Ireland Seven Years On
A Socialist looks back over the conflict and its origins and some of the proposed remedies
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.
As far back as 1962, the IRA had publicly admitted military defeat following on their disastrous border campaign of the mid-fifties. Many of what were, from the Republican standpoint, the cream of the movement had been killed or imprisoned during the campaign; others, frustrated by the evident apathy of their traditional supporters in Northern Ireland, or disgusted by growing Communist influence in the movement, got out and left the field to the “Commies” and political wire-pullers of the left. It was the influence of the latter that led to military disengagement and the adoption of a policy of direct action on social and political issues north and south of the Border.
The announcement by the IRA that it had taken the gun out of Irish politics (where it had been since its introduction by the Unionists in 1912 — when they procured German guns to fight ‘the British, if necessary, to remain British) should have been an occasion for delight among the Unionists but, unfortunately, the man who had said that if there had not been an IRA the Unionists would have to invent one was proved right.
Ammunition for the Republicans in their new constitutional political role abounded in the shape of slums, unemployment, discriminatory local government and local franchise, low wages, draconian police powers, etc. Up to then, the Unionists could successfully defend themselves against armed Republicanism and claim reform was secondary to the struggle against subversion — mostly more imagined or invented, than real. Now the spectre of the gunman was laid, and the ex-militants of the IRA were getting dangerously close to the Achilles heel of the Unionist Party.
Unionism had neither the will nor the strategy to meet its traditional enemy on this new front. Throughout its history its political armament for meeting opposition from any quarter was the blunt instruments of sectarianism and repression, and these were the weapons rolled out against the new “Republican” offensive. The Republican Clubs were banned and their activities branded subversive. If, as many loyalist spokesmen claim, the Civil Rights movement was a mere conspiracy to re-organize armed conflict against the Unionist state, then it must be allowed that the Republicans gambled successfully on the predictable reaction of armed Unionism against peaceful pressure for reform.
But on other fronts too, history was playing a cruel trick with the Unionists. On the one hand, the demise of the traditional industries and proliferation of locally-based multi-national concerns, along with the diminution of Eire’s economic protectionist policies — highlighted by the first stages of the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement and the developing fervour for big-league Common Market capitalism — rendered the old shibboleths and sectarian clarions obsolescent. On the other hand, the overspill from British welfare capitalism had resulted in a new breed of “educated” Catholics — ironically, partly the product of religious discrimination in employment. Traditionally, in places like Belfast and Derry, children of working class Protestant parents were offered the dubious favour of ill-paid jobs in the shipyards and engineering factories. For some of the Catholic school-leavers there were equally ill-paid jobs as barmen, message boys and other dead-end occupations — or there was the emigrant ship, or the street corner. With the introduction of welfare capitalism, a new alternative was open to the Catholic school-leaver; he or she could remain at school and get almost as much in the way of Family Allowances and grants as they would be likely to earn in the types of employment open to them.
So, by the ‘sixties, there was a growing number of young Catholics who had become equipped with what passes for education in capitalist society and there was a growing number, too, of international concerns operating locally which preferred an academic receipt to evidence of religious affiliation.
Whether or not this growing body of young educated Catholics found employment — in fact, an increasing number did, despite Government attempts to railroad new sources of employment away from recognized Nationalist areas — or lingered on the employment touchlines as a “threat” to their Protestant class-brethren, one thing was sure: they had rejected the traditional republican and nationalist dream of a United Ireland in the sweet by-and-by as a cure-all for their social problems. They were concerned with jobs and promotions and houses .and such other appurtenances as epitomize working-class thinking at this stage. And they had thrown up a new breed of articulate leadership, which could ally itself easily with the fledgling bourgeois elements in its own religious community — elements which, though sharing in many instances the wealth privileges of upper-crust Unionists, were frustrated in their desire to achieve some semblance of political power; power denied them, even when, as some did, they were prepared to cross the line into the Unionist Party. Such elements could easily identify with the slogans of the Civil Rights movement and, when that movement was powerful, they were the tail that wagged the Republican dog.
