Running Commentary: Rich and well (1985)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rich and well

 

After the successful operation to remove a cancerous growth from his colon, President Reagan advised Americans to have a medical check-up "if you think something isn't right". This might have rated as the most sensible words Reagan had uttered had the facilities been freely available.

In Britain we do have free health care, but that doesn't help the thousands of people who die from curable cancers every year because they aren't detected early enough. Take cervical cancer for example. If detected early enough there is an almost 100 per cent guarantee of a cure. And yet the screening programme, which was begun twenty years ago. has not improved survival rates: about 2.000 women die of this cancer each year (The Times, 23 July). At present there is a backlog of 25.000 samples waiting to be tested at one laboratory because of under-staffing. Similarly, cancer of the ovary causes 4,000 deaths a year in Britain. As yet there is no national screening programme because of the high cost of ultra-sound scanning equipment.

The moral of the story is clear: if you happen to be Ronald Reagan or any other member of the ruling class who can afford to pay for the best that medical science can offer, then your chances of early detection and cure of cancer are probably high. The rest of us, who have to rely on medical services restricted by considerations of cost, might very well end up as one of the 100 people who die in Britain every day from curable cancer of the breast, cervix, ovary or bowel.

Class “justice”

During the miners' strike 646 people were charged with offences of riot and unlawful assembly which, if proved, carry a possible maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Those cases are now being heard in court. Since their arrest those charged have been under the considerable strain of stringent bail conditions and in fear of the possible imposition of jail sentences if they were found guilty.

In July and August a succession of such cases have been thrown out or dropped for lack of evidence, the most notorious of which related to incidents at the Orgreave coking plant on 18 June last year. Fourteen of the 98 miners charged with riot or unlawful assembly on that day walked out of Sheffield Crown Court when the prosecution abandoned its case after 48 days of the trial. One of the policemen who gave evidence admitted that part of his written statement was inaccurate and that around 20 policemen present at Orgreave were given "rough dictation" of what they should write down. "We just wrote out what we were told" said PC Browning of Merseyside police.

The fact that similar cases against many other miners have also been dropped or lost should not blind us to the class nature of the “justice" being handed down: public order offences like unlawful assembly are inherently political since they can always be used by a nervous ruling class against what is seen as a threatening working class. In the case of the miners' strike the bringing of such charges against so many men served the intended purpose of removing as many as possible from the picket lines and criminalising miners in the eyes of their fellow workers. Once the strike was over there was no point in creating working-class heroes by convictions and imprisonment.

Suffocated

It took 20 years for the ban to be lifted on the showing of the film The War Game. But just in case you thought that freedom of speech was alive and well in Britain, in the same week as the screening a ban was imposed on another TV programme, At the Edge of the Union. It was to have shown interviews with representatives of two organisations in Northern Ireland which advocate the use of political violence. Despite the producers' claims that the programme did not advance the cause of either but rather aimed at exposing the similar backgrounds, motives and behaviour of the men interviewed, the Board of Governors of the BBC, under pressure from the government, decided to withdraw it.

There are a number of ways in which the ruling class can control the media. In Russia it is done directly by government censorship of what is broadcast; in the western "liberal" democracies the means used are more subtle. On the one hand it is achieved through the ownership of TV and radio stations by capitalists like Rupert Murdoch, who exercise effective editorial control through their control of the purse strings. In Britain, the BBC is supposed to be editorially independent although the Home Secretary has an effective veto over any programme.

In the case of the Northern Ireland programme he did not have to use that veto—a few well-chosen words to the BBC governors and they did his dirty work for him. This is not surprising really, when you consider some of the members of the capitalist class who sit on the BBC's Board: Chairman. Stuart Young, senior partner in the city accountants. Hacker Young; Lady Faulkner of Downpatrick; Watson Peat, member of the British Agricultural Council and a prominent figure in farming and food production; Sir John Johnston, former diplomat; Malcolm McAlpine, director of McAIpine construction company.

Margaret Thatcher, in a speech to the American Bar Association, made her intentions plain prior to the programme's banning: terrorists, she said, must be denied the "oxygen of publicity". But democracy also

requires "oxygen" — the oxygen of freely available information and freely expressed views. It is we, the workers, who are being suffocated by the curtailment of those freedoms. consistently starved of information which will enable us to make up our own minds.

New from the World Socialist Party (Ireland) (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Ireland — Twenty Years of Struggle 

A pictorial calendar of the political struggle in Ireland, including a resumé of major events. Educational and practical — a must for the politically aware.

£2 each, including p&p

Cheques etc are payable to World Socialist Party (Ireland)

Available from WSP. 41, Donegall Street, Belfast 1, Northern Ireland.

Current issue of journal, Socialist View No. 13, also now available (20p)

Blogger's Note:

Sadly, I've never seen a copy of this calendar. It sounds like something that should be scanned in and placed on the World Socialist Movement website.

 

P.S. Does this qualify as a pamphlet?

Between the Lines: After Warrington (1993)

The Between the Lines Column from the November 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

After Warrington

Colin and Wendy Parry lost their son, Tim, aged twelve, to an IRA bomb. Their response was to try to find out why he was killed. Panorama (BBC 1, 9.30 pm, 6 September) followed them as they visited the rival factions in search of their tribal motives. It was moving and compelling viewing, but, above all, it was frustrating. The Parrys are the kind of reasonable people socialists like to meet; their minds were genuinely exercised by the question "Why?". But the responses of those they met on their quest for knowledge ranged from the entrenchedly bigoted to the enthusiastically stupid.

