50 Years Ago: Ireland seven years on (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is seven years ago this month (October) since the television screens throughout the world flashed their dramatic pictures of that historic confrontation between the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Civil Rights marchers on Derry’s Craigavon Bridge.

Seven years! Arson, murder and mass intimidation have prospered in the years between and the vaunted ‘reforms’ and ‘freedoms’ that gave courage to the protesters and demonstrators have all fallen victim to the gunmen, military and para-military.

And what was it all about in those heady days of sixty-eight? Well, the various species of loyalist politicians will tell you that it was a devious criminal conspiracy organized by the Irish Republican Army with the ultimate aim of destroying the Ulster State.

That the Civil Rights Association was, in part, the brain-child of the IRA is unquestionably true, but it is equally true that the Provisional IRA who were undeniably the people who ‘brought down’ the Stormont Government, had not then been invented. In fact it was the political and social posturings of the then IRA that fertilized the egg of discontent within the movement, and it was the subsequent military rapacity of the British Army that played midwife to the Provos as a serious guerrilla force when they attempted a military solution of the ‘no-go area’ problem in July 1970. (…)

Whatever the future may hold for us, whether the Unionists get full parliamentary control again or share their ministerial salaries with the SDLP; whether the Province becomes ‘independent’ or part of an all-Ireland federation, one thing we can confidently predict. The great majority of the people, Catholic and Protestant, will remain ‘second-class citizens’ with ‘a reasonable standard of life’ only a pipe-dream for themselves and their children.

Alternatively, of course, there is Socialism and the prospect of a world-wide society of production for use; a society in which people will use their skills and energies to produce an abundance of all the things they require to guarantee every member of society the material basis for a full and happy life and where every human being will have free and equal access to his or her needs. In Socialism there will be no need for gunmen or bombers, of either the state or free-lance variety, for there will be no material basis of conflict and the skills of violence will be as irrelevant as those of bankers, salesmen or lawyers.

[From the article, Ireland seven years on, by Richard Montague, Socialist Standard, November 1975.]

These FoolishThings . . . (1995)

The Scavenger column from the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The basic contradictions in capitalism cause widespread death, destruction, pollution, poverty and waste. But this is to take the world view. Most of us experience day-to-day capitalism as a series of small stupidities, irritations and frustrations. Here are a few. If you encounter any worth a wry smile, please send them to The Scavenger, who will publish the best.

Corporate loyalty

“In El Segundo, California, just before Christmas, Mattel, the toy manufacturer, made some announcements. Dividends would increase, the company would have record sales and earnings for the sixth year in a row, the balance sheet was strong and getting even better.

“Also, the company would eliminate 1,000 jobs, about four per cent of its work force . . . The deal most workers thought they had — that their jobs would be safer and wages higher if thing were good at the factory — is over”. New York Times.

True courage

“I wore my fur coat to Salisbury's at the weekend and one lady came over to congratulate me on being so courageous,” says Aliza Claremont, director of a lingerie company. Robyn Opie, proprietor of a West End nail salon, says: “I have a full-length silver fox — a serious fur coal — that I walk to work every' morning, and I haven’t had the slightest bit of hassle". Mail on Sunday, 15 January.

Dazed and confused

Paratrooper Lee Clegg who was convicted of shooting and killing a joyrider in a stolen car in 1990, said: “The irony is that, if war broke out tomorrow I would have been willing to lay down my life for these pillars of society who have sent me to prison for life for acting in accordance with my training and regulations.”

Learning

From a local headmaster’s newsletter to parents: “Behind these crimes [junk culture] against education are the profits of big business — large firms and their shareholders . . . They are also the people whose voices are loudest in complaining about education standards. Hypocrisy rules.”

“It’s a free country”

“Britain’s prisons are behind the state of play in our security conscious department stores and town centres . . . Seeing how the outside is actually becoming more like an open prison, the prison system will have at least to try to catch up”. Nigel Burke, Guardian, 19 January.

The Scavenger

Northern Ireland “Socialist” Party. (1933)

From the December 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A correspondent in Northern Ireland has sent us the Constitution and Rules of an organisation calling itself the "Northern Ireland Socialist Party," and affiliated with the Labour Party.

The Constitution is a mixture of the Constitutions of the Independent Labour Party (up to 1931) and of the Labour Party. It contains, therefore, the usual large and small inaccuracies and unsound notions cherished by those parties.

For example, the object consists of the meaningless phrase that Socialism "is that state of society in which land and capital are communally owned, and the processes of production, distribution and exchange are social functions.”

Even Mr. Maxton had to confess when his attention was drawn to it, that "capital” by its nature cannot be communally owned. Capital is not merely machines and other instruments of production; it is those things in a particular social relationship—the capitalist form of private ownership. When the means of production become the property of society as a whole, they will cease to be means of providing profit for private owners; they will no longer be capital.

Similarly, it is absurd to talk about ”exchange” under Socialism. Exchange only has a place when goods are privately owned. Under Socialism goods will be produced and distributed. There will be no process of exchange.

Again, the Constitution states that the basis of Socialism will be "the organisation of the wage and salary earners.” Actually Socialism involves the abolition of the system of wage-labour altogether. There will be no capitalist class and no working class, and, therefore, no wage and salary earners.

This so-called Socialist Party is merely another attempt to build up in Northern Ireland one of the vote-catching, reformist organisations with which we are familiar in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere.