The O’Neill Government of the period, responsive to the promptings of its capitalist paymasters (who, in the new conditions of Northern Irish capitalism, no longer required the emphasis on bigotry and repression which in earlier days they needed, to create the political climate necessary to maintain their economic links with the British home market) and the murmurings of a British Labour Government, black-balled from the full status of European Human Rights participation (as a consequence of the N. Ireland administration’s police powers) attempted the political window-dressing of a few reforms. But, apart from the fact that these were too little and too late to quell the fervour which years of repression had brought to boiling-point in the Catholic community, there was for the government the more serious problem of the poison which its predecessors had injected deep into the political vein of its working-class Protestant supporters. This poison made it a relatively simple matter for Paisley and his cohorts to weld on their particular brand of religious superstition to the “no popery” philosophy of previous Unionist Prime Minister.
Men like William Craig, then Minister for Home Affairs (whose “principles” then, as now — if we are to assume that some degree of education had taken him beyond the moronic vapourings of his supporters — were dictated by the requirements of personal political survival) were frightened off by the gulf between the existing political slum and an even slightly-less repressive society. In office, Craig used his freedom of action to commit the armed political police into the struggle against the advocates of reform. Later, when he and several of his Ministerial colleagues (including the present leader of the Unionist Party, who had been dropped from the Government for engagement in questionable land deals) were given the boot by O’Neill, they entered fulsomely into the campaign of sectarian hatred and vilification which then, as now, was being so carefully husbanded by the holy man, Paisley.
By this time the battle was on. The police had attacked .a Civil Rights demonstration in Derry — which, incidentally, Craig had banned — and by this, and by open identification with the mob and the overt sectarianism of the most vituperative spokesmen of Unionism, had earned the bitter hatred of the ghetto Catholics of Belfast and Derry and the severest admonitions of even those “respectable” Catholics who occupied middle-echelon positions in the system.
The breaking-point came with the police invasion of the Catholic Bogside in August 1969 and the ensuing battle there followed by the violent response in Belfast — where the Catholics of the Falls Road ghetto tried a violent diversionary action to thwart the RUC scheme to reinforce its exhausted force in Derry. The subsequent murders, arson and mass intimidation are well enough known, as is the British Government’s reaction in sending in troops to the North. The outstanding question here is whether the British Labour Government were responding to the misplaced trust of an hysterical Catholic hierarchy, or simply concerned with protecting British capitalism’s eight-billion-pound investment in the Province — which latter view would appear to be reinforced by the subsequent use of the troops.
The unfolding cameo of violence, heightened daily by the blundering viciousness and brutality of the Army, the police, the IRA and the Protestant para-militarists, has continued over the years. Sick military strategists of the Kitsonian school, unhampered by the pious hypocrisy of Merlyn Rees and the Labour “lefty” Stanley Orme, have an excellent proving-ground for their madcap theories for the containment of civil strife. It is worthy of note, too, that these “professionals” make no secret of the fact that their “anti-terror” methods of terrorism might well be required on the British mainland if the worsening economic crisis of capitalism should lead a politically ignorant working class into the futile blind-alley of direct action.
We make no apology for quoting what we said at the outset of the troubles in Northern Ireland. At that time we warned those who saw in the Civil Rights movement an avenue to the alleviation of working-class problems that their concern with the Protestant ascendancy policies of Unionism, rather than with the basic cause of ALL working-class problems, capitalism, would set worker against worker and provide the material conditions for an even more repressive regime. In the first of our WSP Bulletin for 1970 we said, tragically prophetically:
“Ironically, the protesters and demonstrators see the problems against which they militate in the same terms as the politicians who run capitalism. Their “demands” are always “realistically” anchored to the standards prevailing among the more fortunate section of the working class. Never would they dare to “demand” for the workers they claim to represent the mode of life enjoyed by members of the owning class. In other words they accept capitalism; they respect its title to ownership of the resources of the earth; they bow to its class structure. What concerns them is -not the FACT of slavery but the CONDITION of the slave. In the case of the Civil Rights movement, the struggle for the establishment of standards for all members of the working class, based on the conditions of those workers who have jobs, homes and votes, has tended to divide the working class and facilitate the Unionist clique in their efforts to play on the old fears which their political forbears manufactured to suit the needs of the propertied class at the turn of the century. We see the road the CRA is taking: as one that will set working men who are Protestant at the throats of working men who are Catholic and vice versa. We see the political nutcases of the IRA and the UVF who have forged a murderous and divisive tradition in this country, exploit the situation and we see the predictable reaction from the violent arm of the State — while the political ghouls of the existing political parties and those that may emerge in the conflict, lament the “hooliganism” and ‘total irresponsibility’ of the working class.”