This TV viewer has grown bored of watching ghetto catholics and protestants pleading a defence for their blinkered outlooks. The self-pitying nationalists who want us to imagine that the Great Famine is still going on and that it constitutes some kind of an excuse for blowing up children should dry their eyes and stop whining; nobody beyond the drunken barroom rebels of Boston cares less about their persistent self-indulging in a patriotism which puts kids in graves. And as for the protestant bigots, always shown to us on our screens from their siege headquarters in the Shankhill Road, they should be informed in no uncertain terms that their vociferous paranoia in defence of a Union which confines them to slums and slogans is a form of nationalist arrogance, made worse by the fact that they too are wage-slaves and have nothing but their illusion of ascendancy to defend. Who cares about these people with their shallow, offensive ethical defences for the prejudices which keep the undertakers busy.

But worse than these home-grown fools, whose only hope now lies in the recognition that instead of fighting to protect their poverty they have a world and not a nation to win, there were the fellow-travelling republicans in Boston — the Noraid brigade who want to see bodybags for their bucks. Who could but admire the patience of Colin Parry, a man whose son was murdered with the support of these remote-control warriors, when one of them (no doubt the son of a nephew of a man who claimed once to spend his boyhood in Kerry) told him that his position of opposing all violence was too easy? No doubt they would prefer it it he came to the war in Ireland by their lofty route: by sitting in a bar in Boston drinking imported stout, singing rebel songs which they do not understand and which decent people have long ago forgotten the words of, and putting dollars in collections so that more Tim Parrys can leave home one morning and arrive at the mortuary before it is dark.

Pretty Woman meets Reality

Not being much of a cinema-goer, ITV’s showing of Pretty Woman (9 m, 5 September), starring Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, was this writer’s first opportunity to see this tale of Cinderella encountering the delights of the free market. The romance is quite simple: Gere, a millionaire whose description of his uselessness as a property speculator was good stuff, picks up Roberts, a hooker who looks like a Hollywood movie star. He pays her huge amounts of money; she gives him sex and then falls in love with him. According to the Beatles, money can’t buy you love, but times have changed and if you want to spend the rest of your life with Julia Roberts, open a deposit account now. Then on Wednesday, 8 September BBC 1’s Inside Story ran the sequel to the film. It was not intended to be a follow-up; it was a documentary about prostitutes and their lives. None of them looked much like Julia Roberts did, but a few of them might have done had they not suffered years of being beaten up by ruthless pimps who wanted their money’s worth out of their investments. It was a story of the daily struggle which our opponents celebrate as the free marker. It’s a strange medium, TV: you watch a romance about buying sex and smile at the happy ending; if the documentary would have been shown immediately before the film its offensive message might just have been a little clearer.

Steve Coleman

Life and Times: Way back when (2025)

The Life and Times column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was a ring on the bell. When I opened the door, a smart looking young man wearing suit, collar and tie and carrying a brief case told me he was selling insurance (those were the days when insurance was still sold door to door), but then he quickly added that what he was really interested in was the Socialist Party of Great Britain. He was very polite and said he knew about the SPGB and had found my name as a contact. I was surprised but also pleased to have someone actually coming round to the house to find out about socialism. So I invited him in and we sat down in the front room. He asked me to tell him about the Party and I tried to sum it up as quickly as possible. I said we stood for a moneyless, wageless democratic world of free access to all goods and services, without leaders or led, based on the idea that this will happen when the majority class in society – all those who had to work for a wage or salary – develop the consciousness necessary to democratically take power from the tiny minority in society who own and control the wealth and to establish the new society. Or something like that.

Andrew – that was his name – seemed enthusiastic and I showed him some of the Party’s leaflets and pamphlets. He appeared particularly interested in certain ideas and positions – for example our attitude towards the use of violence as a political instrument (I told him we were opposed to it) and what was going on in Ireland at the time (it was the period of ‘The Troubles’). He appeared satisfied with this and asked if he could become a member and he would pay the subscription there and then. I told him there wasn’t a joining subscription and I couldn’t enrol him, but, if he came to our next branch meeting at the Swansea Central Library, he could apply to join then. He kept apologising for being an insurance salesman while patting his briefcase and telling me he needed to do that to keep the wolf from the door for himself and his family. I said I understood and he left, telling me he’d see me at our next Monday evening branch meeting.

I felt somehow exhilarated about this – until, that is, my wife emerged from the adjacent room, where she’d been listening to everything that had gone on. ‘He’s a policeman’, was the first thing she said. Wow! It took a moment to sink in, but then it dawned on me that his coming to the house and asking questions in particular about violence and Northern Ireland had to be a bit peculiar. It dawned on me that I’d been naïve. But maybe that was to the good, because, if he was a policeman – an undercover policeman – he might have had a weapon in that briefcase for if and when he might be challenged. And that felt a bit scary.

But was that over-dramatic? Well, I never really found out because Andrew never came to one of our meetings. But I did see him again – about a year later when I attended an indoor public meeting in Swansea put on by the organisation called the International Marxist Group. A group of us were selling our magazines and handing out our leaflets before we went in. As we did, I found myself faced with a casually dressed man who seemed to be one of the organisers. He wasn’t someone I recognised but he said hello to me, looked embarrassed and then sort of blurted out that he was out of the insurance game now and how was I? I realised it was Andrew and reciprocated his ‘hello’ before sitting down.

Make of that what you will. Was I (am I) being paranoid in regarding this as confirmation that he was a police spy? Maybe. But when in 2022 I read and reviewed for the Socialist Standard a book entitled Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century by David Caute, my mind went back to that time. The book’s author had drawn on official but publicly available documents which gave startling insights into the enormous efforts (and massive resources) put into tracking the activities and affiliations of an extraordinarily wide range of people and organisations suspected of being subversive, of constituting a possible ‘threat to national security’.

