50 Years Ago: The Thirteen Derry Dead (2022)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

On Sunday 30 January thirteen men were shot dead in Derry as the British Army moved in to halt a march held in defiance of the Stormont government’s ban. The immediate result was an upsurge of Irish nationalism, both in the South and amongst the Catholic minority in the North.

The thirteen Derry dead has completed the alienation of the Catholic population of Northern Ireland from the regime there. After fifty years of passively accepting the role of what its first Prime Minister called “a Protestant parliament for Protestant people”, they are now actively rejecting its authority—to the extent of regarding the IRA as a useful counter to the British Army which is virtually occupying their ghettos in Belfast and Derry as well as whole towns such as Newry and Strabane where they form the overwhelming majority of the population. (…)

The tragedy of Northern Ireland is that the present political division of the working class there reflects yesterday’s divisions amongst the Irish capitalist class, divisions which now have no relevance even for capitalism since both Britain and Ireland are about to join the Common Market and since the same international companies have investments both sides of the Border.

Our advice to the worker in Northern Ireland is, first: Do not do anything, in word or deed, which might encourage further killings of your working-class brothers, whether Protestant or Catholic or, for that matter, British soldiers. And, secondly: Think carefully about the situation to see if the issue of a United Ireland versus a British Ulster is worth a single drop of working-class blood. (,,,)

Would the working class be worse or better off under one or the other? Would there be anything to choose between the two “solutions”? Surely, in both a British Ulster or a United Ireland, the workers’ standard of living would be much the same. So would the slums, the unemployment and the other problems of capitalist society. And world Socialism would remain the only solution to these problems. The only difference would be the colour of the flag that would fly over the government buildings in Belfast: Union Jack or Irish Tricolour? Is this an issue worth killing and being killed over? No, Socialists reply, a thousand times No!

(Socialist Standard, March 1972)

Between the Lines: The food problem (1986)

The Between the Lines column from the May 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The food problem

The lunatics are most definitely running the asylum. This Week, Next Week (BBC1. 6 April) devoted one hour to a studio discussion about the problem of food surpluses. You see, there is too much food in Europe — 14 million tons of EEC grain is currently locked away in store and by 1990 the grain surplus is predicted to reach 90 million tons Minister of Agricultural Lunacy, John Selwyn Gummer, stated that "Now we're producing too much . . .  it's damaging the rest of the world, especially the poorest people" Funny that: I thought that "the poorest" people were dying in their millions for lack of food. Grain production has increased from two to four tons an acre in a very short time, moaned NFU spokesman David Naish. and this is causing major problems. Indeed, it seems that the British government is now storing beef in secret warehouses in London — Gummer admitted that this was the case but not one of the experts presented proposed that this beef and grain and all this other "surplus" food should be available immediately for free access. Had someone made such a suggestion — the idea of forgetting about money and profits and the nonsense of the market and producing food solely to eat — they would no doubt have been dismissed as a utopian crank. So the lunatics proceeded to think of ways to solve the problem of food over-production and the starving continued to starve and we have no doubt that Selwyn Gummer and the company had a pleasant Sunday lunch when they left the studio.

Make ’em work

This was the title of a Panorama programme (BBC 1. 7 April) about new policies in certain states of the USA to make it compulsory to work for the state before any welfare payments are granted. In Oklahoma it is compulsory for single women to seek work, even if they have given birth within the previous two months. No work, no payment — no payment, no money to spend — no money to spend, no food for them or their children. It's known as Workfare — a better term is wage slavery In West Virginia unemployed miners are forced to sweep the streets or help the police force as uniformed agents of coercion if they want to receive benefits. So much for the "land of the free" In California unemployed wage slaves are forced to go on courses designed to "make them want to work for wages". In the room where this course is being run is a large sign saying "THINK EMPLOYER". What can be better for capitalism than to educate the working class to be desperate for wage slavery to take whatever jobs are on offer — to look at themselves at all times from the angle of how exploitable they can be? In Britain young workers are already pushed on to YTS schemes where they are ripped off because of their economically insecure and unprotected position. How long might it be before "Workfare" is tried on the unemployed of Britain? Watching this programme showed just how unfree and vulnerable to economic coercion the wage-slave class is.

