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

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 

All quiet in Glasgow (1965)

From the June 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Certain historical facts have ensured that racialism has never been prominent in Glasgow. For instance, anti-Semitism rarely shows itself, except in the odd golf club, and even during the ’Thirties Mosley’s sole appearance in the City ended in complete fiasco.

The late arrival of the Jews (mid-19th century) was a help, for this meant that the ancient antagonism so typical on the Continent is absent here. Later on, the importation of Irish religious influences provided other means whereby the frustrations of wage-slavery could be worked off without the presence of any other “races”. The roles of “them” and “us” were adequately filled by the Orange and Catholic elements who have been hating one another ever since.

And unless a few pedlars and seamen, could be counted, Afro-Asians were an unusual sight in the City until the early ’Sixties when, it seemed to the Citizens, a flood of “Paki’s” suddenly descended in their midst. This impression was helped by the newcomers finding employment almost exclusively on the Municipal Transport, thereby assuring themselves of a constant place in the public eye, while their habit of taking up group residence gave the impression of whole areas being taken over.

In fact Glaswegians might be surprised to know that compared to Birmingham, which has a similar population, of just over a million, Glasgow's immigrants are rather thin on the ground—about 7,000 against Birmingham’s 70,000.

The reasons for the low numbers are obvious. Glasgow’s unemployed rarely falls below 20,000 while the light industries which can absorb the unskilled immigrant are practically non-existent here. Clydeside is synonymous with heavy engineering and shipbuilding so the demand is for skilled men only and what light industry there is can, in an area where wages are well below the national average, find an abundance of married women to fill any available vacancies.

Anyway, the big problem in Scotland is not immigration but emigration. Around 11.000 left here for overseas in each of the six years between 1958-63 while another 87.000 found work elsewhere in the U.K. during the 1950’s. So concerned with this state of affairs are the local Nationalists and Labourites that they don’t even have a policy on immigration at all, devoting themselves solely to preventing the mass escape of wage-slaves to other parts!

The Trade Unions have discussed the matter and at the 1962 Conference of the Scottish T.U.C. the Association of Scientific Workers, appropriately enough, moved an anti-racialist resolution which concluded ”. . . no barriers on grounds of race, creed or colour should be erected against those who wish to live and work in this country”. The motion was unanimously adopted. Another resolution condemning Apartheid is due to come before the 1965 Conference and doubtless it, too, will carry the day. All of this hardly reflects the attitude of the average union member. As the seconder of the 1962 resolution admitted “. . . we had to be honest. . . there were still some of our own people who had prejudice against a person’s race, religion or colour”.

So even if Glasgow’s record is comparatively clean it must be remembered that the conditions for real prejudice seldom crop up. The immigrants live almost as a separate community and follow their own cultural activities. They aim simply to stick it out for a few years, save enough money, and return home to open a small business. Few intend to stay.

Nor have they added to the local housing or unemployment problems. The ten year residential qualification rules them out for a Council so they live mainly in tenements which were slums years ago, and the jobs they find are usually those which do not, at present, attract local men anyway.

When the necessary conditions have arisen, in isolated instances Glaswegians have shown the same lack of class consciousness as workers elsewhere. Only recently, when some immigrants moved into a once posh street in the City, their neighbours raised the usual howl about the adverse effect this would have on the value of their property. Last Autumn a racial strike occurred at the Gavinsbum Bus Dept, just outside Glasgow, when the strikers claimed too many Pakistanis were getting jobs in an area of high unemployment. Nor should we forget how—earlier immigrants—Italian Cafe owners—had their shops smashed up by patriotic mobs when Italy entered the war in 1940.

The coming of the Immigration Act, plus the existing state of industry, make any immediate influx of immigrants unlikely. It does not follow, however, that the present peacefulness must continue. Capitalism has shown that no great change is required in its socio-economic climate to produce, here, the outbreaks of intolerance so common in other parts of the country.

Vic Vanni (Glasgow)

Northern Ireland: Is it Peace? (1998)

From the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who have given into the utterly absurd contentions that induces members of the working class to give allegiance to flags and patriotic vapourings may feel injured or elated by the 10 April Anglo-Irish Agreement, but in terms of working-class life it is irrelevant except in that it might restrain the opposing patriots from slaughtering one another.

History is a sequential process, each chapter being an intermix of the past and the present. People do not take those political decisions that then become history with the freedom of an artist choosing a colour from a palette; on the contrary, though political decisions may be fashioned to serve the dominant economic interests, prevailing ideas handed down from the past play a vital role in the acceptance or rejection of such ideas.

Irish history, dominated as it was by the interests of its historically powerful neighbour, Great Britain, and the old imperialist strategy of deliberately introducing and promoting division, is especially convoluted. The most relevant historical milestone is the partitioning of Ireland in 1921 under the terms of the Government of Ireland Act which created Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland). The Act that legalised partition had no democratic basis in Ireland, north or south; in the elections of 1918 Sinn Fein had won a majority of seats (though on a minority vote of the people of all Ireland); then—as now with the two Sinn Fein MPs, Adams and McGuinness—but refused to take their seats in the Westminster parliament.

Instead they chose to establish an Irish parliament, or Dail, which the British promptly declared illegal. The following year, in Co Tipperary, what the British called “the troubles” and the Irish called the Anglo-Irish war broke out when an IRA column shot dead a policeman escorting a donkey laden with dynamite being brought to a quarry.

Immediate and terrible war

For two years, thereafter, a guerrilla struggle ensued and a war of terror and counter-terror raged throughout the country until the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, initiated peace negotiations in 1921. Out of these the British imposed the partition settlement which retained the six north-eastern counties of Ireland as a self-governing entity within the United Kingdom while allowing the twenty-six remaining counties to constitute a “Free State” while still being a British dominion. The Irish delegation to the peace talks later claimed that Lloyd George and Churchill enforced acceptance of this proposal under the threat of “immediate and terrible war”.

In the new Irish Free State, division surfaced within the IRA arising out of the acceptance of Partition and the imposition on the Irish Dail of an oath of loyalty to the British monarch. Civil war resulted which lasted until 1924. The conflict was rooted not simply in the economic interests of the nascent Irish capitalist class, whose interests Sinn Fein represented, but in the ideological fictions promoted by Irish republicanism in order to enlist the support of the working class and small farmers in the struggle for an Irish capitalist republic.

