculation. Only the management changes, from private capitalists or their appointees to state bureaucrats.

Chavez’s renationalisation programme is no different. His “Socialist Revolution of the 21st Century” is the State Capitalism of the 20th Century all over again.

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

IRA: Is It Really the End of “the armed struggle”? (2005)

From the September 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The leadership of Oglaigh na h’Eireann has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign. This will take effect from 4pm this afternoon. All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms” (Extract from IRA statement of 28 July)

So the IRA has given up the gun for the ballot box – but not for the first time.

In 1956 it was reluctantly pushed by its young activists to begin a ‘Border Campaign’. Within a few months the campaign had deteriorated into cutting down a few telegraph poles and issuing grandiose statements about the activities of their commandos. Away from the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic this new phase of the interminable ‘troubles’ was hardly noticed. Everybody but the IRA knew their campaign was going nowhere. Internment, both in the north and in the south, emaciated the movement and inevitably internal disputes in the internment camps began to fester among the volunteers.

It took the IRA’s Army Council five more years before it announced the formal termination of the Border Campaign but at last, in 1962, Oglaith na hEireann, the Irish Republican Army, issued what was as near as possible a notice of surrender. It admitted that it had not achieved the necessary support from the nationalist (Catholic) community in Northern Ireland; in fact it castigated the nationalists claiming that they had sold ‘their heritage for a mess of pottage’ – a reference to the scheme of welfare capitalism introduced in Britain after the war and extended to Northern Ireland.

Henceforth, the IRA was taking the gun out of Irish politics – the IRA spokesperson, the legendary ‘P O’Neill’, actually said that – and would confine its activities to political campaigns on social issues.

Behind the scenes a coterie of Leninists had defeated the death-or-glory boys of traditional Republicanism and took control of the IRA’s Army Council. This element saw the IRA as the nucleus of a political movement that would use the atrocious political and social conditions in the North as a catalyst for uniting workers who traditionally opposed one another on religious grounds. The Rosary brigade, those for whom republicanism and Catholicism were synonymous terms, were appalled by this ‘rank communism’ and left the movement.

The IRA then transformed itself into ‘Republican Clubs’ in furtherance of its plans. Up to then, the Unionist government had claimed to accept the right of republicans to use constitutional means to achieve a united Ireland. Such a claim did not represent a political threat to Unionism, which, at the birth of the state in 1921, had helped demographically tailor the territory of Northern Ireland to ensure that they had a two-to-one majority based on the religious topography of the six north-eastern counties of the ancient Province of Ulster. Despite this guarantee, they immediately banned the Republican Clubs.

Traditionally, the IRA had based its claim to use physical force on the results of the elections of 1918 which was the last general election held in Ireland before the country was arbitrarily divided by the British government. Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political wing, won an overall majority in that election and established the first Dail Eireann which was effectively banned by the British.

Six counties

A brutal guerrilla war ensued during which the Westminster politicians showed that they were the ‘moral’ equal of those they called terrorists by recruiting mercenaries who terrorised the populace in an effort to frighten support away from the IRA. The tactic had the reverse effect but eventually, as now, British ministers sat down with the ‘terrorists’. Under threat, an unsatisfactory peace deal was negotiated which divided Ireland into the 26-county Irish Free State and the 6-county state of Northern Ireland.

This ‘solution’ split the IRA and resulted in a bloody civil war between Free State forces – armed by the British – and a rump of the IRA who were dubbed ‘Irregulars’. The latter, the ideological antecedents of the present Provisional IRA, were defeated and they and their followers glumly pronounced that both the new governments on the Island of Ireland were ‘illegal’ and a betrayal of the holy grail of ‘The Republic’ as proclaimed by the new-born IRA in the insurrection of 1916. Dail Eireann, the legend went, had transferred its executive authority to the Army Council of the IRA and, thenceforth, any group claiming to be the rightful heirs of the 1916 Declaration of the Republic could grandiosely claim to be the de facto government of Ireland.

The political leader and, then, icon of the defeated Irregulars was Eamon De Valera. Despite being the main architect of the politics that resulted in the Civil War ‘Dev’, as he was known, was a pragmatic politician who realised the absurdity of further military adventures against the Free State. In 1926 he formed a new political party, Fianna Fail, to challenge the party in government, Cumann na nGaedheal (later, as now, Fine Gael) and in 1932 Fianna Fail won an outright victory at a general election and De Valera became Taoiseach. It was a bad day for later incarnations of the IRA, for despite having created the genre of dissident Republicans, Dev, who held power until 1948, proved a bitter, even vicious, enemy of the IRA.