An orange fool

World In Action (ITV, 7 April) offered an introduction to a political leader who is arguably crazier than Ian Paisley. Peter Robinson, an MP who has close links with the para-military UDA, was shown to be a calculating, bigoted nationalist who is quite happy to let workers stone and kill one another for the sake of obsolete national aims. Robinson was asked why he attacked the IRA for its murders when he failed to criticise the recent violent rampages of the Loyalist thugs. We can answer the question: under capitalism a leader needs to be a committed hypocrite who will justify the indefensible when it is being carried out by his followers for the sake of his political interest. Anti-working-class leaders like Peter Robinson would not know a genuine political principle if it smacked them in the face Unfortunately for the workers of Ireland, it is they who are receiving the body blows and not well-protected, well-salaried stirrers of sectarian hatred like Robinson.

Update

Readers who followed our reference to the C4 Diverse Reports programme which was given over to the Trotskyist Socialist Workers" Party will be interested to learn that Channel Four have felt unable to deal with our complaint of being excluded and have passed our message to the IBA. We await their considered response.

Steve Coleman

The Coffin as a Weapon (1988)

From the May 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Gibraltar, two men and a woman are walking down the street. They are ruthlessly shot dead by a gang of paid killers in the employment of the British Government. The British media immediately trumpets the news of a great victory: three cowardly IRA bombers have been killed in a stand-up gun battle with an undisclosed number of SAS heroes after the despicable IRA cowards had planted a bomb which would have made the Enniskillen bomb look like a firecracker.

Unfortunately for the politicians who rushed to the begging microphones to glory in the slaughter of three human beings, the story was incomplete. Unfortunately, too, for the people of Northern Ireland, the story turned out to be no more than a chapter in a heightened saga of death and destruction.

The "brutal", "sick" and "sub-human" killers whom the brave SAS had faced in the reported gun-battle turned out to be unarmed and the bomb they had planted, and run away from, did not exist. Back to the microphones went spokespersons for the killers' employers. Ministerial comments were prefaced with. "Well . . . everybody knows the type of ruthless people . . . might have been going for their handkerchiefs but . . . " No one could have been greatly surprised when a bomb was subsequently discovered - in Spain.

“Full Military Honours”

The people of Ireland, and Belfast in particular. braced themselves apprehensively during the days of bureaucratic delay before the coffins arrived. Coffins have become a weapon of war, a Hill 60 in the grand strategy of battle between the IRA and those who provoke disorder to uphold the law. "Full Military Honours" are the final benediction that the state grants to those who, having been trained to live by the sword have fallen victim to it; a final, vital part of the respectabilisation of a foul trade. Even "enemies" are given the full treatment and. during the last war, many an RAF man put the hated swastika over a dead Luftwaffe pilot after both had been locked in deadly combat.

It's a different thing, however, for fully paid-up and licensed state killers to exchange "full military honours" with one another and allowing the same ritual for just any group of people who take on themselves the right to do what soldiers do. Having a bawling man shouting at other uniformed automatons to fire shots over a coffin draped with a piece of cloth dyed in a particular way is a final recognition of legitimacy. The presence of the padre is the church's acknowledgement of the right of the state to abrogate the "divine" prescription on killing.

It is this legitimacy which the IRA seek for their dead members. The right to indulge a ritual which elevates a fallen comrade from the status of a criminal to that of a heroic fighting man or woman. And it is because this mystique is seen as a means of differentiation between criminality and a greater morality that transcends that which the heavenly lawgiver chiselled out for Moses that the matter becomes, for both sides, a matter of principle.

The extent to which the British Government and the media had made a great victory of the Gibraltar killings in itself dictated a huge response from the IRA. If the British could make propaganda out of three killings, the IRA would make even more propaganda out of their coffins. News, in capitalist society, is big business; media people, camera crews, "experts", "news analysts" and commentators would be flying in from all parts of the world to watch three coffins carried through the sort of slum district that moulded the ideas of their human contents; wealth represented by hundreds of thousands of pounds would be expended on covering the whole macabre operation. What would the IRA do? What would the "security forces" do?

Propaganda funerals

Windows would be boarded up. those working in certain areas would not go to work, transport would be re-scheduled, schools closed. Some would stay behind locked doors while others would prepare for their presence in the cortège and the probable consequences. Members of the RUC would kiss their wives and mothers, dress themselves in battle gear, take their rifles or machine-guns and go to earn their wages by ensuring that flags, gun shots, black berets and gloves were not used to defy the law.