All this was brought back to me by a recent investigative series on BBC Radio 4 presented by Mark Steel and entitled Shadow World. The People Versus McDonald’s. It was largely about the so-called McLibel case in the 1990s when two anti-McDonald’s Greenpeace campaigners were pursued through the courts by that company for making claims about their activities and methods which McDonald’s said were libellous. The series was an interesting one in itself, but one of the things that emerged from it was the discovery by one of the campaigners that a member of her group she’d engaged in a two-year relationship with was a police infiltrator. He then vanished, but when she later tracked him down, it emerged that, while he was with her, he was married to someone else. She also discovered that other undercover policemen had had relationships with other female activists (over 60 of them in all) from small ‘suspect’ groups. One of these policemen had been involved with four different women, with one of whom he fathered a child. Finally, Mark Steel revealed that, as a member of one such ‘suspect’ group himself in the 1980s, his local branch of the Socialist Workers Party had discovered that one of their members was a police infiltrator, and that records now available showed that, from 1968 to 2008, Special Branch oversaw what he called the ‘massive expensive palaver’ of spying on more than 1,000 different organisations in Britain.

So why not the SPGB as part of that? Just in case. After all it would only be a small part of the massive expensive (and wasteful) palavers of every description that capitalism is full of.

Howard Moss

Inconvenient commemoration (1984)

From the December 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not every liar, cheat and hypocrite is qualified to be a politician, for which a high standard of expertise is required. Even so equipped, however, politicians can frequently become victims of what has come to be known as the banana-skin syndrome. A pesky civil servant is sometimes the agent of this dreaded problem which can bring about political death, or even reveal the fact that a female generalissimo was lying through her teeth when she disclaimed responsibility for the slaughter of 350 of her fellow human beings.

Whether the suggestion by that well-known Christian. Enoch Powell, that the murder of 350 Argentinian sailors should have been an occasion for “justification and rejoicing" (as reported in the Belfast Telegraph, 3 October. 1984) is genuine hypocrisy, is open to doubt. It is true that according to the Christian ethic “thou shall not kill", but Christian practice has never been averse to a bout of murder, providing it is committed under the guise of war. At any rate, it is conceivable that the eminent Enoch is quite genuine in his well-publicised hatred of all but the best of white-anglo-saxon protestants.

Timing is critical in the use of hypocrisy. It is fine, for example, for the British Labour Party to show righteous indignation about the Tories presiding over rising unemployment; attacking the health service; breaking strikes and using the full rigour of the capitalist law to punish pickets and strikers and, indeed, all the other dirty things that Tories do. But the Labour Party can protest only when it is Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition — and its parliamentary representatives should leave the House before the Tories remind them that all Labour governments — all seven of them — have done all of these things in the past and will be obliged to do so again if they ever become the government again.

Yes, timing is always vital; but then, how fickle is the public memory? Who is likely to remind the pensioned media that butchering the people of Afghanistan was a practice taken up by British governments long before the Russian ruling class ever thought of it? Churchill, arguably one of the greatest exponents of political hypocrisy. just got his timing right in 1939 when he told the British working class to pledge their lives in the fight against Hitler — just two years after he had told readers of The Times that if Britain ever got into difficulties he hoped a man with the will and determination of Hitler would emerge. Mind you, this feat of monumental hypocrisy was almost eclipsed by the Russian Foreign Minister. Molotov, when he told his German counterpart that the Russian rulers had always held that a strong Germany was indispensable to world peace — about a year before their respective leaders sent their wage-slaves out to slaughter each other.

Then there was Kenyatta of Kenya, the leader of the Mau-Mau. If we believed the British press, this unsavoury bunch not only killed our brave boys who were upholding the flag in foreign parts, they actually ritualised the savaging of their corpses. Finally a deal was done with old Jomo that helped to keep trade and commerce intact and Kenyatta was canonised into the ranks of secular saints who help to keep the world safe for hypocrisy and capitalist exploitation.

Given half the space used by the press for bingo and trivia, we could lengthen indefinitely the list of current and past examples of hypocrisy. Where these examples proved successful, you can be sure that the timing was right. Bad timing and . . . there’s a banana skin!

It was such a banana skin that caused no less a person than the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Ireland, the redoubtable hypocrite, Dick Spring, to fall on his political backside on 1 October last. In looking at the background to Spring’s misadventure. it is important to note that the Irish government is busily re-writing history in order to distance its more prominent personnel from the activities of the Provisional IRA and events in Northern Ireland. Again, the element of time comes into this mammoth exercise; according to the comfortable Garrett Fitzgerald and his cohorts, murder and mayhem was alright in 1916 and in 1919-21 but it is quite . . . well, barbaric, today.

Of course there were differences between 1916 and 1984. In 1916. when Pearse and Connolly led a bunch of politically ignorant workers onto the streets of Dublin to kill and be killed by their fellow members of the working class, Ireland was undergoing a period of British rule less rigorous and repressive than the country had ever experienced. In the present Northern Ireland troubles, on the other hand, those who mislead workers into an anti-working-class conflict against each other have very real military repression as well as social deprivation to play the role of recruiting sergeants. But this is not the difference that concerns southern Irish politicians; the difference is that they now have power and influence as the lickspittles of Irish capitalism; power, influence, Mercedes cars and all the trappings of rich living that their ex-imperial masters used to flaunt and all derived directly from the earlier bout of killing. Can it be wondered why they want to conceal the history of their bloody inheritance?