It is not a Socialist Party in anything but name, and is not deserving of working-class support.

P. S.

Exhibition Review: Troubled Times (2024)

Exhibition Review from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Imperial War Museum North at Salford Quays is currently running an exhibition on ‘Northern Ireland: Living with the Troubles’, which deals with the period of violence which lasted from the late 1960s to the signing of the Good Friday agreement in 1998 and caused the deaths of over 3,500 people. It is on until the end of September.

One of its main themes is the different perspectives on developments from the ‘loyalist’ and ‘nationalist’ sides (though both are in fact loyal to different nations). This extends even to basic facts, such as who had guns in the Battle of St Matthew’s on 27–28 June 1970, in which three people were killed. Views representing both versions of what happened that night are given.

Many of the statements and other exhibits should cause visitors to think a bit. For instance, a poster shows Tufty the squirrel (used to teach children about road safety) warning kids not to pick up things in the street, as they might be dangerous. A former member of the Provisional IRA says that you have to ‘depersonalise’ people in order to shoot them. The members of fire services were stoned on an almost daily basis. People would go out to shop and find soldiers in gardens and checkpoints on roads; they had to go through turnstiles and bag searches in order to get into the centre of Belfast. Most victims of the Troubles were civilians, not soldiers, police or paramilitaries.

The glossary accompanying the exhibition states that loyalism was ‘primarily working class in nature’, and class is mentioned a number of times in the displays, though without any definition. The vast majority of those killed were working class, and a Sinn Féin member is quoted as saying that there was a class issue across communities, but that the fundamental constitutional question was the real dividing line.

A final film with a variety of quotes claims that Northern Ireland now has more institutionalised sectarianism than ever, and that a war continues, using words rather than bullets. A United Ireland will not end sectarianism, it is said, and Brexit has led to trade and border concerns within the North.

It’s not mentioned in the displays, but Troubles-related tourism now takes place in Belfast; it’s an example of ‘dark tourism’ (cf the Jack the Ripper Museum in London).

This is an informative exhibition, from which visitors are likely to draw different conclusions, perhaps including that nothing of any significance for the vast majority of people was being fought over.

Paul Bennett

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

Beyond sectarianism (2007)

From the February 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Ervine, Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly for a loyalist area of east Belfast, who died in January, saw that working class Protestants and Catholics had both been conned. Ervine recounted how in July 1972 as a young man on what came to be known as Bloody Friday he watched as the IRA carried out 22 bomb attacks in Belfast killing innocent people and ripping the commercial heart out of the city. For him it was the final straw; he decided to join the protestant UVF then engaged in a sectarian war against innocent Catholics who it regarded as the soft underbelly of the IRA. Ironically, Ervine was reacting to the other side of the same politico-religious stimuli that had created the material basis for the emergence and recruitment of the Provisional IRA in 1970. His ‘war’ ended when he was caught ferrying a bomb and was sentenced to 6 years’ imprisonment.

David Ervine was a Belfast man from the east of the city, an area which in the sectarian demography of Belfast is mainly ‘Protestant’. Though the area was heavily industrialised and the workforce was overwhelmingly Protestant and Unionist, the acres of mean back-to-back houses demonstrated the poverty of those who were fed the fiction that they were the special concern of the Unionist government.

Some on the political Left tried to emphasise this point but the active political Left painfully avoided a class analysis of the local political situation – a failure which ultimately, in 1948, caused a split in the Northern Ireland Labour Party on sectarian lines. After that split, four Labour candidates in three overwhelmingly Protestant constituencies in east Belfast won seats in the Stormont parliament. Labour was by no means socialist but it represented the political philosophy of many on the Catholic side who thought it was, thus exposing the nonsense that working class Protestants would always support Unionism because they were ‘a labour aristocracy’.

Capitalism had sundered any little sense of unity within the working class. Catholics and Irish nationalists, including Sinn Fein, reflecting the ignorance and bigotry of the Orange Order, and the Left utterly failed to offer any real alternative to what was, and remains, a conflict of opposing capitalist nationalisms.

This was the world David Ervine was brought up in. In his early youth he might well have imbibed the dregs of bigotry and hatred and looked with deep suspicion on workers who were Catholics equally bigoted, equally embittered. He would have learnt from the demagoguery of Ian Paisley, then forging a rich fiefdom in bigotry, that the removal of the property qualification in the local government franchise, the establishment of a fair system of social housing distribution and the abolition of gerrymandered electoral constituencies would have been a defeat for his religion and his national culture.

Maybe he was caught up in the vibrant youth culture of the period; maybe he didn’t give a damn but the combustibles of conflict were gathering and like many other working class young men and women on both ‘sides’ of the artificially-devised sectarian barrier he would become a victim of that conflict, condemned and criminalised by holy men and politicians and those who combined these functions and greatly enhanced their mean earning power.

To his credit, despite his experiences, Ervine rose superior to the politics of bigotry and hatred. In his wry way he was to show the extent of his learning when a few years ago he said publicly that he looked forward to the day when he and Gerry Adams could have a pint together. Those who know the territory will appreciate just how far David Ervine had come and the courage it took to voice such a sentiment.