A pall of fear and expectation hung over Belfast. In the workplaces, comments were guarded or otherwise, depending on the religious mix of the workforce. People living in sensitive areas worried about the aftermath of the funerals, new slogans appeared on gable walls, epitaphs of vulgar censure or praise, according to their location.

Here and there, perhaps, a few wondered at it all. Wondered that in a world where thousands were dying every day from hunger, where tens of millions of lives were diminished by poverty, by slums and unemployment, that the sadness of a funeral should become such an occasion of madness and conflict. Wondered why so many young, unemployed denizens of slumdom, whose wives and mothers were every day degraded and insulted by an uncaring system, should want to risk life and limb for something that had no bearing whatsoever on the quality of their lives. Such people were few and even they listened anxiously to the news broadcasts.

In the event, wisdom seemed to prevail. Some time before the funerals, the IRA dressed four of their members in the sort of silly clothes that their military enemies wear, erected a board with pictures of the deceased pinned to it, and fired a volley of shots. On the other side, the RUC intimated that it was not going to degrade its members by having them attack the funerals. It seemed as though a stand-off position had been achieved that allowed the tortured minds on both sides to claim a victory.

The RUC were, indeed, visibly absent from the funerals and Sinn Fein organised a valedictory parade aimed at milking the last ounce of propaganda value out of the event. Still, there was no one present for them to fight with and, as the day passed, the news reports seemed to indicate that the tactics of both sides had been successful. On this occasion, it seemed, a funeral would pass without being the precursor of more deaths.

Somewhere in the city, however, a man was preparing a dramatic gesture. Like most of those attending the funerals, he was poor, unemployed and lived in a slum. Like most of those attending the funerals, he had learned to hate. He did not hate the system that degraded him and forced him and his wife and kids to live in poverty. He hated those whom he had been taught to believe threatened his "whole way of life". From an unmysterious source he had been given a gun and a number of hand grenades and. hyped-up on bigotry, he was waiting at the cemetery for the IRA mourners.

He killed three people and injured a further fifty. Like his enemies, who strode forward towards his blazing guns and the devastation of exploding hand grenades, he was imbued with a madness of anger that transcended a rational human being's fear of death.

After the charges and counter-charges of police collusion, after the riots, the burnt-out cars, the petrol-bombed homes, there remained three more corpses. Three more funerals.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

Almost as a diversion from the central drama, two soldiers were injured by an IRA bomb and a young girl shot dead and her boy friend seriously injured when the IRA opened fire on their car because they mistakenly thought it belonged to her brother whom they mistakenly thought was a member of the security forces. In a place where life is cheap an innocent victim merely merits an official apology and their funeral does not threaten us with full military honours.

But there were three other corpses that could be exploited for political gain. Scheduled for the following Saturday, it promised to be a monumental affair for, apart from the IRA, ordinary Catholics had been affronted by their killing and angered at the loyalists who had emblazoned their slums with congratulatory messages to their killer.

Again, there was no visible police presence at the funerals and. since two of the victims were not associated with the IRA, Sinn Fein management was less conspicuous. It seemed the day would end peacefully and a city would earn a respite from the threat of more coffins.

It was not to be. As the funerals made their way along the road they were confronted with a car containing two British soldiers. Why they were there will never be known. According to the IRA, they attempted to run down mourners but, unless they were imbued with the same bitterness as that which motivated the man who had caused the funerals, this seems an utterly absurd action. Equally absurd is the official story which suggested that the soldiers lost their way and accidentally came face-to-face with the funerals. In a country where working-class lives are expendable in a filthy conflict whose outcome has no bearing on working-class lives, anything can happen and the possibility of the soldiers being deliberately sacrificed by their masters for propaganda purposes is not beyond belief.

That the men were killed with unbelievable savagery is beyond dispute. First they were beaten into unconsciousness by the mob and then taken to a sports field where the IRA claim they were shot with their own guns. Television crews were close at hand; the pictures of the disgusting obscenity were flashed around the world. It was the turn of the British to milk the death of human beings for a propaganda coup.

Politicians, media people and clergymen were in demand to condemn the undoubted horror of the killings and they performed their selective condemnations with sickening dishonesty.

An end to the violence

Again it was left to the few to rationally explain the irrationality of a system that plays politics with human lives. To argue that the perceptions and values with which the state — any state — imbues its wage slaves are deliberate disguises to cover up the real problem. To hide the fact that, whether we perceive ourselves to be Catholic or Protestant. British or Irish, our way of life is dictated by our class position in society. To show that it is our class position, and not the colour of the rag that floats at the masthead or the colour of the pillar boxes, that imposes on all of the working class its poverty and degradation.