In fact the solution imposed by Britain suited the three sides to the Irish conflict at that time. The British, whose interests in Ireland were now largely strategic, would retain control over Northern Ireland with indirect control over the Irish Free State. The emerging Irish capitalist class, whose interests were reflected in the IRA struggle, would have the law-making processes they wanted to nurture their fledgling industries, and the Unionists in the north would retain their access to the British home market and enjoy the benefits of Empire Preference for the north’s shipbuilding, engineering and textile industries.

If history was simply a reflex of material interests, the matter may have ended there but, as Marx pointed out, while we make our own history, that history is contained to a greater or lesser extent by the dead hand of the past. The Northern Ireland state had been tailored by the architects of division to ensure the widest possible territory consistent with what was hoped would be a permanent Protestant majority that could then impose on the Catholic Nationalist element of the population a permanent quasi-democratic dictatorship.

Protestant and Catholics united

From the outset, the Unionist government of Northern Ireland whipped up anti-Catholic bigotry in order to keep a firm control of their Protestant voting fodder and the Catholics responded by refusing to co-operate with the Unionist state. Bigotry, political gerrymandering, draconian legislation and an armed police force backed by an armed, exclusively Protestant, auxiliary police were the weapons of the Government. Inevitably, the Catholic minority, already churlish and antagonistic towards the state, were driven into new heights of hostility.

Northern Ireland was born in violence. Sectarian murder and arson were the accepted weapons of the upper class Unionist gentlemen who took over the running of the state. As long as it was the poor, the grossly impoverished working class, Catholics and Protestants who were hurting one another, it was a tolerable strategy that helped to foster the fallacious notion that simply being a Protestant in the new state was a guarantee of privilege.

That Protestant members of the working class were subject to the same mean lifestyle as their fellow Catholics was made manifest in 1932, when the state was eleven years old. Faced with massive unemployment, the government decreed that unemployed people who were single would not get any unemployment benefit; instead, they should apply for admittance to the workhouse.

Together in poverty, the single unemployed united in an unemployed movement; in Belfast they marched up the Lisburn Road to the workhouse which, of course, could not admit them. The government called out the armed RUC to face down the workers; it tried desperately to divide them on religious grounds and, failing to subdue them with police thuggery or sectarian cajoling, it surrendered and re-instituted the miserable pittance to all the unemployed.

In the three years that followed, the loyalist organisations like the Orange Order and the Apprentice Boys, whose leaders were frequently members of the government or members of the government party, worked hard to re-establish the hegemony of sectarian division and, in 1935, in the midst of a desperate economic crisis, yet another vicious sectarian clash occurred, requiring the intervention of the British military.

Momentous event

Before the commencement of World War Two the IRA inaugurated a bombing campaign in England and in the early nineteen forties there was a further upsurge of violence in Northern Ireland. In 1956 the IRA embarked on yet another campaign of terror which was largely confined to the border areas. After a spectacular start, this fizzled out and, for the first time ever, the IRA, in 1962, admitted defeat.

Acknowledging the growing accommodation between the northern Catholic Nationalists and the Northern Ireland state following on the introduction of “welfare” capitalism—which the post-war Labour government had forced the reluctant Unionist leaders to accept—the IRA statement accepting defeat condemned the northern Nationalists for “selling their heritage for a mess of pottage”. For the first time in the twentieth century the gun had been taken out of Irish politics.

In the growing spirit of toleration, Nationalist politicians accepted the role of official opposition in the Stormont parliament and, against the background of a new Anglo-Irish Free Trade agreement, the Unionist Prime Minister of Northern Ireland met his southern Irish counterpart in Stormont.

But if the politics of reality was forcing events forward, the dead hand of the past was actively provoking reaction and the prime instrument of that reaction was the demagogic hot-gospeller, Ian Paisley. When Catholics and liberal Protestants combined in a struggle for Civil Rights they were opposed by a ranting Paisley and a coterie of fanatical bigots who used the fascist tactic of the counter-demonstration to provoke civil disturbance.

Ironically, Paisley and his bigoted ilk exacerbated a conflict that created the material conditions for the emergence of the Provisional IRA and for nearly thirty years of internecine warfare. He and his political and religious cohorts have greeted every effort to find an accommodation between the warring parties with accusations of treachery and “sell-out” directed at his fellow Unionists. He has mounted campaigns and crusades down the years the purpose of which is allegedly to “save Ulster” from treachery and now, following the “peace” agreement signed between the main representatives of Unionism and Irish Nationalism, he is bellowing his denunciation with the claim that this is Ulster’s most calamitous crisis–which seems like a confession of past failures.

“The Agreement”, which is the simple title given to the document which is being widely circulated in Northern Ireland and which has been picked over in detail by the media since 10 April, betrays the utter futility of sectarian politics and paramilitary terrorism. Bigotry and violence, including state violence, have killed some 3,500 people and injured a further 40,000 and, apart from the gangsters and ghouls who have found opportunity for gain in this mayhem, it has not advanced the condition of any section of the working class.

“Some gain and some pain”

Socialists would be fools if they did not hope that this agreement succeeds in bringing an end to the violence, in ending the killing, the maiming and the torching of peoples’ homes; in ending, too, a political ambience in which only the absurd politico-religious posturings of the conflicting factions is regarded as valid political debate. The promoters of the Agreement, the British and Irish governments claim that it represents a reasonable compromise between the parties and the political spin masters have coined the phrase, “Some gain and some pain” for all.

Paisley and his hate-mongers as well as the Orange Order and the corresponding lunatic fringes of Irish nationalism are mounting campaigns to encourage a “No” vote in the impending referendum. Given that these people see the alternative to the Agreement as a fight to the finish, one would think their lunacies would be rejected out-of-hand by the electorate on 22 May.

Richard Montague

[In our next issue we will analyse the position of the main participants in the aftermath of the 22 May referendum.]

Editorial: Neither London nor Dublin but World Socialism (2021)

Editorial from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year marks the centenary of the founding of the Northern Ireland statelet, also referred to as the North of Ireland, the ‘occupied six counties’ or Ulster depending on your point of view. In April, this anniversary was greeted with serious rioting in Protestant working-class areas of Belfast. Three causes were given – anger at the new hard border established in the Irish Sea by the Northern Ireland ‘Protocol’ as part of the final Brexit agreement with the EU, resentment at Sinn Fein politicians not being prosecuted for allegedly breaking Covid rules while attending a funeral of an IRA man, and the young rioters allegedly being put up to it by local loyalist gang leaders who wanted cover to protect their criminal activities. There are fears of further rioting during this month’s marching season.