The old songs about yesterday’s heroes that once rocked the timbers where drunken patriotism found solace no longer have official favour — what respectable politician would want to share a ballad with the Provos? The sick commemoration services that previously allowed government ministers to unveil plaques to the immortal memory of some poor, unfortunate Paddy Murphy — whose dog might have barked at the Black-and-Tans — are, similarly, now frowned upon. But sometimes it can’t be helped; members of the commemoration committee might be the same people who marshall the voting fodder for the Party and. on the principle of votes before principles, what can a Minister, even a Deputy Prime Minister, do but attend?

Doubtless, for such good reason. Deputy Prime Minister Dick Spring was the chief hypocrite at a commemoration in honour of Sir Roger Casement, a would-be Republican gun-runner who was apprehended by the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1916. Actually, there are several layers of hypocrisy in the Casement affair. After his arrest, the British authorities — who had knighted him for his civil service in the Congo — found his diaries which, they claimed, revealed that he was a homosexual. The truth or otherwise of that claim should have been irrelevant but — mindful of the sick perversity of Catholic thinking on matters sexual — both sides tried to make propaganda out of the alleged revelations. the leaders of Catholic nationalism claiming that the “Black Diaries" were forgeries and, as such, demonstrated the depravity of the British.

The truth of the matter has never been cleared up nor have Irish politicians — the political heirs of yesterday’s gunmen — or the present IRA ever been brave enough to express their admiration for Casement irrespective of the nature of his sexual proclivities. The hypocrites can only revere the memory of a heterosexual Casement. But that is the lower layer of hypocrisy; the more immediately glaring aspect of the matter — the commemoration of a gunrunner by an Irish Minister — was the part that came unstuck — through bad timing for all concerned.

Poor Dick was not to know that the latter-day gunmen were attempting an almost carbon-copy re-run of the Casement adventure — at least, not when he agreed to give the oration. As it was a seven-ton trawler, loaded with weapons and surrounded by the entire Irish navy, was sailing into port within a short distance of the spot where Dick was commemorating an equally-failed venture. Whether it disturbed the Deputy Prime Minister to the point where he left the festivities without partaking in the sumptuous repast usually allotted to a hypocrite of such high standing. is not reported. Certainly, the affair did not appear to rock his boss, Garrett Fitzgerald, who with contemptible effrontery took credit for saving the lives of “fellow-irishmen” who might have died if the weapons had got into the hands of the Provos. Presumably, had Casement's mission been accomplished, the resultant deaths might have provided another opportunity for some other hypocrite to commemorate a "successful" engagement in the “Glorious Struggle" where the "other side" were “British" members of the working class.

Paisley, one of the chief political architects of the present troubles in Northern Ireland, and the Unionist Party leader. Molyneaux, while complimenting the southern politicians on the capture of the arms, were quick to point to the hypocrisy of the Irish government. Molyneaux equated the Casement adventure with the more recent attempt to bring weapons into Ireland and he upbraided the southerners for not condemning all gun-running. A fair point, you might think, until you remember that he and his Party of Superbrits owe their existence in no small way to the fact that they conspired successfully with Germany, in 1912 — in the shadow of the First World War — to bring in guns to use against British troops if the British government intended to impose a solution of the Irish Problem that was not compatible with the political and economic requirements of the capitalist class in Northern Ireland.

Harrington might well have been referring particularly to Irish politicians when he penned the couplet:

Treason doth never prosper; what’s the

reason?

If it prosper, none dare call it treason!

We are not implying that capitalism is bad because its politicians are demonstrably cheats, liars and hypocrites. Capitalism should be abolished because it kills people by starvation, war and lack of medical attention; because it imposes poverty of varying intensity on the overwhelming majority of the world's people; because it divides. alienates and embitters the human family and denies us all the material means of a full and happy life — and finally because. even if the politicians who legalise its thieving processes were anxious to promote political honesty, they could not do so.

Richard Montague

Belfast Branch, WSP

Blogger's Note:

Embedded within this article in the original copy of the December 1984 Socialist Standard was an ad for the recently published pamphlet, Ireland — Past, Present and Future. This pamphlet was produced jointly by the SPGB and the World Socialist Party of Ireland. It can be accessed at the following link.

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.]

Nationalism's winners and losers (1993)

From the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The IRA claims it is acting in the interests of 'The Risen People’. But as R Montague makes clear, it is our fellow members of the working class, fighting over the fictions of opposing nationalisms, who are not only the battle casualties but the social casualties of the ‘national question’.

'The cause of Labour is the cause of Ireland". So wrote the renegade James Connolly when he abandoned his concept of internationalism and aligned himself with the racist nationalist, Patrick Pearse, in a struggle to extend the power of Ireland's fledgling capitalists back in 1916.

The lie did not die with Connolly; it remained to pollute working-class politics in Ireland and to facilitate the divisive interests of Ulster Unionists and Irish Nationalists and to bolster the fiction among some workers that despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary Ireland is in some way "their country". Connolly's reformist vision of solving the "national question" in order to clear the ground for the class struggle played no small part in making the so-called national question — which should be of no concern to the working class — a battleground on which workers slaughter one another over tribal issues.

The Provisional IRA and its political cousin, Sinn Fein, frequently use the term "the risen people" to designate their members and supporters, most of whom reside in working-class housing estates or on small farms. Like much of the archaic political baggage of the republicans, the expression dates back to the early part of the present century when the Gaelic revival and Sinn Fein were a burgeoning force in Irish politics.

Not that Sinn Fein or the genteel pseuds of of the Gaelic League were particularly concerned about the ordinary people. In Dublin, where Sinn Fein was especially active, the Medical Officer of Health announced in 1912 that 82,000 people were living in one-roomed tenement slums. Poverty was endemic, grim, the sort of poverty that has an ambience of real hunger, foul smells, ignorance and beggarly hopes and expectations. In 1912, too, Jim Larkin began to unionize the low paid, the labourers and transport workers who, against a background of mass unemployment, had no protection from their particularly rapacious employers.