To demonstrate that there is an alternative way of living that should be considered. A way of life that will open the gates of abundance to all human beings; that will allow each the dignity of contributing constructively to the society of which he or she is a vital part and the right to avail themselves of whatever they need or require to lead full and peaceful lives.

Unfortunately, there were no begging microphones, no column inches, for that message. The people who own and control the media, like others of their class who own and control the rest of the means whereby we live, might be sickened by the coffins of the victims of violence but they do not want a solution that might involve them taking their places as ordinary human beings in the only form of society that can guarantee peace.

Richard Montague

The Thirteen Derry Dead (1972)

Editorial from the March 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Sunday 30 January thirteen men were shot dead in Derry as the British Army moved in to halt a march held in defiance of the Stormont government's ban. The immediate result was an upsurge of Irish nationalism, both in the South and amongst the Catholic minority in the North. 

The thirteen Derry dead has completed the alienation of the Catholic population of Northern Ireland from the regime there. After fifty years of passively accepting the role of what its first Prime Minister called "a Protestant parliament for Protestant people", they are now actively rejecting its authority—to the extent of regarding the IRA as a useful counter to the British Army which is virtually occupying their ghettos in Belfast and Derry as well as whole towns such as Newry and Strabane where they form the overwhelming majority of the population. 

The Unionist government at Stormont, and the British government at Westminster, see this as an armed insurrection against the will of the Northern Ireland majority, and to a certain extent it is. But it is well to remember that it was the political predecessors of Faulkner and Co. who in 1914 introduced the gun into Northern Irish politics when they armed themselves to resist the will of the British parliament that Ireland should be given Home Rule. The capitalists in and around Belfast did not want to be cut off from the markets of the British Empire behind the tariff walls of an industrially-backward Ireland. So, from the 1880's onward, they created a mass political following by stirring up the traditional anti-Catholic fears and prejudices of their Protestant workmen. The strategy worked. When in 1921 an Irish Free State was set up, the six counties of North East Ireland were excluded. The one-third Catholic minority in this area was by gerrymandering and intimidation excluded from playing any effective role in politics there. They were just awkward outsiders which the Unionist government, relying on the support of the Protestant majority, felt it could easily handle. As indeed it did until 1968, despite the occasional IRA "campaign" which fizzled out through lack of popular support. In October of that year part of the official armed forces of the Stormont regime—the notorious B specials—brutally suppressed another march, once again in Derry. From then on the Stormont government lost control and the British Army had to be called in to maintain "law and order", i.e., to get the Catholic population to once again passively accept Stormont and British rule. 

The British government extracted a price from Stormont for this support: gerrymandering and intimidation was to stop; the Catholics in Northern Ireland were to be treated in the same way as they would if they lived in England. Since, with the coming of Common Market capitalism, the original economic reason for Partition had gone the political representatives of the Belfast capitalists were prepared to accept this (even if many of the Protestant workers they had duped in the past were not). 

One of the unfortunate side-effects of the Northern Ireland situation is that the term "socialist" has become associated with pro-Catholic politics. Protestant and Catholic alike expect someone who calls himself a socialist to back the IRA or at least support a United Ireland. Well, we support neither. We know that "independence" for Ireland in 1921 was just a change of masters which left the basic position, and problems, of the Irish worker unchanged. We know that Irish nationalism and republicanism was the ideology of the up-and-coming capitalists in the South who, being weaker than their counterparts in Belfast, wanted Home Rule and tariffs as a protection against British competition. 

The tragedy of Northern Ireland is that the present political division of' the working class there reflects yesterday's divisions amongst the Irish capitalist class, divisions which now have no relevance even for capitalism since both Britain and Ireland are about to join the Common Market and since the same international companies have investments both sides of the Border. 

Our advice to the worker in Northern Ireland is, first: Do not do anything, in word or deed, which might encourage further killings of your working-class brothers, whether Protestant or Catholic or, for that matter, British soldiers. And, secondly: Think carefully about the situation to see if the issue of a United Ireland versus a British Ulster is worth a single drop of working-class blood. 