But these explanations fail to consider the wider context in which this social unrest is taking place. The new statelet was born in 1921 in the aftermath of the Irish war of independence. In the North, pogroms were incited against the Catholic population leaving over five hundred dead, mainly Catholics. Thousands of Catholic workers were expelled from their workplaces in the engineering and shipyard industries. The Northern Unionist capitalists, anxious that the Northern industries centred around Belfast and Derry stay within the markets of the then British empire, agreed to a separate state in the North remaining in the UK. Not all unionists envisaged a state that marginalised its Roman Catholic minority. Edward Carson declared ‘from the outset let us see that the Catholic minority have nothing to fear from the Protestant majority’. James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, had other ideas when he stated ‘All I boast is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant state’. Under his watch, constituencies were gerrymandered to create Unionist majorities, the state forces, the notorious B-Specials and the RUC, were set up to keep the Catholic working class in their place. The Unionist ruling class reckoned that they needed to secure the support of the Protestant working class, by ensuring that the best paid jobs in the shipbuilding and engineering industries went to Protestant workers.

Although Northern Ireland has since been reformed, the religious sectarianism imprinted on its political DNA has not been fully erased.

It has often been pointed out that the Good Friday Agreement assumes a frictionless border between the North and South. Another less visible assumption was that the capitalist economy which was booming at the time in 1998 would continue to do so generating more jobs and higher incomes for the working class. However, this was never going to be the case. The capitalist economy tanked in 2008 with the resulting austerity and again with the current Covid-19 pandemic. Many workers have been plunged into greater poverty. Given the poisonous mixture of systemic sectarianism and economic insecurity, it is no wonder that violent clashes have occurred where workers turn on each other.

The truth is that Protestant and Catholic workers have more in common with each other than they have with the capitalist class. Protestant workers have no interest in a Northern Ireland linked with the UK and Catholic workers have no interest in a united Ireland. They both have an interest in establishing socialism.

Labour loyalists (2009)

Book Review from the June 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party: Democratic Socialism and Sectarianism. By Aaron Edwards. Manchester University Press

The reference in the title to ‘Democratic Socialism’ might well have been an acceptable tautology on the part of the author or, as it frequently is, a manifestation of misunderstanding of the meaning of socialism. In the case of this author’s work it was quickly demonstrated not only that he has peculiar ideas as to what represented socialism, but in dealing with the political events in Northern Ireland that are the background to his narrative, he is, also, below par regarding the acceptable nature of what passes for democracy in liberal bourgeois society.

The term ‘socialism’ was first used to define an alternative form of social organisation to capitalism. There already existed alternative political and economic suggestions for treating the myriad problems associated with capitalism but within the consensus of those who used the term ‘socialism’ was the conviction that such suggestions were inadequate or unworkable. What was required was the total dismantling of the system of class monopoly of the means of life and its replacement with a system of common ownership and free access to goods and services.

The more politically coherent elements among the reformers, liberals and trade unionists that formed the British Labour Party in 1906 would have accepted the need to replace capitalism with socialism but they thought they could circumvent the essential need to create a democratic socialist consciousness to achieve that purpose. Instead they would, by an ongoing and gradual process, reform capitalism out of existence. Their error is transparent in the bunch of self-seeking careerists and ruthless authoritarian Labour politicians currently grasping with yet another of the crises of capitalism.

Following the partition of Ireland by the British government in 1921 some disparate elements from a Northern Ireland community deeply divided into forms of conditioned politico-religious hatreds re-energised residual Labour support under the banner of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP). The Party would have attracted the same elements as the British party but would have carried the baggage of political and religious division within its ranks. Contrary to Edwards contention it never made a class analysis of Irish politics; instead it joined the ward-healing process while nervously tip-toeing its way through the minefield of tribal divisions that were the political stock-in-trade of everyday political life in its territory.

Still, those divisions were reflected acutely within the NILP. Catholics, who almost exclusively suffered the tyrannies of the notorious Unionist government’s Special Powers Act (a sort of Complete Dictator’s DIY kit) as well as discrimination in employment and social housing, wanted a determined stand against these evils which would seem good political fodder for a reformist group. In this work the author further betrays his ignorance of socialism as well as his ambivalence to democracy by his sympathy with the NILP leadership’s view that a fulsome condemnation of anti-Catholic practices might alarm potential Protestant voters who supported these evils.

In the late 1940s, having failed to achieve meaningful political kudos from its fence-sitting position the Party openly adopted a Unionist position. Ulster Labour, it proclaimed was British Labour. In a display that would have rivalled that of the National Front, Labour election platforms, in Unionist areas, were festooned with Union flags, which traditionally was the banner carried by the Orange mob. The decision caused a major split in the Party; Catholics, reflecting the same political ignorance as their erstwhile ’comrades’, formed the Irish Labour Association (long since demised) predictably under the banner of the Irish tricolour. Curiously, no mention of this latter happening is found in the book.

In the 1950s the NILP won four seats in the Northern Ireland House of Commons. The new MP’s were all men, proclaimed as good men on the strength of their Protestant fundamentalist faith. Eventually, as traditionalist Nationalist politics went into terminal decline before more strident Catholic demands for the democratisation of the Northern Ireland state, there was an influx of Catholics back into the NILP. Again the Party’s internal unease surfaced: the Catholics more and more favouring direct action against the Stormont regime in which Labour’s four holy men were comfortably ensconced to the extent where one had accepted a white-washing position with the government.

The prelude to open sectarian conflagration in Northern Ireland left the gaping sectarian wounds of the NILP increasingly exposed and finally inflicted their coup de grace on its squalid political corpse. Edwards intones the requiem with the acknowledgement of numbers of its members cosying up to the sectarian murder gangs; a measure of what they had learnt in the NILP. His belated obsequies will find little sympathy with genuine socialists but should serve as a warning for those who put political expediency before principle.

Edwards is a Senior Lecturer in Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst.

Richard Montague

The People's Democracy: Old nonsense from a new quarter (1970)

Pamphlet Review from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the problems confronting the Socialist movement in its efforts to bring an understanding of Socialism to the working class is the number of organisations that spread confusion about the meaning of Socialism.

In Northern Ireland, for example, apart from the N.I. Labour Party, whose particular brand of “socialism” is the difference between a Development Commission and a Development Corporation —embellished, of course, with love of the Queen and the Constitution—and even, for a period, nebulous support of the infamous Special Powers Act—and the Communist Party whose conception of “socialism” is reflected in petty demands for reform and admiration for the brutal totalitarianism of their adopted state-capitalist motherland, we have a number of peculiar “socialist” and “socialist” organisations.