The employers responded with a lock-out and the Royal Irish Constabulary won a contemptible place in Irish history by brutally attacking these semi-starvelings who had the audacity to ask their employers for a little more. The priests moralized and reminded the workers that property was a divine right and that they must distrust the motives of trade unionists in Britain who opened their homes to the starving kids of the victims of property and who, according to the priests, might be careless of the religion of those they were helping!

Sinn Fein stood aloof; its founder. Arthur Griffith, making no secret of his bitter hostility to the cause of organized labour.

"The first duty of the (Irish) nation", according to Sinn Fein, was not the plight of the desperately poor and downtrodden families that represented the generality of working-class life. Sinn Fein and the Gaelic League were not on their side. On the contrary: in as much as Sinn Fein’s purpose and its policy was aimed at gaining political independence so that an Irish government could nurture a native capitalism behind tariff walls and import quotas, it can be said that it was firmly on the side of the masters whose riches and affluence were fashioned from the grim exploitation of the poor.

With fierce candour, Sinn Fein would declare the first duty of the new Irish nation to be the interests of "the home manufacturers and producers" — a euphemistic description of the Irish capitalists who were locked in class warfare with the workers. Yet it was these workers who were subsequently elevated in republican myth to the status of "the risen people" because the republicans had succeeded in convincing some of them to forgo their ow n class interests and risk their lives fighting for the political and economic interests of their enemies!

In the light of recent revelations appertaining to lifestyle, wealth and poverty in Northern Ireland, it might be of interest to take a look at the current crop of "risen people" and to assess whether they are winners or losers in the grim game of death, maiming and suffering so grandiloquently misrepresented by republican slogans.

We must make it immediately clear that when we look for those who are losers and those who are winners in the Northern Ireland troubles, we see neither category represented as catholics or protestants, or as republicans or loyalists. All such categories are among the winners and, of course, catholics, protestant, loyalists and republicans are the entire human material of the losers the people who suffer death, maiming, intimidation and imprisonment. Among the losers, too, are those who inflict these miseries on one another.

Who are the "risen people"? Where and how do they live and what sustains the claim that either in their actual conditions, or in their political aspirations, they could justifiably be seen to have "risen"? Put another way, as the media draws attention to the rich lifestyles of some people in Northern Ireland and disgraced ex-Minister, Michael Mates, suggests the British government’s £3 billion annual subvention is making life easy for some people, we might suspect that these are the real risen people. The question is, are these people whose lives have changed so noticeably for the better as to gain the attention of the national press the "risen people" of republican legend?

In offering the testimony of Michael Mates we are conscious of his dubious reputation but he is right in saying that the British government makes a nett contribution of some £3 billion annually to Northern Ireland and he is right in suggesting that some of this money goes to the Northern Ireland Housing Executive and he might even be right in inferring that that public authority has evolved a standard of housing which is superior to some local authority housing in Britain.

Where Mates lapses into nonsense is in inferring, as he does, that money invested in public housing is in some way associated with the reluctance of local politicians to hammer out an agreed solution to the province’s problems. The fact is that there is still an acute housing problem in Northern Ireland and that this is being currently aggravated by severe cuts in the housing budget.

It is true that the overwhelming majority of IRA activists and IRA supporters, the "risen people", in the cities, towns and villages of Northern Ireland live in public housing estates. By their nature, even where standards have improved, these are depressing places and when the IRA or Loyalist writ is triumphant life can be very frightening indeed.

Peculiarly, the "risen people” and their "enemies” who support the loyalist cause, live in very similar surroundings. Whether they support the posturings of the paramilitaries or remain frightened and silenced by graffiti, intimidation, hijackings, and the occasional taking-over of their homes by local or state gunmen, they live in fairly uniform poverty. Unemployment in some of these areas can be as high as 85 percent; where it is lower, it remains a fact that most of the people are wholly dependent on state benefits.

As far as political aspirations are concerned, for most people they extend to the simple and somewhat despairing hope that the killings will end and the gun bullies, legal and illegal, go away. For others, politics are the bitter reaction to the last atrocity. For others, and especially the young people, nurtured in the ambivalence of a capitalist "morality" that glorifies military thuggery, and licensed killings, it is easy to translate the machoism, romance and reaction to state violence into the cause of Ireland — or the cause of Ulster. These are the areas from which come those who are killed, those who are maimed and those who are sentenced to long periods of imprisonment — and, of course, those who are doing most of the killing. Workers in these areas are often articulate and aware that whatever way the troubles are ultimately resolved will not affect the economic life of their class. The regime under which they live — either republican or loyalist — doesn’t tolerate dissent, however. Freedom is the right to do what you’re told!

Both republican and loyalist paramilitaries accept and commonly practise capital punishment even for what they term anti-social behaviour; there is no appeal, no concern for the social conditions that give rise to the alleged misbehaviour. This is a dominant, frightening part of the life of the IRA's risen people and they are locked into it because it is the heritage of their class; because their poverty denies them the opportunity to seek another form of life that exists a short distance away — among the real winners.

The prominence of this other form of life has become so pronounced that it has become newsworthy. On August 8 the Independent on Sunday featured an article entitled "Ulster Few Enjoy A Golden Age”. The article was accompanied by a picture of yachts and luxury cruisers tied up at Bangor marina and the lead-in proclaimed. "The sweet life goes on in North Down despite everything".