On the evening of his death a camera crew visited a working class club Ervine frequented in east Belfast. The drinkers, Protestants to a man, praised Ervine, the loquacious peace monger, the man who told them that working class Protestants and Catholics had been conned. Specifically, he was praised as ‘a socialist’. That he was not, but he was motivated by the same political honesty and concern for his class that motivates socialists; he had learnt to detest the political and economic realities of capitalism. The  next step would have been an appreciation of the fact that the problems of his class, including the generation of division, were inevitable aspects of that system.

Richard Montague

At Home and Abroad . . . (1971)

The Home and Abroad Column from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Review December 1971

At Home

It is impossible to sympathise with the howls of frustrated rage over the cynical semantics of the Compton report on the interrogation methods of the British in Northern Ireland. The military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph pointed out that the methods employed were also used on some British shock troops, with the idea of training them to resist pressure if they were ever captured. This was of course a poor attempt at justifying the methods used by the British but it did underline the fact that brutal interrogation is widely used, on all sides, in war. And anyone who really expected the inquiry to come up with anything other than a whitewash themselves need some sort of interrogation but on a psychiatrist’s couch.

Cynical semantics have also been used by government spokesmen about two of their most pressing problems. When he addressed the well-fed Institute of Directors at their annual conference, Chancellor of the Exchequer Barber forgot all about the mounting unemployment and claimed that we are about to experience the biggest boom for years, that the economy is expanding and that price restraint is working. Perhaps he was drunk—the directors always enjoy a good lunch, with a small bottle of wine. Shortly afterwards Barber’s colleague Peter Walker, not to be outdone, was burbling out the same stale old promises about housing which we have been hearing for so long. His new Housing Bill, he said, is the most important reform in the field this century and then, like housing ministers before him, he made the ritual promise about slums. Walker, who lives in a posh house himself, reckons that he will have cleared the slums up in ten years. There is no mitigating evidence, that he was drunk.

Abroad

Never before have the protests about Bomb tests been taken as high as those about America’s latest one underneath the island of Amchitka. If this indicates a heightening of the energy of the protesters, it also hints that their unrealistic hysteria is becoming acute. Surely they didn’t expect the Supreme Court to rule that human interests should come before those of the American ruling class? To overturn every priority, every assumption, upon which capitalism everywhere works? Perhaps in future they will realise the order of things under capitalism and then begin working against the system instead of against one of its effects.

Meanwhile, another of the world’s nuclear powers—and one where there is no opportunity to protest against its Bomb tests—was finally allowed to join the club. China’s entry into the United Nations, although a big diplomatic defeat for Nixon, showed the contempt with which the UN (which, we may remember, was once going to be the means to a securely peaceful world) is treated by the world powers. In the old days America would never have allowed such a defeat. For after all the fine words and the lies about it, the United Nations is little more than an international gangsters’ club. It is fitting that the latest recruit to the top league of international capitalism should at last be welcomed into it—bombs and all.

Politics

Despite the recent upheaval in the Labour Party over the Common Market, it was a fairly safe bet that Jenkins would beat Foot for the Deputy Leadership. Most of the press applauded the vote, as a sign that Labour is still interested in men of principle and honesty. In its present depression, Labour could do with a new hope; even the problems which the Tories are finding in trying to run British capitalism have not yet erased the memories of those six gloomy years of Labour rule. So once again we have a rising star, who is going to lead us to yet another promised land. In this one incident we have all the history of capitalist politics; promise and disillusionment, confidence and panic, hope and despair. This wearying process goes on year in and year out, with each successive leader being hailed as the answer to our problems then quickly exposed for a futile trickster. And none of them, yet, has been honest enough to admit it.

Honesty is a word very foreign to the Communist Party, whose recent national congress came well up to the expectations of those who always look to the Communists to provide some hilarious political double acts. This year, of course, they had to talk about Northern Ireland, and to hammer out a typical reformist line. They showed a touching concern for the catholic minority, then took the line that the best thing to happen was for the British troops, whose methods have been under such fire, to stay there. This was typical of the confusion and the trickery of the Communist Party, who as usual are dabbling their hands in the blood of the workers in the hope of fishing up a few miserable scraps of ignorant support.

Blogger's Note:

See the article, 'Northern Ireland: The Gentle Art of Interrogation ', from the same issue of the Socialist Standard.

An insignificant happening: Labour in Northern Ireland (2003)

From the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

For some people in Northern Ireland, this year’s British Labour Party Conference was a momentous event. For those present at the Conference, or the numerous Labour Party branches throughout the UK whose pious resolutions might get an airing before being thrown into the Blair wastepaper basket, the event was utterly inconsequential. On the other hand, for some, not too many, in Northern Ireland, it was the culmination of a whole life’s political effort.

Now for pragmatic people who believe in the immediacy of schemes for conning the workers into the belief that Labour capitalism is better than Tory capitalism, the great event itself was something of a damp squib. It was hardly noticed in the mainstream British media and got no headlines even in Northern Ireland. A neighbour of this writer, not known for socialist sympathies, summed it up rather succinctly when he said, “Both Taigs and Prods here are at least agreed on one thing: Tony Blair and his cohorts are unprincipled, fucking liars; what difference will the addition of some local political stooges make?”