There is the political ignoramous Gerry Fitt and his personal political circus, ever ready to jump on on any bandwagon of prejudice or ignorance to milk a few working class votes. His party, the “Socialist” Republican Party, is a mere anti-Unionist group that pays lip service to the more vulgar ideas of the late James Connolly—insofar as those ideas are compatible with the prejudices of their Catholic supporters; indeed, they fearlessly avoid mention of any of Connolly’s statements attacking religion and its “sacred” institutions.

These organisations render considerable service to capitalism; they help to maintain the fog of working class ignorance on which capitalism depends for its continued existence and in that they confuse the workers as to the nature of the alternative which Socialism proposes.

The tragedy is that many of the sincere and enthusiastic workers who subscribe to the fallacious reasoning of these “socialist” organisations get so involved in their complex political fetishes, and its attendant vocabulary, that they become bitter opponents of Socialism — except as it relates to their ideas of “knocking the system” or promoting their pet reform.

In Northern Ireland we are now seeing the growing claims to Socialism of the Peoples Democracy and especially in a recent pamphlet Struggle in the North by one of the leaders of that organisation, Mike Farrell.

The Peoples Democracy is an organisation made up of all types of anti- Unionist, anti-establishment elements. Generally, they are young workers and students at varying levels of discontent with various facets of the system. Particularly, they are the political hot-gospelers of the different “leftist” creeds earnestly endeavouring to inject their various, and conflicting, ideas into the movement. The ideological umbrella of the movement is “action now” and the objective is a contradiction in terms known as a “Socialist Workers’ Republic”.

If we admitted to a degree of comparison in the forces that confuse the working class in its nebulous groping towards Socialism we should undoubtedly acknowledge that the PD is head and shoulders above the Labour parties, the ‘communists’ and the Fitt circus in their partial understanding of the situation and, indeed, we do recognise the courage and earnestness of purpose which the PD has shown in its opposition to the bigots and patriots at both ends of the Northern Ireland political spectrum.

Until a short time ago, when the organisation adopted the practice of having a card-carrying membership (at a disputed “suggested” fee of four shillings—later revoked), it was a loosely knit body. In these circumstances it was difficult to indict PD on the statements made by those claiming membership of that organisation with whom we have come in contact. The re-telling of faction struggles may be precocious and the revolutionary romantics may be for amusement only. We consider it fair, however, to discuss PD within the context of Farrell’s pamphlet which is an official PD publication. The pamphlet tells, accurately enough, the facts of the recent violence in Northern Ireland and advances the case for PD.

If we allow for the imposed brevity of a short pamphlet, Farrell’s analysis of the economic background to Partition and the use of religious bigotry as an instrument of policy by the political handmaidens of capitalism in Northern Ireland in 1912 and after — in their anxiety to preserve direct access to the British market—is correct in its essentials.

Perhaps his republicanism defeats a more penetrating analysis of the motives of the Southern capitalists and their political servants in side-tracking the working class of southern Ireland into a patriotic struggle. He simply tells us that "The Home Rulers were anxious to put tariffs on British imports coming into Ireland to facilitate the development of Irish industry”. He does not tell us that Sinn Fein were similarly anxious about the affairs of the rising native capitalists—a concern expressed thus by one of their leaders Griffith:

  No possibility would be left as far as (Sinn Fein) were concerned for a syndicate of unscrupulous English capitalists to crush out the home manufacturer and the home trader (The Sinn Fein Policy, 1917)

Nor does Mr. Farrell remind us that the “Irish industry” concerned was the concrete preserve of the southern capitalist class who owed nothing to their Northern counterparts in the matter of viciousness and contempt for the working class.

As in all national struggles, the working class were being used by the economically dominant class to win victories for their masters. True, the workers did not see the struggle in that light, indeed a few may, like Mr. Farrell and the PD, have subscribed to indefinite concepts of an equalitarian society, but because they lacked understanding of the nature of capitalism and the only alternative to that system, Socialism, they were easy prey for the chauvinistic smokescreen of those whose real purpose was their stake in the exploitation of the working class in southern Ireland.

Mr. Farrell agrees that the basis of discrimination is the economic system, capitalism. If this is so, and the World Socialist Party has continually advanced this view, if capitalism causes discrimination, is it not futile to lead the working class into a struggle against discrimination on the assumption that it can be ended within capitalism? Is it not dangerous folly to lead the workers into such a struggle, which inevitably means taking sides and creating the climate for fratricidal strife within the working class?

On the whole question of discrimination, however, Farrell is on shifting ground. Rightly he tells us that the privileges allegedly enjoyed by the Protestant workers are largely illusionary and the few examples that he gives devastates argument to the contrary. This is the line of approach which the WSP has continually put on the question of discrimination. Later, however, we find the pamphlet rebuking those “moderates” who ". . . fail to understand that by REMOVING discrimination in jobs and housing they are removing a buffer which has shielded the Protestant workers from the worst effects of the economic situation" (our emphasis). The error is repeated when we are told that the apparatus of discrimination is being dismantled—despite the fact that what Farrell admits to be its cause, the economic system, remains!

Long before October 1968 the WSP was arguing that discrimination in Northern Ireland was on class and not religious lines. We pointed out that Catholic members of the capitalist class had no problems in the matter of jobs and houses and that they enjoyed the same multiple voting rights as their Protestant counterparts. Protestant members of the working class, on the other hand, faced the same problems as their Catholic class brethren. True, some political flunkeys in the lower echelon of Unionism were ‘rewarded’ with a house or job which, because they were members of the working class they needed—the fact that their need, by some odious order of capitalist priorities, was less pressing than someone else is simply an indictment of the class system that makes such priorities necessary. The very limited extent of such “privilege” is amply demonstrated by Farrell’s striking examples of squalor and misery in the most vociferously “loyal” of all the Protestant areas. Thus, in the exclusively Protestant Shankill Road area of Belfast 96 per cent of the “homes” have no hot water, bath or wash-hand basin and have only an outside toilet. In the 83 per cent Protestant Ballymena Rural Council area 55 per cent of the houses have no toilet of any kind and 47 per cent no running water. We would venture to suggest that if similar statistics are available for other Protestant areas, such as Sandy Row and Ballymacarret, they would be equally evident of misery and squalor.