The ”story" was about luxury boats, about Jaguars and Mercs and Porsches, and the arrogant, pompous and non-productive people who own these things.

Two days later, the Irish Times took up the theme in a lengthy article entitled "The Sweet Charm of the Northern Bourgeoisie". The writer, Nuala O Faolain, festoons her article with quotes that speak volumes about the "charm" of her subjects. Listen to their words. these people who live rich lives because they own the means of wealth production or who organize the exploitation of the producing class for those owners. When you read what these people have to say you will see that, while they live a mere dozen-or-so miles from the working-class housing estates of Belfast, economically and culturally they are light-years away.

Here are some of O Faolain’s direct quotes:

"You can hear explosions across the lough. I do wonder some times why we‘re so fortunate, when they're so unfortunate."

"Pound for pound, we have a higher standard of living than anywhere else in Europe."

There’s a lot more of the same thing. But there is no talk of catholics and protestants; not a word about republicanism or loyalism. These people might compete with each other but they have no fictions to kill for. No, they know what side their cake’s buttered on and they can eat in peace — together.

And there, surely, is a lesson for us — the working class.

Richard Montague

Blogger's Note:

Embedded within this article were two 'Facts Files' giving more background on some of the participants in the conflict. Rather than try and post them within the article, I have reproduced them below:

FACT FILE: The Royal Ulster Constabulary

The RUC came into being with the Stormont state and over the years proved a willing and frequently brutal instrument of the ruling Unionist Party. With the commencement of the Civil Rights agitation in 1968 the RUC unquestioningly accepted Unionist Party instructions to deal with protest in the traditional way — with the boot, the baton and, if necessary, the gun.

Before the provisional IRA came into existence (1970) the RUC had been responsible for at least six deaths. The first two fatalities were as a result of beatings and, later, the RUC directed heavy machine-gun fire against a block of flats killing four people including a nine-year-old boy and a British soldier home on leave.

The RUC do not carry out normal policing in nationalist areas; instead, heavily armed patrols in armoured Land Rovers travel through these areas accompanied by soldiers. No attempt is made by these patrols to carry out ordinary policing; on the contrary, the frequent journeyings up and down streets in residential areas is seen as an act of provocation which helps to consolidate the influence of the IRA. Given its history, it is as difficult to see the RUC achieving acceptance among nationalists as it is to see loyalists tolerating the IRA. The force is much more a part of the problem of Northern Ireland than it is a part of the solution.

FACT FILE: The IRA's "Mandate"

The last all-Ireland General Election was held in 1918. Sinn Fein won 73 seats (for Westminster parliament); other nationalists won a further 6 seats and the Unionist Party won 26 seats. The Unionists won majorities in four only of the six counties that was to become Northern Ireland.

In 1921 the British government partitioned Ireland, creating Northern Ireland (6 counties) and the Irish Free State (26 counties).

The present IRA and Sinn Fein validate their right to carry on an armed struggle by reference to the electoral victory of Sinn Fein in 1918. Given that numerous general elections have taken place in both parts of Ireland since that date and that, when they have contested these elections. Sinn Fein have failed to achieve a significant vote, the IRA/Sinn Fein "mandate" claim is patently absurd. Current indications are that in an all-Ireland election Sinn Fein could expect two percent of the vote.

The Provisionals do not mention that the Irish electorate in the 1918 election was staunchly catholic and conservative and that today that electorate oppose contraception, divorce, abortion and all the other trappings of a pluralist state. The IRA/Sinn Fein, on the other hand, have abandoned the old 1918 conservatism: today, despite their claim to be faithful to 1918. they not only mouth the sort of left-wing shibboleths that would cause the 1918 electors to rotate continuously in their graves but they have, also, espoused most pluralist reforms.

Papal bull (1979)

From the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The weekend visit of the Pope to Ireland at the end of September was a spectacular occasion. Following a careful build-up by the media, ‘his holiness’ landed to a reception that football stars and pop groups dream of. Crowds were estimated at more than one million; people collapsed in the crush and women gave birth in the excitement; and a mint was made from the sale of blessed knick-knacks, from gnome-like effigies to embossed papal scribblings. The whole show was managed with a TV professionalism that must have made Lord Grade envious.

Medieval pageant

But the visit was not just a twentieth century version of a medieval pageant — although it was about as relevant. Desperate politicians and churchmen fell over in the rush to humble themselves at the papal feet. A revitalisation of the catholic faith (and obedience) was hoped for by some; and they all prayed for an end to the misery of the war in the north that spills over into the south. Well briefed by his Vatican ministers of state, the Pope knew he had been sent to create the illusion that the catholic church somehow cares about peace. It is noteworthy that, while papal visits to politically sensitive spots have the effect of reinforcing the status quo (the American visit took in the slums of Harlem and the Bronx), the area must not be too sensitive. Northern Ireland, for example, was not left off the itinerary because workers there weren’t suffering enough.

The Pope sought, in the course of his stay, to impress upon the Irish people the need to reject “materialism “in favour of “spiritual values”. By this of course, he did not mean that the capitalist class in Ireland should cease their insatiable quest for profit, but that the workers should reconcile themselves to their poverty. Neither could he find it in his heart to remind his flock that the organisation he represents is one the richest in the world, and invests a portion of its loot in that most worldly of profit-making enterprises, the arms industry. The Economist magazine estimates the Vatican’s wealth at around 9,000 million dollars, while the American economist Nino Lo Bella (in his carefully researched book, The Vatican Empire) states that the Vatican state now possesses assets equal to the gold and dollar reserves of France. So much for Christian charity.