Oh yes, the event? Well, the British Labour Party had at last conceded the right of UK citizens who live in Northern Ireland to become members of the Labour Party. Neither the party leadership, nor the members-at-large had shown any great enthusiasm for the move. It was the big unions, making a meaningless gesture to vociferous elements in Northern Ireland, who engineered the change of attitude. Essentially, as my colourful neighbour significantly hinted, the justification for the move had to do with Taigs and Prods—which is Ulsterspeak for Catholics and Protestants respectively.

Labour, went the argument of the local enthusiasts, will provide a non-sectarian base for both Catholics and Protestants. That nonsense is founded on the notion that sectarianism in Northern Ireland is based on theological differences and it is made by people who either have convenient memories or little knowledge of Labour history in the province. While religion has an input into the problem, tribal sectarianism here is a complex politico-religious mix historically promoted to serve the economic interests of different sections of the propertied class in both Great Britain and Ireland. It is a long and convoluted story that this journal has dealt with many times and here we are concerned only with contemporary effects.

After the formation of the northern statelet in 1921, the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) was formed. Like Labour parties everywhere, the NILP adhered to the simplistic notion that capitalism would serve a universal interest if conservative politicians were replaced with Labour politicians. Unable to offer a class analysis of the historic “Irish Question”, the NILP simply sat on the fence on the ‘Border’ issue. Until 1948, it is probable that Catholic nationalists proportionately outnumbered Protestant unionists in their support of Labour. Labour strategists were inclined to take the support of the former for granted; the problem, as they saw it, was the deep-rooted “Britishness” of workers who were Protestants and these outnumbered their Catholic class brethren by some two to one.

So, in 1948, the NILP got off the fence; “Ulster Labour is British Labour!” they cried. Out came the Union flags and the red, white and blue trappings as Labour went head-to-head with Ulster Unionism in a squalid contest of Britishness. Nothing was said about religion but what Catholic nationalists of the Connolly tradition saw as a rabid rejection of their culture resulted in the great majority of Catholics leaving Labour. Some of these formed an Irish Labour Association and effectively there were two Labour organisations; one for Catholics and one for Protestants.

The NILP did make temporary inroads into Ulster Unionism, having four born-again Christians returned to the Stormont Parliament where they cosied up to the Unionist Government who accepted their proclamations of loyalty enough to make one of them a Minister. When serious political disturbances commenced in the late Sixties, Labour elements of both camps scurried back to their traditional loyalties.

The irony of this latest attempt to raise the standard of British Labour in Northern Ireland is that it is promoted by Labourites who cannot find a political home in the Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP). This latter organisation is regarded as a sister party of the British Labour Party and operates within the EU under the same ersatz “socialist” umbrella as both the British and the Irish Labour parties. The policies of all these Labour organisations is essentially the same: they wholly accept capitalism and their essential “practical” strategy is to get career politicians jobs in the governments of capitalism.

Ah, yes, that is all very good but the anti-sectarians who want British Labour here to sort out the problem of sectarianism would have difficulty in associating with the SDLP. Why? Because it is a largely Catholic and pro-nationalist Labour Party!

But the people who have spent lifetimes trying to persuade British Labour to accept them as members were always spoilt for choice. The number of parties and groups that claim affinity with the Left are numerous. Sinn Fein, claims to act in the Connolly tradition; Gerry Adams and his political playmates would welcome Protestants into their organisation, but they are indelibly branded, and correctly so, as sectarians.

The Workers’ Party, on the other hand, are pukka Lefties without religious baggage and, like British Labour, the WP has shown an enthusiasm for espousing any pettifogging reform of capitalism that it thinks might get votes. On the other hand, they have a distant connection, rather like the British Labour Party, with the concept of a united Ireland.

Of course there is Socialism itself. No careers there, no jobs for the boys or the girls, no place whatsoever for aspiring politicians, no nonsense about different religions or flags or patriotism or any of the other crap that is the basis of all sectarianism. All of which make genuine Socialism worth the consideration of the working class.

Richard Montague

'Terror in our schools' (2006)

From the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the media, reports of bad behaviour, assaults, stabbings, teenage drinking, attacks on the elderly and the like are daily fare.

This was the headline covering the front page story in the Belfast Telegraph on 12 August. The story was under the by-line of Linda McKee but the editor obviously thought it deserved greater exposure because the same story in almost the same words and sensational statistics appeared again on page 7 under the name of Dan McGinn.

We learnt from a screaming sub-heading that 1,000 pupils in Northern Ireland had been suspended from school for attacking staff. The body of the news item reduced the stridency of the headline by telling us that the figure of 1,000 was for a period of three years and that only 14 of the cases concerned merited expulsion. Statistically the article could have said that less than 0.047 per cent of pupils in Northern Ireland were accused of abusive behaviour towards teachers every year and between four and five of the complaints on each of the three years were serious enough to merit expulsion. The truth, however, has less impact than the sensational and it is the sensational that sells newspapers and makes profits for the self-interested moguls whose papers have such an important input into the formation of our opinions.

In this case the front page author was not only skilled in sensationalising but she was able to tell her readers how to resolve the problem. She tells us that the dreadful happenings she depicts happened ‘without proper punishments’ leading us to the assumption that punishment – by definition an act of violence – is the answer to the problem of violence.

Influenced youth culture

For the media, reports of bad behaviour, assaults, stabbings, teenage drinking, attacks on the elderly and the like are daily fare. Good behaviour is rarely news, perhaps because it is much more common than the stuff the press reports and, indeed, is what the public regard as normal despite frenetic media persuasion to the contrary.