Of course Unionist leaders, while publicly disavowing the practice, quietly nourish the notion among their Protestant supporters that they enjoy real privileges and when bodies like the Civil Rights Association and the PD approach the question on the same premise they merely help to concretise the fiction and, hence, the fears of Protestant members of the working class. Inevitably the struggle “against discrimination” becomes a sectarian-orientated clash between Catholic and Protestant workers on the relative claims of each for jobs and housing. So, in fact, the CRA and the PD, insofar as they equated religion to class, played the Unionist Party’s game and gave vicious teeth to the tiger of Unionist bigotry.

Farrell advances Lenin’s failed “imperialist” thesis and wrongly ascribes the plight of the workers in Ireland to British imperialism rather than capitalism.

Farrell pledges PD to support of the struggle for an Irish "Socialist Workers' Republic” without in any way indicating what is meant by “Socialist”. It could be that closer scrutiny of the meaning of the term is deliberately avoided in order to facilitate unity among the factions and potential factions within PD or, equally likely, it could be the misuse of the term to indicate national state capitalism. Whatever Farrell means by Socialist—and he insists that only “genuine Socialists” can win the Protestant workers—he appears to feel that the Catholic workers are closer to it than the Protestants. For example, in the struggle leading up to its achievement, he tells us:

  There is another way. Pressure must be maintained to make sure the reforms are implemented, but as they are, Catholic workers will realise that they are largely hollow and don’t solve the problems of unemployment and homeless families. At the same time Protestant workers must have it explained to them that the reason for the shortage is not the Catholics but the economic system (our emphasis)

Farrell tells us that there is “no point in trying to trick the Protestants” but surely the above not only exposes his notions on the relative proximity of Catholic and Protestant workers to what he deems to be Socialism but, also, that PD’s programme of immediate reforms are calculated to trick workers of all denominations and none. On the one hand, PD brings workers out on the streets in support of reforms; now they tell us the Catholics will “realise” these reforms are “hollow” and don’t affect their basic problems and Protestants will have it “explained” that the real problem is the economic system. Oh, the perils of “leadership”!

No reform could be more hollow than the solution of our problem proposed by the PD and Farrell and blessed by the holy name of the patron saint of Irish reformers, James Connolly. As we have noted, that solution is an Irish “Socialist” Workers’ Republic.

Capitalism is a world wide system in which the social labour of the world’s workers is harnessed to the profit-making activities of the capitalists through the medium of the wages-money system.

Socialism, the only alternative to capitalism, is a world-wide system which will avail of the wealth-producing techniques of social labour in order to produce the wealth required in a system of social distribution in terms of "from each in accordance with his mental or physical ability; to each in accordance with his needs”. Since social class is determined by the relationship in which people stand to the means of wealth production, and since in Socialism, all will stand in the same relation to these means, classes, including the working class, must obviously disappear—hence the expression “Socialist Workers’ Republic” is, as we say, a contradiction in terms. The sort of contradiction, indeed, that results from a lack of understanding not only of Socialism but of capitalism too.

It is not possible for one country alone to leap forward into Socialism in a capitalist world. Even if we follow the fanciful thinking of PD to the extent of allowing their hypothesis that the “Irish people” could organise “Irish” industry in the “National” interest, even if we don’t press the point that wage- labour and capital are two sides of the same relation, the absurdity of the proposition becomes immediately obvious. The “Socialist Workers’ Republic” would have to carry on production of commodities (wealth produced for sale and profit); that would require the import of raw materials from the capitalist world and would require the export of its produce to pay for such imports. Obviously, therefore, the mood of capitalism would have more control over its republicans.

Richard Montague

Letter: Irish civil rights (1969)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sir,

While none would argue that the Civil Rights Movement as a whole in Northern Ireland is out to abolish capitalism, and while I would agree that only this can finally solve our most basic problems, I would nevertheless suggest that our indirect potential in this direction is much greater than you appear to anticipate.

But first let me make it clear that this movement did not “tend to divide the working class”, as you say in your October issue, since at best only a very spurious unity ever existed. We have not however brought its various sections together—at this stage.

You correctly suggest that sectarianism has been deliberately fostered by the Unionist Party in order to prevent the development of a class consciousness which would be the result of unity between Catholic and Protestant workers. But you fail to point out that the denial of Civil Rights—such things as political patronage and electoral malpractice—has all along been the chief, though admittedly not the only weapon at the government’s disposal. The “privileges” bestowed upon the Protestant workers have been relatively “puny”, but one thing is clear, the World Socialist Party of Ireland has failed to convince them of this. To the Protestant worker, a small but concrete privilege is worth more than an abstract political promise, and to the Catholic worker the difference between spending six weeks or six years in a rat-infested slum, is not “puny”. In an area of high, and chronic unemployment, bad housing, and low wages any privilege is enlarged, any injustice magnified. Protestants fear they will lose what little they have, Catholics that their intolerable situation would be relieved but for Protestant selfishness. In these circumstances it will continue to be impossible for the Socialist Party of Ireland, or any other group to bridge the gap between the vast majority of Northern Ireland workers.

The first step on this bridge therefore will be the removal of just those things which in the past have facilitated a Capitalist government and opposition to encourage the working class to misuse “the overwhelming superiority” of its votes.

Only when a Protestant worker no longer has the irrational feeling that he is a member of a privileged group, and when a Catholic worker realises that his condition has not improved quite as much as he had hoped, can there be the possibility of a class consciousness emerging. This will not inevitably follow a successful conclusion of our campaign but it cannot precede it. Only when full Civil Rights have been wrung from a fearful and unwilling government can the working class ever be united, and only the Civil Rights Movement, I would submit, is equipped to do just that.

Respectfully yours,

J. Quinn, 

Newtonabbey, Co. Antrim.

Reply:
The World Socialist Party in a pamphlet, Civil Rights or Socialism, issued in January of this year said:

  If the campaign for Civil Rights earns every worker in N. Ireland an equal opportunity to live in a slum and face unemployment and if all are afforded equal rights to vote for the continuance of the economic regime from which their miseries flow, the “Civil Rights” will have achieved its purpose. Theirs is not to question the economic circumstances behind slums and unemployment but simply to see that all share equally in the misery.

This sums up the line of argument taken by the various articles on the subject of the Civil Rights Movement in the Socialist Standard, including the October contribution to which Mr. Quinn’s letter refers.

Mr. Quinn agrees that only the abolition of capitalism can solve our basic problems but he infers that between those basic problems and conditions as they are in Northern Ireland today there is an ’indirect potential’ for improvement. If he means that better community relations and an end to open sectarian violence can be brought about, we are prepared to accept this and prepared to accept that all manner of people and organisations can help to bring this about but, while capitalism remains to shape the events of everyday life, discrimination must continue to exist.