Hypocrisy

The first major speech was at Drogheda where, predictably, the Pope pitched into the cameras and the swooning crowd with a long plea for peace. Unfortunately, the history of the catholic church exposes this for the hypocrisy it is; from its inception it has either directly waged war or urged others to do so, often being active on both sides at once.

But leaving aside the blood-drenched hands of the Church of Rome, what relevance did the Pope’s visit have to workers of Ireland? How does his message bear on the political reality they, and workers everywhere, face?

The first thing to note in all this is that god, whom the Pope is supposed to represent, does not exist. The Pope kept calling for prayers for peace: “a prayer from the heart for the peoples who live on this earth, peace for all the people of Ireland. He can hardly have forgotten catholic church has been continuously praying for peace (except of course when involved in wars, when it prays for victory) ever since its establishment. There is only one possible conclusion: if that god of theirs is not deaf he is a very good non-listener. Not that the Pope’s own confidence in god very deep. He was so concerned for own skin that, rather than leave his protection to a non-existent deity, he wore a bullet-proof vest throughout the the trip (Sunday Mirror 30.9.79).

Property baron

If one thing is abundantly clear it is that peace is not going to be brought to Ireland (or anywhere else) merely because some descendant of a medieval property baron dressed in a funny hat drops from the sky to ask for it. The Irish situation ration is a complex result of more than one hundred years of barbaric treatment of a largely peasant by mainly absentee capitalist landlords (all of them no doubt good christians). The misery has been whipped up by this same catholic(and by the protestants) into Irish bog of prejudice that is not going disappear in the face of a disingenuous mass of words, however, very much in the interest of the capitalist class as a whole that workers heed the advice of the Pope, so that a minority may continue to live lives of idle luxury amidst poverty. The catholic church, like all other religious bodies, is an enemy of the workers and a long-time friend of ruling classes. Its oppressive and exploitative nature is a reflection of ignorance and superstition.

Bad for business

Clearly it is no longer the wishes of any but a small, demented handful that the atrocities in Ireland continue. The Capitalist class in the north and south are fed up with their property being destroyed and their expensively trained workers maimed and killed. The disruption of trade is bad for business and makes capitalist politicians look as in effectual as indeed they largely are.

The majority of workers on both sides of the border do not want the killings either. They suffer from them and are certain to lose, whichever side wins. The one thing that is absent from the argument about war and peace in Ireland is this: what are the prospects for the Irish working class? The Pope could not be expected to point out to the workers that apart from the fact that one group of workers is busy killing another, both sides support the same social system. He omitted to mention that this means a society of exploitation of the majority; of second rate existence for the class that produces a first rate existence for the exploiters. A world of insecurity and, inevitably from time to time, violent conflict. The Pope’s message boiled down to a plea to the working class to behave like good little workers and stop disrupting the arteries of profit with unnecessary clots of blood.

RAW/VM

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

Capitalism's code of killing (1993)

From the December 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism has always maintained the mythology of the ’just war’, and the church has always been the leading standard bearer for state-sanctioned murder.

It’s not all that long ago since boys’ adventure stories were about swashbuckling heroes meeting in battle on more-or-less equal terms. Raphael Sabbatini's Captain Blood or Maurice Walsh’s David Gordon were fairly typical of the type: brave men opposing one another with courage and resolution and a determination not to take unfair advantage in battle.

Such romantic nonsense is out of place against the background of modern weaponry that denies the killer the agony of watching his victim die. War was never romantic nor "fair"; individual hand-to-hand combat with pikes, lances or swords must have been hell and the science of gaining an unfair advantage over an opponent, then as now. was known as strategy.

Because war and preparation for war is a permanent feature of capitalism that accounts for massive investments of personnel and finance and because it is an utterly foul business, governments are obliged to "respectabilize” it. Thus, something of the old romanticism prevails in what is offered as history. In every' walk of life, parents, schools, churches, participation in war is elevated in the public consciousness and emotive key words, like bravery, heroism, sacrifice, dedicated, proud and patriotic are part of the lexicon of glorification used to transmute the most utterly debased acts of human savagery into something necessary and noble.

Even the "enemy" is not completely damned lest condemnation provoke interest and enquiry. His leaders can be mad or bad and his courage, dignity and honour can rarely be accepted as on a level with "our boys". Nevertheless, there is a decorum that embellishes the obscenity of war. almost a mystique to lighten the haunting futility of death and this can be extended to the enemy.

Thus, it is expected that "we" and our "enemy" will reciprocate in showing a respect to corpses that must be denied to the living. The Luftwaffe pilot shot down while slaughtering women and children in London, the RAF man show down over Dresden while carrying out Churchill’s plan to kill as many German civilians as possible, the hyped-up John Wayne dropping a 2.000kg bomb on a Baghdad street, the heroes who made history at Hiroshima; if, in death, any of these falls into the hands of "the enemy", then they will be accorded the ritual firing of rifles and blowing of bugles over their graves. The exercise gives dignity to those who work at killing and promotes the notion that they died bravely in pursuit of a noble calling.

Appalling reality

But, in the reality of war. battles are won by the gaining of unfair advantage. Obviously, a completely fair fight could have no winner and it is, thus, imperative to the opposing sides to deceive their opponent and. where possible, to introduce weapons of greater destructive capacity and to amass greater concentrations of men and materials.

Spying, with its underscore of lies, deceit, blackmail and, not infrequently, murder, is a legitimate adjunct of war; striking at the enemy’s homeland and slaughtering innocent civilians demoralizes the enemy, impedes his movement and his production of munitions and is, therefore, condoned on the grounds of saving lives. The watchword in war must be "Victory!", untrammelled and uncompromised by considerations of everyday moral rectitude. The Roman Catholic church articulates the provisions for waging a "just war" and one of these stipulates a favourable chance of winning. In common with other bodies, the churches deplore war but lend their services to succour the participants and, often, to plead with their god for the vanquishing of "the enemy".