That said, it is true that violence against the aged, alcohol- and drug-induced violence and muggings have become unsavoury aspects of social concern. Now there are burglar alarms where often people were careless about locking their doors at night and a night-time fear of errant behaviour often imposes a curfew on the elderly and the timid in many town and city centres.

We have to examine the causes of these patterns of behaviour against the background of the present way of life and to show that they are part of the myriad problems for which capitalism has no answer and another reason for considering the rational socialist alternative to the way we live.

Capitalism created a need for those employed in the production and distribution of its goods and services to posses a basic knowledge of what became known as the Three R’s: reading, writing and arithmetic. Accordingly the capitalist state institutionalised basic education as a legal requirement. But at that stage education beyond the basic was all the system required of working class children. ‘Their betters’, the scions of the rich, could have their educational horizons widened at universities to enrich their lives and prepare them as ‘leaders’ of society. Giving the working class the ability to read, however, opened the floodgates of knowledge and speeded the debunking of many of the myths on which religious morality is based.

Demand of the labour market

It is probably true to say that the capitalist political administration in its urgency to provide a more technically efficient labour force now robs the young of an important segment of childhood. Children are forced into the educational process at a younger age and within a few years their educational apprenticeship into the competitive demands of the labour market means that they are working at school and at home for a greater part of each day than those actually at work.

Now the schools have become educational factories, with harassed teachers themselves under compulsion to justify capitalism’s investment in what is still quaintly referred to as education and pupils induced to sacrifice their vital formative years in the hope that it will make them more competitive – by definition more aggressive and with fewer social concerns – in the hard world of capitalism.

Because education in capitalism is about creating the most efficient varieties of wage slaves those deemed by early audit to be a poor educational investment are rejected and stigmatised as failures. Further attendance at school in these cases often becomes a form of punishment and it is easy to see how young people, rejected and labelled failures, can build antagonisms towards teachers, schools and towards the society that has branded them.

The effect of New Labour’s charges on third-level education – the mountains of debt now facing working class students who earned the right to compete for the more specialised jobs – has not yet worked its way through the system. It is not hard, however to appreciate the disillusion and alienation of a qualified teacher, for example, with a debt of £20,000 who can’t get a job and finds him- or herself filling supermarket shelves.

In the wider field, news true and false is now an intensive, heavily-capitalised, industry pumping out all sorts of information twenty-four hours of every day while concealing anything that might reveal the real cause of most of the news that is reported. Without exception, all the major news media, print and electronic, promote the patriotic fervour that is so utterly meaningless and shallow; even commercialised sport, art, culture or any other human activity is used as a conduit to an aggressive xenophobic competitiveness that blights understanding between peoples. Hence, we get things like football hooliganism, so roundly condemned by those who do most to promote it.

Political clout

The search for the news commodity is borderless and inexorable: media lies and hype make politicians celebrities just as media lies and truth can strip them and castigate them when there’s kudos in a story or when they threaten some interest of the parasites who own a section of the news media. We hear how the results of a general election can be determined by the owner of a rag like the Sun and how governmental consideration is given to policies that might not find sympathy with some media mogul with more political clout than a million voters.

We are well, if not accurately informed; however disinterested we might be we cannot escape the knowledge that social democracy does not exist and our political democracy is at the level where political parties do not win elections; their opponents simply lose them while millions do not vote because they have abandoned the idea that their votes are of any real value.

Meanwhile, the wars go on somewhere every day; so does the competitive brutality of the marketplace, its money shuffling, and corporate swindling and corruption. The disgusting self-interest of leading politicians and public figures the swingeing poverty of social services and the application of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders to the problem of errant youth, visionless, disillusioned, often intellectually deprived and now, under New Labour, left to the tender mercies of the police.

Richard Montague

Old scores (1983)

From the October 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Old scores

Recently a documentary entitled Old Scores was shown on Northern Ireland television. Made in Belfast and intended mainly for local viewing, it was about a group of Protestant and Catholic teenagers who lived in the Rathcoole housing estate in the northern suburbs of Belfast, and who played together as a football team for the last time in the summer of 1969. The province at that time was about to erupt into sectarian violence, and the mixed housing estate of Rathcoole was shortly to become staunchly Protestant. The Catholic residents were persuaded, by threats and intimidation, to leave the Catholic ghettos.

Some of the players in this team ended up in the Protestant Ulster Volunteer Force, others in the Provisional IRA. One served three years in the Maze prison, another is at present serving 18 years for shooting three Catholics, a third — Bobby Sands — grew up to become a Westminster MP, and later died on hunger strike. The Belfast Telegraph called the documentary “a very worthwhile human story which looks at an aspect of the troubles from a different angle”. But in fact the theme of the documentary was to show both sides of the sectarian divide with no attempt to trace the real cause of the Ulster tragedy.

Those players of the football team who were still alive and available were interviewed and asked for their opinions of their former teammates. The Catholics still living in the ghettos spoke guardedly but none seemed even faintly aware of the cause of their predicament. All measured the problem in terms of Catholics and Protestants without even knowing why. None could see any inconsistency in being a teammate one minute and a deadly enemy the next. One Catholic, on being asked “Would you play football with a Protestant again?” replied “No”. Asked "Why did Bobby Sands get mixed up with the paramilitaries?” he said “He was unlucky”. Most saw the only way out of their dilemma as emigration. To date three had settled in the Channel Islands, one had gone to Australia, and another was attempting to emigrate to America. The documentary typifies the media approach to the troubles in Northern Ireland which attempts to explain everything in sectarian terms.