Legalistic formulae may remove, wholly or in part, the religious element of selection from the spheres of housing and employment but, we repeat, there is no devisable formula for running capitalism in such a way as to end either its housing or unemployment problems or for removing the social and economic degradation of second-class citizenship from the working class, Catholic and Protestant. This discrimination against the overwhelming majority will continue as long as capitalism remains and any organisation that diverts the attention of the working class away from this discrimination merely canalises their revolutionary potential into the safe stream of reformist politics and, thus, helps perpetuate injustice.

Unquestionably, Unionist ‘ward-healing’ politicians have entrenched their position by throwing crumbs to the more active section of their supporters and since these supporters are Protestant, inevitably Catholics often have their claim to such crumbs set aside. In similar circumstances, Catholics, Jews, or atheists would act likewise. Obviously, therefore, it is not against the distribution of the crumbs that we should militate, but against the ’circumstances’—the circumstances of capitalism which creates not only its political priorities but the conditions of scarcity and poverty that makes selection or discrimination necessary.

Mr. Quinn claims that a small but 'concrete privilege’ to a Protestant worker or the difference to a Catholic worker between spending six weeks or six years in a rat-infested slum is worth more than an abstract political promise. His comparison between the Protestant workers’ 'concrete privilege’ and the Catholic workers’ ’rat- infested slum’ may, in his case, be purely accidental, but it is typical of many who follow the reasoning of the Civil Rights movement to assume that such a comparison exists. It is nonsense.

There are at least as many Protestant denizens of slumdom as Catholic—indeed the most outrageously ’loyal’ of the ‘loyalists’ of Belfast's Shankill Road, who embellish their slum gables with the legend “This we will maintain!”, are victims of the same notion as that suggested by Mr. Quinn’s comparison.

Of course their notion of privilege, like the individual Catholic’s heart-cry for a decent house, may appear more real than ‘an abstract political promise'. The new house is achievable for a few—and with it, incidentally, new problems, often as great as the one the new house solved—but for the working class the housing problem, like the unemployment problem, the problems of poverty, insecurity, violence, etc., is insoluble in a system of production for profit.

It is the tragedy of our class that individual workers work and hope for the solution of their own immediate problem and it is the strength of capitalism that its conditions can create the political climate for workers to organise against some feature of the system rather than unite for its complete overthrow. In fact, organisations like CRA, insofar as they draw the attention of the workers from the real cause of their problems and lend credibility to the capitalist fiction that working class problems are soluble within capitalism, are the enemies of the working class—ably abetting the political administrators of capitalism in concealing from the working class the real nature of capitalist exploitation.

Mr. Quinn takes us to task for claiming that the activities of the CRA have tended to divide the working class and he makes the point that the workers were not, in the first instance, united. The point is a valid one and we would agree that the use of the term ‘further’ before ‘divide’ may have better expressed the position from our point of view—since the workers were never united in pursuit of Socialism. On the other hand, from Mr. Quinn’s reformist point of view, considerable unity on a number of broad issues did exist prior to the recent troubles and this unity is certainly a casualty of the sectarian strife. Anyone who has moved about in the different areas affected by the shootings, burnings and lootings could not be other than appalled at the very real fear and hatred which the recent outbreaks, and the frictions attending thereto, has engendered between Catholic and Protestant members of the working class. As we indicated in our article, the CRA, not because it wanted to, but because it failed to understand the real nature of the problem, has become an instrument of sectarianism and that sectarianism is a further obstacle on the road to a final solution of our problems.

Mr. Quinn rightly points out that, to date, the WSP has failed to convince the workers of the need for Socialism. It must be said that our failure is not attributable to the prowess of the avowed upholders of capitalism; it is the temporary victory of the unconscious upholders of that system, those who, like Mr. Quinn, fed the working class should devote their energies to the administrative problems of capitalism rather than to the task of abolishing that system.

We accept that Mr. Quinn makes the point about our failure to influence the working class not as a snide political broadside but as an honest contribution to political debate. In the same spirit we would point out that, in the matter of failure, the record of those who support the idea of the reform of capitalism is an all-time high—despite the fact that on numerous occasions they have won the overwhelming support of the working class. Generally, their argument, like that offered by Mr. Quinn, is that, while Socialism is the only real answer to the basic problem of the working class, there are certain ’immediate' problems to which we should turn our attention. They have been struggling with the problem of slums, the problem of unemployment, the problem of violence, of bombs, of war, of crime, of discrimination and all the other ugly features of capitalism for hundreds of years. They have formed mass organisations, elected people to parliaments, signed petitions, sat down and stood up, they have sent workers to early graves and filled capitalism's gaols . . . but the problems remain to drive the workers into disillusion and apathy.

We would not boast our records; we are pitifully few and our energies and resources are dissipated mainly in endeavouring to counteract the activities of those bodies that waylay our class into the abortive struggle for reforms. But we are the only organisation in Ireland upholding the Socialist claim for a wageless, classless, moneyless society of production for use. During our various electoral activities we have brought that message into the most bigoted Unionist strongholds in Belfast. To date that message has been rejected but, such has been its nature that it has not, and could not, provide the basis for sectarian strife.

Finally, we would say that the CRA has achieved its purpose and will now limp its way into political oblivion. Time will demonstrate the futility of the reforms it has achieved. We would hope that as this becomes clearer we will be able to welcome people like Mr. Quinn into our ranks to put their undoubted enthusiasm, courage and ability in the service of Socialism.

Richard Montague

The World Socialist Party

The Workers in Ireland (1973)

Book Review from the February 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A History of the Irish Working Class by P. Berresford Ellis. Gollancz. £3.50.

The Rise of the Irish Trade Unions 1729-1970 by Andrew Boyd. Anvil. 50p.

A history of the working class in Ireland is badly needed but this book by Ellis is no good. It is too hastily written, too full of factual mistakes and too biased in favour of Irish republicanism. Indeed the last part is largely a list of the various republican sects, all of which claim to be “socialist”—which means they stand for an Irish state capitalism of one sort or another. Nor are we told much about the trade union movement.

This omission is corrected in Boyd’s booklet (for it is only about a hundred pages). He describes the laws passed against and the punishments meted out to the local craft unions of Dublin and Belfast in the 18th and early 19th centuries (including, be it noted, those passed between 1782 and 1800 by the Irish Home Rule Parliament). Later these craft unions were to amalgamate into national unions, though generally on an all-Britain rather than an all-Ireland basis, much to the dislike of later Irish Nationalists. Then in the years before the first world war came the organisation of the unskilled (Catholic) workers by men like Jim Larkin and James Connolly.