It is remarkable that decent people who deplore violence and who might be in the forefront of those demanding stiffer sentences and the return of the death penalty for people engaged in violence are often the most vociferous supporters of armed forces and patriotic aggression. How can any rational human being defend the idea of training great masses of people to kill and arming them with guns, bombs, nuclear weapons and the rest of the obscene array destructive equipment that governments provide for the killing business?

The answer we get from apologists for state violence is that it is made necessary by the nature of our society and the fact that our potential enemies have armed forces. The latter simply acknowledges that the effect lies in the cause — because there are armed forces, we must get armed conflict. Pressed, then, to consider an alternative form of society that will not contain the seeds of conflict, these apologists are usually revealed as the most trenchant defenders of the present system.

But there are other aspects of the killing business that create a real dilemma for the upholders of the political and economic status quo with its competition and built-in propensity for conflict and war. Among these is the problem of political terrorism.

In Northern Ireland, for example, people like Archbishop Eames of the Church of Ireland frequently grab headlines with condemnations of terrorists. There are many other churchmen, politicians and others who echo Eames’s sentiments and we name him only because he is the most forceful and frequent person to condemn violence. Like the others. Eames does not condemn all violence or dissociate his church from bodies established and maintained to excel in the use of the most calculatingly efficient means of inflicting death and injury.

Forthrightly and correctly — he condemns the terrorist who leaves a bomb in a hold-all in a public place; he condemns the gunman and his organization and he argues that such behaviour is anti-Christian and that, despite the claims of loyalist killers, they are not acting for the Protestant community.

But Archbishop Eames has yet to go on record condemning governments for having armed forces, he does not condemn gunmen acting for the state and he is silent when a massive bomb is dropped on a city by a sophisticated flying machine using the most advanced technology to conceal its presence and its purpose, and, of course. Eames does not tell members of the state armed forces that their behaviour is anti-Christian.

Psychological scars

In fact the Archbishop, like his competitor colleagues in the other churches and, indeed, most of those in the forefront of the various well-intentioned peace groups, is not opposed to violence and killing. He may be moved to sadness by the lunacy of human beings killing human beings but he only condemns and disowns such behaviour when it is illegal.

Effectively, this reduces the Christian — and, it must be said, the general — concept of so-called moral reasoning to the politics of the head count and this, in turn, must raise very serious questions about the nature of capitalist democracy and the manipulation of "public opinion" by a minority-controlled public power of persuasion.

The question is particularly crucial for those of us who live in Northern Ireland, where the violence which spawned the ruthless Provisional IRA was initialed by a repressive elected government some twenty-five years ago. Now. with violence an everyday occurrence and selective condemnations ritualized by, among others, the very people whose behaviour and political ambition made it inevitable, the hypocritical utterances of people with a ready recourse to a microphone or TV camera can itself fuel violence.

Random killing

Recently, with an upsurge in the random killing of catholics by groups of loyalists operating under various fine sounding titles, a new strain of hypocrisy has emerged — from Sinn Fein, who articulate the political thinking of the IRA. According to this source, killing people because of their job or their overt political altitudes is a legitimate pursuit. On the other hand, if protestant terrorists, in order to exert political pressure, identify their targets on the basis of perceived religion, that is breaking the rules and must, therefore, be evil.

But is it? If you can departmentalize your thinking of the question you might conclude that killing someone is deplorable but sometimes necessary and proper providing the killing is within the confines of a particular code. But who determines the nature of the code and on what basis is it justified? Who is it says that it is permissible to kill perhaps millions of people in another country with a nuclear bomb because that country, or the authority within it that controls armed force, is threatening "our" markets, trade routes or sources of raw materials but it is wrong to kill people who represent an authority that abuses you or unfairly frustrates your political aspirations?

In the ease of the Provisional IRA, apart from the spurious claim to the democratic succession of Sinn Fein’s 1918 all-Ireland electoral victory, the historical morality of violence is often advanced, it is true, of course, that most states owe their existence and their power to the violence, often illegal violence, by which they were established. The "morality" of that argument is that violence is the justification of violence.

Special condemnation

As for preserving a social condemnation for the random killings carried out by loyalist gunmen, it might be asked by what logic it is permissible to shoot a bricklayer because the only way he can make a living is by selling his skills to "the enemy" but wrong to kill at random in order to frustrate a perceived harmful political design.

This is a part of the maze of contradictions you get into when you accept violence at any level. Nor can the question be resolved legalistically for, in every case, the lawful executive is itself not only an agent, real or potential. of the most ruthless violence but. in its role as what Marx referred to as "the executive committee of the ruling class". "Lawful government" is the constant agent of the many other forms of, frequently obscene, violence perpetrated on the working class.

Condemn all violence

Socialists condemn all wars and all political violence. That might seem a simplistic way of avoiding comparisons and condemnations of one form of violence as opposed to another. But it is not a simplistic formula; it is the inescapable logic of the fact that while members of the working class are pitched against one another in wars and so-called national liberation struggles, working class interests are never at stake.

All wars and violent political struggles arise directly or indirectly out of the competition and conflicts of capitalism though such conflicts are usually filtered through an ideological disguise in order to conceal their nature and as a means of enlisting working-class support.

The only struggle that concerns socialists and should concern the working class is the class struggle — the struggle between those who produce all wealth and own virtually none and those who produce nothing and own virtually everything. That struggle, we hold, can be resolved democratically when we have divested ourselves of the fictions that allow us to be enlisted as killers.

Richard Montague

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

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