Is this not the scenario we have seen unfolding in our midst — lacking, perhaps, only the horror of the present position which came only with hindsight?
In the WSP Bulletin for December 1970 we read:
“It is tragically ludicrous that both sides share so much of the things that are relevant in our everyday lives and yet remain divided by identification with the religious garbage of the last century. But the theological thuggery of Paisley and — though there is no Catholic counterpart of Paisley — the viciousness of Catholic bigots, finds its strength, not in biblical vapourings, but in the confused politico/religious/patriotic nonsense that the divided capitalist class in Ireland developed and propagated to serve their economic needs. The gunmen, the arsonists and the intimidators are not evangelists; their purpose is not conversion, not even the defence of the superstitions they hold. Rather is it fear and hatred of one another’s presence as a threat to their working-class needs — their jobs, houses and all the other pressing priorities of working-class life within capitalism.”
Was it not, and is it not, a fact that the real basis of contention in N. Ireland, however concealed in the smoke of battle, was, and remains, the denial of what most workers see as a reasonable standard of life, in the form of homes and jobs and incomes and security — allied to the allegation that such a “reasonable standard of life” is the plaything of political manipulators? Put another way, is it not likely that if every citizen in N. Ireland had been assured a “reasonable standard of life” the basis of the claims and counter-claims of discrimination, and the protests, repression and armed conflict that followed therefrom, would not have existed?
The question is: can capitalism, the “free” variety favoured by the Unionist parties, or the type that involves a measure of state control as envisaged by the salary-hungry pundits of the SDLP or, even, the full state capitalism which the various Republican armies and groups, in their appalling ignorance of the subject, refer to as “socialism” — can capitalism, under any guise, provide a “reasonable standard of life” for the socially-useful class in society?
We assert, with the evidence provided throughout the world of capitalism, from New York to Moscow and from Peking to London, that it can not. The purpose of capitalism is to produce wealth not for use but for profit and, to fulfil that purpose, wealth is produced in the form of commodities for sale and profit on the market. Even if we were to allow the contention of “workers’ republic” advocates that their system envisages the ploughing-back of such profit into the national coffers (the accumulation of capital) it is still a fact that national capitalism is at all times obliged to conform with the dictates of the world market, not the fanciful whims of political idealists within its own frontiers.
We repeat, nowhere throughout the world has capitalism been able to provide that “reasonable standard of life for everyone” which is the dream-child of the ignorant reformer. On the contrary, the working class in those countries that came nearest to that elusive “standard” are now being told by the political hatchetmen of capitalism (often the party of reformers!) that they have been living too well and have brought the system into a crisis!
If American capitalism, with its amplitude of wealth resources, and Russian capitalism with its state control of productive resources (and the inevitable authoritarianism that follows therefrom) cannot produce that “reasonable standard”, the lack of which is at the seat of the Northern Ireland problem, can you honestly see how our local bunch of politicians — even with the guns of whatever fraternity of gunmen which may support them — are going to carry out the miracle?
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.
Of course it will mean a revolution! Not an exercise in violence which results in the enthronement of a new group of political bully-boys to keep working-class noses to the grindstone of poverty. It starts with a revolution in your thinking about the world you live in and in which you endure mere want or desperate poverty in the midst of potential abundance : in seeing the absurdity of maintaining with your votes a vicious, violent and brutal system whose only benefits accrue to a class of social parasites. From this you progress to the idea of an alternative scheme of social organization. You might well wrestle with the old nonsenses and values which capitalism and its political super-structure have inculcated in you — especially the theological garbage about Man being by nature (rather than by environment and social conditioning) a greedy and predatory beast, and all the political and social implications of that position in which our class enemies take such comfort.
Eventually, probably by taking a sample of humanity, like yourself, and projecting your thoughts into your likely pattern of behaviour in a society where you were expected to contribute in accordance with your mental or physical abilities to the production of the human family’s requirements, and where you were free to take your own requirements for living, you will appreciate that you are ready for Socialism.
At that point you may decide to help us to spread the word.
R. M.