The modern IRA

It is important to take this brief look back at the history of the IRA because it raises an important question. Following the Civil War in 1922, the split within the movement and then the desertion of De Valera, the organisation never regained any real political influence in Ireland until 1970 and the establishment of yet another breakaway movement, the Provisional IRA.

The IRA admitted in 1962 that the Northern Catholic nationalists had not supported its brief, inglorious ‘border campaign’ but what were the new material conditions that brought about general Catholic support for the Provisional IRA after 1970? And what lessons may it have for the future, both in Northern Ireland and in Great Britain which is now facing a terrorist threat of an even more menacing kind?

The IRA’s 1962 decision to pursue a constitutional campaign based on social issues paradoxically fused with an aspect of the new mood of northern nationalists who had earlier rejected the IRA. Generally, after the war and the benefits of some UK social reforms, nationalists were becoming increasingly reconciled to acceptance of the northern state. In 1965 Britain and the Republic of Ireland signed a Free Trade Agreement and after this the few nationalist politicians in the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont accepted the role (and the salaries) of Her Majesty’s Opposition. But, if they were going to be loyal then they wanted the apparatus of religious discrimination and vote-rigging to be dismantled.

What happened was that the Republicans managed to tap into this mood. Unionist politicians and fascist-type bigots like the hot-gospeller Ian Paisley, were to claim that the subsequent Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement was a creature of the IRA but it wasn’t this simple; in fact it was established by a younger, more active genre of nationalists, products of the 1944 British Education Acts, and it resulted in a coalescing of anti-Unionist factions including the IRA in its Republican Clubs incarnation.

Taking its cue from the American Civil Rights campaign, the new movement adopted the name Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and proceeded to use the same tactics of massed demonstrations and protests in pursuit of its demands. The Unionist Prime Minister, Captain Terence O’Neill, was not averse to granting the basic demands of the NICRA and had he been able to do so it is likely that Catholic nationalist anger would have been defused and the violence of the following thirty years avoided but Paisley was rousing old anti-Catholic bigotries in the unionist community – and, incidentally, using that bigotry to forge a political career that would bring rewards well beyond his modest Bible-thumping talents.

Faced with government bans, NICRA turned to civil disobedience and the government ordered the armed police, which the Unionists had traditionally used as their private army, to use force against ‘illegal’ demonstrations. Television pictures showing the police (RUC) attacking non-violent marchers were flashed around the world much to the discomfort of the British government which was the ultimate authority in Northern Ireland.

Events were hurrying towards a bitter sectarian pogrom. Protestant loyalists, assisted by the B Specials (an exclusively Protestant paramilitary auxiliary police force) torched Catholic homes; some ex-IRA men went to the Dublin leadership of the IRA to seek arms to defend the Catholic ghettoes in Belfast and Derry and were told that IRA arms would not be made available for sectarian warfare. In Belfast, Republican dissidents were appalled at this response; the ‘communist’ leadership was denounced by much of the rank-and-file and the Provisional IRA was born, leaving two IRA’s –the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA, both claiming to be the executive heirs of the only legitimate Dial Eireann. Extreme Catholic conservatives within the Irish government, fearful of the consequences of ‘communist’ influences, helped to procure arms for the new PIRA

Pawns in a game

The rest is the story of the brutal conflict that became Northern Ireland’s ‘Dirty War’. Now the IRA is standing down its foot soldiers. There were three sides to the war: the British Army/RUC, the Provisional IRA and the various Protestant paramilitary organisations. As a first step in accounting, we can say that none can claim victory. It is always the working class that make up the pawns in armies, legal and illegal, and the end of a war never brings them victory. The other thousands who died were just the innocent victims of those who were at war.

Ironically, Paisley’s strident anti-Catholicism played a major role in galvanising the Catholics into open rebellion. ‘No truck with Dublin’ has been his war cry but his hard-line bigotry has now brought about a situation of virtual joint authority between London and Dublin in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Paisley, whose fight for Ulster went only as far as throwing snowballs at Jack Lynch when he visited Stormont as Irish Taoiseach, is obliged to discuss policy with both the British and Irish Prime Ministers.

On the other hand, the Provisional IRA, whose war aim was to end partition, drive out the British and abolish the state of Northern Ireland have succeeded only in establishing a claim to be part of the political administration of the state they set out to abolish!

Eventually the politicians on both sides will have to reach an accommodation to work the structures of government established by the Good Friday Agreement. The salaries and the expenses are good and the leaders can write of a finish to a satisfactory war.