Irish trade unionism has of course been weakened by the sectarian divisions amongst the workers. Boyd tends to blame the Unionists exclusively for this, and indeed Ulster Unionist employers did use sectarianism in a bid to defeat attempts to organise their workers into unions. But the blame must be shared by union organisers like Connolly who openly proclaimed their own Irish Nationalism and even that the unions in Ireland should support the demand for Irish independence. No wonder the ITGWU in Belfast remained confined to Catholic workers. The Protestant workers, with some justice, suspected that Connolly wanted Protestant / Catholic unity as much for Irish Nationalist political ends as for trade unionism.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that those who argued that the trade unions in Ireland should steer clear of politics, both Nationalist and Unionist, and concentrate on bread-and-butter issues like wages and working conditions were better trade unionists than Connolly even if they weren’t always so militant over wage demands. After all, when it comes to organising workers to defend their interests at work a man’s politics or religion is irrelevant. What is required is unity.

Adam Buick

The Great Non-Event (1969)

From the April 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Now the tumult and the shouting, real and phoney, has died; the news-hounds have gone to re-live the scene elsewhere; the successful candidates breathe affably from the upholstery of the Members’ Lounge; the tickman regains a place of prominence in the workers’ troubles . . . it’s all over! Tragically, most of those who played parts, especially the voters who gave point to the exercise, knew precious little of what it was all about.

Captain O’Neill and his supporters perhaps come nearest to an appreciation of the situation. They have inherited a state and a party which emerged from the power struggles of Irish capitalism in the 20s fully clothed in the trappings of bigotry and intolerance. The material conditions of capitalism which then needed that bigotry and intolerance have changed, and continue to change rapidly as capitalism in Eire acquires a political maturity in keeping with its rapid post-war economic development.

The situation does not only allow for, but in fact demands, a de-escalation of all the old fictions if the new circumstances are to yield their obvious economic advantages in cross-border trade and the like. The Stormont parliament, with its parish-pump status, need not be an impediment. Indeed, all the leading political spokesmen in the South agree that a future ’united Ireland’ will allow Stormont the retention of its present powers.

This is the main factor that has determined the O’Neill Wing of Unionism on a more moderate course just as, ironically, it has caused a complete political about face among leading Northern Irish Nationalists — who are today as vociferous in their demands for “British standards for Northern Ireland” as they were yesterday in wanting to break the British connection! These people, ably abetted by the Labour Party and the large ’non-political' but pro-O’Neill group of businessmen who make up the New Ulster Movement (formed to support O’Neill candidates in the recent elections) represent ’responsible’—in the capitalist sense—political opinion.

But yesterday’s slogans and red herrings still have many thousands of active supporters, mainly (tragically) among the most impoverished sections of the working class. These are the people whom successive generations of ’responsible’ Unionist politicians brought up on the slogans “Home Rule is Rome Rule” and “Catholics are Disloyal”. In the fierce pace of change they have been slow to adjust and are easy prey to the ignorant slobberings of the firebrand Paisley. Their movement, insofar as it accepts the present social order, is capitalist, but it serves no need of capitalism today and can continue for only a time on the bitter slogans of yesterday. Assuredly, as opportunities for hooliganism and violence get less, it will atrophy and pass into history.

This leaves the various movements for civil rights that rapidly appeared and coalesced into an effective political weapon within the last two years. These groups were forged largely by the younger workers in the schools and university, in the factories and on the dole. More intelligent in ambition and political direction than previous movements born locally from frustration, political humbug, and fear, they were nevertheless hamstrung from the outset by their failure to get beneath the surface of the political events and institutions against which they militated and to appreciate that their real enemy was not Unionism or Nationalism, sectarianism or discrimination, but the system of class ownership that brings these things into being throughout the whole world of capitalism.

If we allowed a degree of comparison we should say that undoubtedly the Peoples Democracy movement, emanating largely from Belfast’s Queen’s University, came nearer to an appreciation of the situation than did the Civil Rights Association or the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee, and it is, incidentally, worthy of note that while some of the better known civil rights leaders obviously used their position to get into parliament, the PD contested, with distinction and courage, eleven constituencies without regard for the religion and politics traditionally popular in such constituencies, and with a policy that surrendered nothing to traditional conservatism.

Richard Montague

Violent Belfast (1969)

Book Review from the November 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Holy War in Belfast, by Andrew Boyd. Anvil Books 8s. 6d.

Belfast has a tradition of sectarian disturbances which is still alive as the fence the Army has put up between the Protestant and Catholic slums shows. Andrew Boyd gives here a simple blow-by-blow description of major riots that took place in 1857, 1864, 1872 and 1886. He has added a couple of hastily-written chapters which are supposed to bring the position up to date, but his book really ends in 1886.

That was the year Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill was defeated. It was also the year the Orange Order became respectable. Up till then it was a secret society of poorer Protestants whose parades were nearly always accompanied by disturbances. Their aim seemed to be to provoke the Catholics whenever the occasion arose. As such they were regarded as a nuisance by the government and for many years Orange marches or the display of Orange banners were prohibited. Many of the clashes described by Boyd were between police and Protestants.

The pattern is familiar: raving Presbyterian ministers, gun-fights, mob violence, intimidation, barricades, murder, arson, looting and battles with the police. In nearly every case the aggressors were the Orange extremists. In every case it was the poor, Protestant and Catholic, who suffered the consequences of this violence in terms of death, injury, homelessness and unemployment.

Inflamed by the anti-popery of their preachers, the Protestant workers feared that Home Rule would mean domination by the Catholic majority in the rest of Ireland. The landlords and the rich capitalists knew this was so much nonsense but they had a very real economic interest in encouraging hostility to Home Rule. The landlords wished to protect their right to exploit and oppress the Irish peasants while the capitalists wanted access to the profitable markets of the British Empire. To protect their economic interests they decided, as Churchill’s father Lord Randolph Churchill put it, to play the Orange card. Catholic-baiting and anti-popery became the stock-in-trade of the Unionist Party which emerged in 1886 from the anti-Horne Rule elements in Ireland.