Sectarian Roots

What are the origins of this sectarianism? Sectarianism has a long and complicated history in Ireland, but basically the present upsurge dates from the early years of the 20th century.

Protestant and Catholic workers have been used as pawns in the economic rivalry between the industrial capitalists of the North, and the emerging capitalist class of the South. The North is predominantly Protestant, and the South predominantly Catholic. With the threat of Home Rule for Ireland the Northern capitalists, seeing that Home Rule could exclude them from the lucrative markets of Britain and its empire, enlisted the aid of the Protestant working class to fight for the Partition of the North from the rest of Ireland. They did this by implying that Home Rule would mean that the Protestant religion would become submerged in a Catholic Ireland. So successful was this ploy that the Catholics in the North have become the whipping boys for many of Ulster’s problems. Over the years the bitterness has grown and the Catholics have reacted accordingly.

Bigotry . . . 

Many Protestant workers will tell you that Catholics are devious, clannish, and that their entire outlook is determined by their church. For example if they marry Protestants the children of the marriage must be raised as Catholics. Another sore point is that Catholics get everything that is going in the way of social security and, because they generally have large families, this usually amounts to something more than the minimum wage. In addition in the Catholic ghettos very few pay rent or gas and electricity bills. Hence the saying "they neither work nor want”. Those few Catholics who find favour in the Protestants' eyes are given the accolade: “He is not a bad fellow for a Catholic”. To discuss the class struggle with the Protestant worker is likely to cause the assumption that you are in some way connected with the Catholic orientated Provisional IRA. or Sinn Fein.

Catholic workers are equally explicit about their Protestant counterparts, saying that Catholics are treated like second class citizens, discriminated against and kept out of the best jobs; or that the RUC is a mainly Protestant police force which has a bias against Catholics. Only in a United Ireland, they say, where we will no longer be in a minority, can Catholics expect to get justice.

The Real Issue

There will be no justice in Ireland or anywhere else until workers realise that it is not their religion but their class position in society which is the cause of their poverty, poor housing, and insecurity. The real problem is exploitation by those who own the means and instruments of wealth production and distribution. These owners can be Catholic or Protestant.

It is true that the capitalist class would be glad to see the end of sectarian violence. As we say in our pamphlet Ireland, Past, Present and Future:

By the 1960s the factors which divided the capitalist class had changed. Capitalism in the South had developed to a point where trade protection was being counterproductive, and the new economic strategy was concerned with attracting foreign investment. In the North the traditional industries were in decline and the Unionist government too was fighting vigorously to attract foreign capital. A new economic pattern was developing in both states involving multi-national firms which, as often as not, operated on both sides of the border. There was a growing interchange of capital and personnel, and both states stood on the threshold of the profitable markets of the European Economic Community. The old bigotries were no longer required, the capitalist priorities which had dictated their use had changed. There was to be a new era of “bridge building" and "reconciliation”. Unfortunately however the poison had been injected deep into the veins of the working class. The warnings, the fears, the naked hatred nurtured over decades by businessmen, politicians, churchmen, and even judges could not be easily wafted away!

It is sectarian divisions which cloud the real issue — the class struggle between the working class on one hand, and the capitalist class on the other. Old Scores might be a human story but it did not tell us anything new about the troubles in Ulster. There are no old scores to settle between workers no matter of what persuasion they happen to be. Their common and overriding interest is to understand the nature of capitalism, and then to organise on a class basis to end it. With the introduction of a society where production will be for use and not for sale, the hatred and bigotry conjured up by the use of the words Catholic and Protestant will be as extinct as the dinosaur.

WHC

 . . . or reason?

Ireland—Past, Present and Future — The Socialist Party of Great Britain and the World Socialist Party of Ireland. 30p 

Between the Lines: The Patriot Game (1989)

The Between the Lines column from the September 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Patriot Game

"Come all you young rebels, enlist while I
 sing

For the love of one's country is a terrible 
thing.

It banishes fear with the speed of a flame


And makes us all part of the patriot game".

These are the opening lines of a song called The Patriot Game, written by Dominic Behan who died last month. The love of countries is, indeed, a terrible thing. It makes fools out of all patriots; it takes noble sentiments of home and community and equips them with guns and bombs. First Tuesday (ITV, 1 August. 10.35pm) allowed the voices of British troops in Northern Ireland to be heard. There are 10,000 of them on active service there: the mugs and thugs who do the dirty work for the British ruling class.

"If you're going to Ireland and afraid of being shot, then you're not doing your job", declared a Second Lieutenant in the Royal Green Jackets who exhibited the kind of wisdom that would not qualify him to look after my cat, let alone a pile of machine guns. Thankfully, most of the workers in uniform interviewed were not as desensitised as that they were frightened—petrified. They did not want to be there. Choice had not brought them: most were economic conscripts. making big money by taking big risks. "You get a load of bull when you join . . . you get told it's a good life, so you believe it". What was most striking about these soldiers was their immaturity. Listening to them, it was quite obvious that most had a conception of conflict which had not developed beyond the traditions of the school playground and the more juvenile antics of the football terraces. They were like puerile gang members: They try to wind us up, you try to wind them up”, explained one young keeper of the peace. He explained how they told him that his mother was sleeping with a black man. so he made them stand in the rain for ten minutes for a security check. They call it the war of nerves; well, they wouldn't call it a war of brains.