But what have the workers across the infamous religious divide got? As so many times before, they have simply been used as pawns.

Richard Montague

Free speech in Belfast (1966)

Party News from the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

The activities of the World Socialist Party in the North of Ireland are being hindered i by a ban on political meetings within a 15-mile radius of Belfast imposed by the government there. The Sunday evening outdoor meetings at the City Hall have had to be abandoned. Instead the WSP is running a series of meetings at their Head Office (53 High Street, Belfast) under the title “Free Speech Forum”. At these meetings other political groups are given a chance to express the views that the government ban would otherwise prevent being heard. The ban has been imposed as a result of religious sectarian incidents sparked off by the hooliganism of the Rev. Ian Paisley and his followers.

Party News (1969)

From the June 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite police 'protection' and a rival Paisleyite meeting, Belfast branch of the World Socialist Party of Ireland held their May Day meeting on Sunday May 4. The Paisleyites said they were holding a religious service nearby to protest about a political meeting on a Sunday, but their meeting turned out to be political too with attacks on Harold Wilson and talk of Ulster's 'great Protestant leader,' then in jail. Despite having loudspeaker equipment they gave up before the Socialist meeting closed.

The previous day, WSP members had distributed socialist literature at the Labour and trade union march. Among the other leaflets handed out was one from the People's Democracy headed Workers' Civil Rights which seemed to advocate the extension of contracting-out to trade unions in Northern Ireland, where (quite reasonably) those who want to pay the political levy to the Labour Party have to say:

The 1927 Trades Disputes Act was never repealed in Northern Ireland. This meant that Trade Union funds cannot be donated to the Labour Party unless a worker 'contracts in'. In Great Britain, Trade Union Funds can be used to affiliate to the Labour Party unless the worker 'contracts out'.

Perhaps the Northern Ireland Labour Party is short of cash and is using its members in PD to whitewash the undemocratic contracting-out swindle.

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

Is Ian Paisley a socialist?

It is not often that the business pages of the capitalist press refer to socialism. Past experience suggests that when they do they make fools of themselves. A recent article in The Times (29 January) by Tim Haines confirmed this. "Northern Ireland", he wrote, "is in danger of replacing sectarianism with socialism".

If only this were true. Unfortunately socialism (common ownership, democratic control, production for use not profit, distribution according to needs) is not on the agenda there and in any event couldn't be since socialism cannot be established just in one country let alone one province. But this is not what Hames had in mind. After pointing out that state spending represents 60 percent of all spending in Northern Ireland, he went on:

"The Rev Paisley and Mr McGuiness will find little difficulty making common cause in asking for ever larger public spending to be showered, equitably, on their constituencies".

While it is true that politics in Northern Ireland is characterised by what on the continent of Europe is known as "clientelism" - where different politicians appeal to a different group of identified "clients" on the basis of getting material benefits for them in particular – Hames is wrong in thinking government spending and subsidies on and for the poorer sections of society is socialism. If it did then the Reverend Inane Paisley, with his client basis of poor Protestants, would indeed be a socialist. An absurd conclusion which is proof that the original proposition is wrong in accordance with the principle of logic the Ancient Romans used to call reductio ad absurdum.

Government spending on measures to help the poor has nothing to do with socialism. That's reformism not socialism. At most Paisley is a reformist, even a "leftwing" reformist compared with the UK Labour Party which used to take up this position (now it cuts back on benefits for the poor).

But if Paisley isn't a socialist, what about Martin McGuiness? He actually claims to be some sort of a socialist. At the special Sinn Fein conference to discuss policing in Northern Ireland on 28 January Gerry Adams proclaimed that his party's ultimate aim was "to bring about a 32 county democratic socialist republic." But this is just rhetoric. It means no more than the utopia of an all-Ireland Irish capitalist state reformed so as to work in the interest of workers in Ireland. But capitalism doesn't, and can't be made to, work that way. It's a profit-making system that can only work in the interests of the profit-takers not those who work for a wage or a salary.

In Northern Ireland, Sinn Fein is the mirror image of Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party - it is the party of politicians who see the Catholic minority there as their "clients". McGuiness is no more a socialist than Paisley. He, too, only wants reforms to help his clients, the poor Catholics. Which is why Hames is right that the two of them should be able to get along quite well together in any devolved administration of capitalism in Northern Ireland that might emerge after the elections there next month. Not that either of them will be able to deliver on their promises, though both will be able to use the same alibi: that the British State didn't give them enough money.

Adam Buick