The British government's declared aim is that Northern Ireland should become a part of Britain like Scotland or the West Country so that being a Catholic would not affect your job or house prospects. The IRA, and now Bernadette Devlin, the Social Democratic and Labour Party and others, stand (despite their socialist pretensions) for a United Ireland, in which the Protestant worker would retain the "civil and religious liberties" he now has (i.e., freedom from the interference of the Catholic Church in what he reads, or thinks, or does). 

True, both programmes are somewhat unrealistic since the Catholics of Northern Ireland, with some justice, distrust the Unionist politicians who would continue to rule Northern Ireland while the Protestants, again with some justice, doubt the ability of Irish politicians to control the Catholic hierarchy. But, for the moment, suppose both aims could be achieved. 

Would the working class be worse or better off under one or the other? Would there be anything to choose between the two "solutions"? Surely, in both a British Ulster or a United Ireland, the workers' standard of living would be much the same. So would the slums, the unemployment and the other problems of capitalist society. And world Socialism would remain the only solution to these problems. The only difference would be the colour of the flag that would fly over the government buildings in Belfast: Union Jack or Irish Tricolour? Is this an issue worth killing and being killed over? No, Socialists reply, a thousand times No!

Party News (1981)

Party News from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

To relieve the awful boredom of the day of the Great Yawn, Wednesday 29 July, members of Glasgow branch of the SPGB arranged an outdoor meeting at our regular venue, Royal Exchange Square, under the title, "The Royal Wedding—Who Cares?—We Don't!"

While the majority of the audience were sane people seeking escape from the dose of undiluted royal nuptials poured out by press, radio and TV, unfortunately there was also present a sick but sizeable minority of "loyalists". The members of this latter group, although obviously present as an organised gang, were either too shy or ashamed to say which organisation they belonged to or, to judge by their behaviour, which institution they had escaped from. However, their insistence on accompanying our speaker's opening remarks with a tuneless rendition of God Save the Queen, their ignorant assertion that we were catholics, associates of the IRA and "baby-murderers", all provided fairly obvious clues to their provenance; there is surely only one organisation whose members assume that all its opponents are catholics. This undemocratic mob of protestant hooligans, literally howling with rage, spent the next half hour demonstrating their declared intention to break up the meeting.

The most articulate statement expressed was, "What this country really needs is a strong right-wing government that will clear out all the papes and darkies and leave it for the protestants". This of course from one of their intellectual heavyweights who unfortunately must have skipped Sunday- school on the day they were told about the missionaries; otherwise he would have known that just like sone "whiteys", some "darkies" are a bit unclear in unclear in the head and have the misfortune to be protestants too.

During all the chorus of abuse and physical threats the SPGB speaker presented the socialist case firmly but reasonably. His patience was exhausted, however, when the ravers in the audience came down again with another serious attack of the god savers' blues and, in the interest of both good order and musical good taste, he brought the meeting to a close.

This may seem to have been simply another victory for ignorance over reason, but we derive some cheer from the knowledge that the majority of the forty or so people in the audience, having read our poster, wished to know more about our views and had deliberately chosen to attend the meeting rather than waste time at home or in the pub watching the nonsense of the wedding. Most of them remained till the end despite the undemocratic behaviour of the loyalists, whose noise in fact attracted people who might otherwise have passed us by. So, if victory at all, it was not a very famous one, even tinier than that historical non-event that the Orangemen celebrate so noisily when the British summer overheats their brains.

There is a tragedy in the above episode; not the fact that our meeting was briefer than intended, but that ordinary working men, in every other way just like ourselves, sharing our poverty and hardships, should be so blinded by irrational prejudices that they fail to see that it is capitalism, not the pape/protestant/darky/whitey next door, which is the source of their problems and that the only sane solution is socialism, not shooting, assaulting or deporting fellow workers.

There are of course many established institutions in capitalism—the press, radio, TV, schools, universities, churches—part of whose resources are dedicated to reinforcing those prejudices that divide workers. It may seem then that the SPGB is a puny weapon with which to oppose such powerful and manipulative instruments; but what we have going for us is a force much more potent than either our own little organisation or the head-fixing apparatus of the establishment. That is the power of ideas generated by capitalism itself. For no matter how its PR men and women try to dress it up, the system is beyond the control even of the owning class in whose interest it operates and it is in the long run impossible to conceal the anti-social nature of capitalism from the working class, at whose expense and by whose acquiescence alone its continuance is possible.

Campbell McEwen