What was sickening about this patriotic parade was the brutal deference displayed towards violence. Said one soldier of his gun. “We take better care of it than a woman. Without it you're defenceless’. This

must have explained a lot to his wife if she was watching. But, more importantly, "without it you're defenceless"—the piece of designed killing machinery upholds life. It is little wonder that one of the officers, with more than a touch of perverse pride in his voice, declared that the IRA are the best terrorists in the world. Well, there's a compliment, from a man who gets paid and given medals for being a legalised Queen's terrorist.

By contrast—but not by contrast at all— Families At War (BBC1, 7 August, 9,30pm) was about Shane O'Doherty who became a volunteer for the IRA. Because of the state censorship law forbidding interviews with current members of the IRA the BBC had to interview O'Doherty, who has now denounced violence as being counter-productive. It must be said that O'Doherty came across as a much more human being than the current practitioners of armed brutality in the British army. Silly old British state: they pass a law preventing themselves from depicting the sick views of Irish Nationalists who really believe in the nobility of blowing up their fellow workers. O'Doherty had become a victim of the romantic folly of the patriot game by the time he was eight years old: at fifteen he joined the IRA and within a short time was indulging in such 'liberationary" acts as planting a bomb at Baker Street station in London. I bet he treated his gun better than any woman. They all do. And they go to sleep dreaming of piles of dead bodies on the other side. Their minds have been screwed up and they are victims of war; the gun. though pointed away from them, has inflicted an immeasurable injury upon their dignity and decency.

Shooting from the mouth

Whoever said that the pen is mightier than the sword was right. And talking is more potent than shooting. The present writer would not fancy a fist fight with the uniformed dummies in their Irish barracks, but in a debate they would be bloody slaughtered. A Gift Of The Gab (BBC2. 8 August, 9.50pm) was an interesting three-part series by Ludovic Kennedy about the art of oratory. As expected. Kennedy made some highly perceptive points in his first programme (the only one seen at the time of writing), but the series seems in danger of concentrating too much on the well-recorded oratory of parliamentarians and Presidents This emphasis misses a point: the main impetus for public speaking is the need to communicate beyond the available channels. The MP can go through the motions of repeating sterile speech-making formulae and the trade union leader can wave his arms in the time-honoured fashion, but it is the dissident, denied all opportunity to relate to a big audience except through the wit of holding them with his or her words, who usually makes the most intriguing speaker. To be specific. Churchill might have carved out a reputation as a brilliant pro-war orator, but that skill amounted to little compared with the brilliant eloquence of the orator whose dissenting words shout out against the popular support for warfare. "The love of one's country is a terrible thing" and to extinguish such fool's love is a skill to be admired.

Steve Coleman

“There’s nothing we could do” (1991)

From the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most nights, the Northern Ireland News on television has something to say about employment. If the news is good, if new jobs have been “created", the accompanying picture usually includes a group of people, sometimes with the Minister himself present. These are not the people for whom work has been created, of course; these are people drinking champagne because. the voice-over tells us, they have arranged for other people to work. The exercise is called “job creation".

But this “job creation" is a funny business. When the capitalists who have come to Northern Ireland to make a profit are being entertained by the Minister and an army of job creators, when the corks are popping and the actual number of millions of pounds being contributed by the government (to enable the new entrepreneurs to get going in a rent-free factory) is being announced, everybody present is happy. Well, two or three hundred jobs, in an area where there might be 60 or 70 percent of the local population unemployed, will be widely regarded as a joyful occasion.

Of course, the two or three hundred jobs will not be created overnight. Oh no, no. You see job creation doesn't work like that.The two or three hundred jobs are for the future . . . say in five years time. The Minister knows that, and so do the job creators. But there will, maybe, be twenty or thirty jobs immediately—if they can get people to come off the dole to work for that sort of money.

The reverse of this job creation business takes place too. If the economic climate is not too bad, we can have job creation and the redundancies and sackings on alternate nights—which is good for the television company's Industrial Correspondent. Unfortunately, the one doesn't balance the other; which probably explains why, despite all the job creation, the skillfully-adjusted unemployment figures continue to increase and are now a province-wide 20 percent.

Job losses

The other night the busy Industrial Correspondent told us that a local firm, in an area of chronic unemployment, was “getting rid" of 260 workers and that most of the remaining 300-odd workers would be going on to a three-day week.

The company, James Mackie and Sons Ltd. used to employ 9.000 in its hey-day. Its textile machinery was exported throughout the world. But the world has changed; the place of the intricate machinery and the highly-skilled craftsmen who produced this machinery has been taken by electronic chips and. somewhere else, in a contracting market, there are workers who take even less than the low pay paid by Mackie’s in Belfast.

It was a family business. But the family is OK. The millions they got from the American company which took over the firm a few years ago will be working for them and saving them the inconvenience of having to work for themselves. The workers whose labour created that for which the American company paid millions . . . well, they're just redundant.

When the take-over was announced a couple of years ago. there were about 900 in the Mackies' employ. The new owners entered negotiations with the unions; 300 jobs would have to go in order to secure the jobs of the remaining 600.