Since 1920 this Party has itself ironically enjoyed a measure of Home Rule over six counties in the North East of Ireland. Lord Craigavon, Northern Ireland’s first Prime Minister, declared that they now had a “Protestant government for a Protestant people”, a statement not calculated to encourage the “loyalty” of the non-Protestants who made up a third of its subjects. To deal with those who were likely to be “disloyal” the government soon passed the notorious Special Powers Act; set up a special para-military police force of which the equally notorious B Specials survive; abolished proportional representation in elections and gerrymandered local council wards—all really needlessly since the Unionists had a built- in majority if they could continue to play the Orange card successfully.

Today, however, this has become an embarrassment — with the need to attract overseas investors and with full free trade between Ireland and Britain (including Northern Ireland) due in 1975—and some Unionists are trying to repudiate their past. But this will not be easy since not only do many of their followers still hold to the bigotry their masters once taught them but the records show that what Paisley says today nearly every leading Unionist—Minister, MP, aristocrat, judge or churchman—said yesterday.

For the record (since the publishers do not disclose this) Boyd is a member of the Northern Ireland Labour Party and is obviously out to discredit the Orange Order and the Ulster Unionist Party. That’s easy, a great deal easier than defending the NILP, which is but a second unionist and loyalist party with an unrivalled record of opportunism including support for the Special Powers Act.

Adam Buick

What we said at the start . . . (1994)

From the October 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

To workers from Ireland 

Many of you will be concerned about what is happening in places like Belfast and Derry. You will probably support the civil rights struggle in Northern Ireland.

We too are concerned about the conditions our fellow workers in other parts of the world have to live and work under. We know that the role of the police and army is everywhere to protect private property and the existing political set-up.

When Ireland got independence in 1921 the North East part, for economic reasons, was kept under British rule though given a parliament and government of its own. The government there has since armed itself with various undemocratic powers to use against its opponents. It is against these powers, and against bad housing and unemployment, that the Civil Rights people are protesting.

Protest movements are nothing new and are not confined to Northern Ireland. They exist everywhere and show that everywhere workers are discontented with some aspect of their lot. It is by promising to do something about this that politicians obtain your votes — and it is their failures that lead people to protest on the streets.

The politicians fail not because they are dishonest or incompetent but because capitalism cannot be made to work for the good of all.

If you accept this, then you will see that direct action is in the end as futile as voting for parties that stand for capitalism. You will see too the uselessness of a United Ireland as a way of solving the problems of workers in the North. This would merely be a political re-shuffle — a change of masters, we would say — that would leave unchanged the class basis of society which is the real cause of these problems. As anyone who has lived in the Irish Republic can confirm, people there face the same problems of bad housing, unemployment and insecurity (indeed this may be why you are now living in Britain).

The lasting solution to these problems in Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, Britain and the rest of the world is Socialism.

(From Socialist Standard, December 1970)

Don’t be fooled by words

"All I want to see, is my country free, happiness peace and prosperity." A theme, with variations, that has headed the top ten of the political hit parade with unceasing regularity during the last century.

The chorus master on this occasion is Joe Cahill who has been described as "the militant leader of the Belfast wing of the provisional IRA" after his release from detention in Dublin. At this point we will stop the satire; the part played over the decades by political "leaders" with their message of national independence has proved too tragic and disastrous to joke about.

The working class of Ireland, that is to say of Eire and Northern Ireland, as indeed workers wherever they may reside, should think seriously about such phrases as "Freedom". "My country", "Prosperity" and "Peace". Let's see what they really mean.

FREEDOM: In capitalist society means the right of the vast majority to be property's wage workers producing wealth to be sold on a market with a view to profit.

MY COUNTRY: The countries of the world are owned by a privileged minority. The working class has problems and interests that are produced by capitalism and not by the existence of national barriers.

PROSPERITY: All workers are poor, some are destitute. A prosperous working class is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism is as incapable of producing a working class that is prosperous as it is of producing a government that is popular. 

PEACE: Even if the shooting stopped the class war would remain, that is the struggle which goes on all the time over the ownership of the wealth of society, whether it be in a so called “United” Ireland, the “United" States, the "United" Kingdom, the "United” Arab Republic, Russia, Africa, in fact wherever capitalism is the predominating form of society.

(From Socialist Standard, November 1971)

Letter: What a Consolation! (1994)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

The two articles in your October issue dealing with the problems in Northern Ireland said next to nothing about the thoroughgoing reactionary nature of the Protestant working class's political consciousness. Why was that?

Surely the writers of these articles were not ignorant of the fact that the Catholic working class people in Northern Ireland have been treated something like a non-people by the Herrnevolk attitude of the Unionist parties there and also most of the Protestant working class.

So what do you expect the Catholic population to do there in Northern Ireland when they are treated like coolies? Sitting down reading Socialist Standards certainly would be no consolation to them at all. And I am sure the Protestant working class in Northern Ireland in the main would not be impressed by what your writers have to say about Northern Ireland.

So what's the point in trying to make out that your type of Socialism has the solution to the problems in Northern Ireland?

Certainly the capitalist economic system causes problems and crises, but capitalism is not completely the same in all countries. The class consciousness Marx advocated for the bringing about of Socialism is a non-starter at the present time.

The Catholics in Northern Ireland just want to move forward to have an equal say in political matters rather than be treated with contempt by Unionist Herrenvolk or, worse still, as being enemies.

You say Ian Paisley is a clown. If so, he is a clown with plenty M-O-N-E-Y. Also, a clown that stirs up plenty of trouble for the Catholic population of Ulster. How many reincarnations do you think he would need to become a class conscious Socialist?

R. Smith, 

Dundee.

Reply:

R. Smith is not correct to say that the two articles on Northern Ireland in our October issue "said next to nothing about the thoroughgoing reactionary nature of the Protestant working class". In fact the two articles in question said all that needed to be said about reactionary attitudes in general in Northern Ireland.

We pointed out that Catholic workers who give their allegiance to Irish nationalism are every bit as "reactionary" as Protestant workers who give their allegiance to British nationalism. R. Smith doesn’t like this viewpoint as it obviously contradicts the fantasy that all Protestants are materially well-off and reactionary bigots in their views while all Catholics are poor, down-trodden and progressive in their views.

As socialists, we don’t go in for moralising in this way about the "goodness" or "badness” of whole sections of the working class. We base our views on an analysis of the material conditions. In the case of Northern Ireland, such an analysis tells us that both sets of nationalists are conning themselves and other workers and are betraying their class interests.

Sitting down and reading the Socialist Standard may not be "a consolation" — it isn't meant to be; it's meant to be an education and an antidote. 

Editors