Nothing very unusual in the story, even if we mention that the Minister and the job creators were also deeply involved doing their best for the new owners. Nothing unusual, indeed. Men and women walking out through the heavy iron gates for the last time. Men and women, thirty years, forty years, fifty years and without hope or promise for the future.

In a sane society it would be a good story. A story showing us how progress had made it unnecessary for working men and women to go into what is still a dark. Satanic mill. A story depicting how. away from the priorities of the market and the profit system, human beings could use science to emancipate themselves from drudgery and dangerous tasks. Unfortunately we are not living in a sane society, and the thing that these workers feared more than their slavery was the poverty that would accompany their emancipation from drudgery.

A reporter spoke to five workers. All complained that the media had learnt about the sackings before they had. All complained that the Company had failed to advise the unions. All expressed their fears for the future. And all ended their comments by making the same point, each in a different way but covered in a short sentence: "there's nothing we could do".

Paradox

Of course, it is the people and the institutions of capitalism, who tell us that we live in a democracy, where we, the people, are the source of all power, who also manage to promote the notion that there is nothing we can do. It's a formula for all situations: there is nothing we can do about poverty; about war and violence; about slums. In a word, about capitalism.

It is the working class which not only produces the goods and services required by people in capitalism but also carries out all the utterly wasteful administrative and other functions made necessary only by the casino economics of capitalism itself. Yet we have this paradox of a class which runs society from top to bottom within a system where its majority status should give it political and, thus, ultimately, economic control, accepting the tyranny of democratic powerlessness.

The paradox is explained by the political success of capitalism's institutions: its educational system, its class system, its political system and its control over the means of communication. These are the means by which we are conditioned to accept the idea that there are those intended to be leaders, those entitled to position, to wealth and privilege, and those who, if they display the required aptitudes, will be allowed to work for a wage or salary. Properly processed through this machinery of acceptance, most workers—and, ironically, especially those who boast that they live in a free and democratic country—will accept the idea that "there is nothing we can do".

The belief that we, the working class, are powerless to change society in our interests is a fundamental bulwark of capitalism's wage-slavery. The more skilful of capitalism's defenders are conscious that there is nothing that can be said in favour of an economic system which, through a complex process primarily intended to enrich a minority, creates such terrible problems for the great majority in our world. Such apologists, rather than attempting to defend the indefensible, concentrate on attacking those who offer an alternative form of social organisation. Essential to their apologia is the promotion of the idea that the working class is incapable of changing society.

If it was true, it would be the epitaph of freedom.

Richard Montague

The politics of madness (2001)

From the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

Slaughter of the innocents

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hotchpotch of ambiguities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Montague

Watering down socialism (2007)

Pamphlet Review from the August 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

We won’t pay! By Gary Mulcahy. Published by ‘Socialist Party’. £3.

This pamphlet somewhat tediously sets out in detail the arguments offered by those – probably the great majority across the social spectrum in Northern Ireland – who are opposed to the proposed introduction of water charges.

Despite the generality of this opposition, it is the fragmented Left that have made the issue their current hobby-horse. Indeed, given the strength of opposition to water charges, it should prove a unifying element among those who support the notion that the capitalist leopard can have its spots removed one at a time. The pamphlet is aimed at the creation of a united Left front to the charges; however in lengthy and vigorous excoriation of their political kindred, it shows that while there is agreement on purpose within the Left there is acrid diversity regarding the means of achieving that purpose.

These verbal punch-ups are endemic within the Left; inevitable political afterthoughts nourished in the fecund soil of failure and disillusion brought about by the belief that they can control or seriously influence capitalism without the overwhelming authority of a socialist-conscious working class.

These ‘vanguard cadres’ don’t view the democratic process as a means of achieving the revolutionary change from capitalism to socialism. They aim at ‘improvement’, at making capitalism better for its wage slaves which is akin to suggesting that the slaughter house should be made better for the cattle.

Against the Marxian view that the achievement of socialism must be the work of the working class this so-called ‘Socialist Party’ (a reincarnation of Militant) adheres to the absurdly arrogant Leninist thesis that workers are incapable of emancipating themselves and must be led to political salvation by a political elite.

The pioneers of the socialist movement held to the view that since capitalism was based on the exploitation of the working class it could not function in the interests of that class. Understanding this essential truth they urged workers to organise to end capitalism. As Marx put it, workers should abandon the conservative motto ‘A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ and, instead, to inscribe on their banner ‘Abolition of the wages system’.

However well-intentioned Left reformists might be it is a fact that by distorting the essential meaning of the terms socialism and communism (which Marx and Engels used interchangeably) they have seriously set back the growth of socialist consciousness.

A gross example of this distortion appears on page 47 of the pamphlet under the heading ‘The Need For a Socialist Alternative’. The author recites a few of the greater obscenities of recent capitalist plunder and cites the need for a mass socialist party to – no! not to abolish capitalism; not to use our unified power to end its iniquitous wages and money system; not to dump commodity production into the dustbin of history – but to retain what is patently now a harmful social anachronism but under the aegis of the state. Probably they would argue that unlike Lenin and the totalitarian empire he endorsed when his ‘vanguard’ established state capitalism in Russia, their vanguard would be more socially virtuous.

Richard Montague

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