Over seven years of direct military occupation, of internment and perpetual harassment of the nationalist population have not solved the crisis of Britain’s rule in Northern Ireland. The renewed bombing campaign of the Provisional IRA and the failure of the ‘Peace Movement’ to develop and sustain any dynamism independent of the British Army and British imperialism testify to the failure of the British ruling class.
Britain’s crisis in Ireland is a direct result of the attempts of British capitalism to restructure their system of exploitation in Ireland during the mid-1960s. In the interests of more open access to the markets and produce of the Southern Republic the British ruling class was prepared to encourage minor reforms in its Northern sectarian state.
But, however anxious it may have been to ‘modernise’ and ‘rationalise’ its exploitation of Ireland, the British ruling class was not prepared to break with its historic state and allies in the North. Britain’s aim since 1968 has remained that of conciliating middle class Catholic opinion, or reforming certain of the blatant excess of the Protestant ascendancy in order to undermine nationalist resistance and safeguard the integrity of the Northern state. While wishing to turn its back on certain uncompetitive and anachronistic industries the British ruling class holds massive investments in the North of Ireland. The Orange ascendancy, the unionists, have been too vital a component of the British ruling class historically to be jettisoned altogether.
All attempts to undermine nationalist resistance have failed. The Orange ascendancy, created in its own interests by the British ruling class, would not tolerate power sharing or tampering with their marginal privileges. The horizon of British policy has become increasingly narrow and limited. The British ruling class today has no perspective of a new power sharing bid, or of any significant or new initiative. Through the person of the Minister Roy Mason (the Labour politician most acceptable to Military High Command), the Labour government has no perspective but a hard continued military push against the nationalist population. This perspective does involve increasing the arms and power of the Protestant Ulster Constabulary — this is what ‘Ulsterisation’ means. But it does not mean any significant withdrawal of British troops.
The British ruling class are set on a long term course of repression and harassment. They cannot contemplate defeat in Ireland. Defeat for their army would be a profound blow to ruling class morale. Sections of the ruling class — most notably Kitson and Enoch Powell — see Northern Ireland both as training ground and power base for future attacks on the British working class.
This crisis and stalemate in perspectives extends to the Southern Irish bourgeoisie and to the forces of loyalism. The ruling coalition in the Southern Republic represents an alliance of the traditional party of the big farmers, Fianna Fail, and the Irish Labour Party. Economically, it is set on holding down real wages, while granting encouragement and massive concessions to international investment. It looks to the EEC to stimulate Irish agriculture and capital investment. Successive National Wage Agreements struck with the Irish trade union bureaucracy have pushed real wages down, the latest deal envisages pay rises of between £4 and £8 over 14 months while the annual inflation rate is running close on 20%.
Repression in the south
With its strategy hinging on encouraging foreign investment the Southern government has moved sharply against Republican forces. Repressive emergency legislation, internment and torture are being used in a showdown with Republican forces in the South. In the interests of investment and profit, the Southern coalition government is dearly looking for new compromises with British imperialism and with the Orange state in the North.
While the prosecution of the British government in the international court serves to maintain the popularity of the Coalition in election year, the members of the Coalition are openly discussing new deals and proposals to disassociate themselves irrevocably from the struggle against British domination in Ireland. Conor Cruise O’Brien, of the Irish Labour Party, has already made it clear that if the Coalition is re-elected he will be proposing deleting all claims to a united Ireland from the Irish constitution.
Against this, Fianna Fail — the opposition party that perfected and introduced the repressive campaign in the South — is trying to play the ‘green’ card. Faced with declining popularity at the polls the party has gone on record again at its annual conference in February as favouring British withdrawal. Jack Lynch has made it clear that if his party were re-elected, he as prime minister would seek United Nations intervention in Northern Ireland and initiate discussion concerning British withdrawal. Despite the rhetoric of the conference platform, Fianna Fail have given no clear commitment to dismantle the repressive legislation in the South, have done no more than repeat their 1975 call for Britain to withdraw.
While the Southern bourgeoisie is looking to restructure its relations with international capitalism, the Orange ruling class in the North has been plunged into serious disarray and disunity by the efforts of British capitalism to adapt and refine their methods of rule. Since the British ruling class sought to force it to relinquish certain of its traditional privileges and positions, loyalism has been in relative disarray. Since the Ulster Workers Council strike against the Sunningdale power-sharing agreement, all proposals for politically re-unifying loyalism have failed.
The arguments within loyalism for a UDI bid in Ulster failed to galvanise coherent support. James Molyneaux, leader of the UUUC MPs at Westminster, divided the loyalist camp when he suggested recently that ‘as a first step’, Northern Ireland might be content with administrative rather than legislative government. Ian Paisley’s party is riven with conflict between himself and Martin Smyth. Without direct support from the British ruling class the forces of loyalism have no coherent or unifying programme.
The politics of Irish nationalism do not lay the basis for breaking the hold of British imperialism and the strategy of the Southern bourgeoisie. Only a leadership that fights for the national independence and unity of Ireland on a revolutionary workers’ programme — against British imperialism, against the Southern bourgeoisie, against loyalism — can galvanise the forces to break that deadlock.
The Provisional IRA have stood in the forefront of the struggle against British imperialism. The British army has failed to break their organisation and fighting strength. They remain the defenders of the Catholic areas against the harassment and rampages of the British army. The Provisionals have undoubted mass support, but have not conducted their campaign within the framework of building a sustained movement. They remain both reluctant and unable to challenge the politics of the Southern ‘green’ bourgeoisie and to relate the military struggle against the British Army to class battles in the north and the South.
They have in fact refused, North and South, to work systematically with other republicans and socialists to build united front action committees against repression, against the British Army. While capable of sustaining new campaigns, turning their attention now to Northern Ireland business-men, the Provisionals cannot break the deadlock in the struggle in Ireland.
The Stalinist and reformist left in Southern Ireland focus their attention away from the struggle in the North. The left alternative current — composed of Official Sinn Fein, the Communist Party of Ireland and the liaison of the left in the Labour Party — have formed a propaganda bloc on the basis of economic nationalist politics. Their campaign hinges on opposition to the EEC with the central demands focusing on the nationalisation of Ireland’s resources, on an investment programme to establish an Irish processing industry for the abundant resources and raw materials. This programme, statist through and through, cannot mobilise the working class. It can offer no action or campaign, only lobbies and romantic scheme building. It serves however as a fundamental diversion to the real problems facing the Irish working class. It substitutes for campaigning on the national struggle against the British army and on the struggle against unemployment, inflation and declining real wages.
The Irish left remains dominated by the politics of nationalism on the one hand, and syndicalist abstention from the national struggle on the other. The IRSP failed to break with the politics and traditions of republicanism — it has been riven with its own splits and internal conflict. The SWM (the fraternal organisation of British IS [SWP]) remains predictably on the sidelines offering militant economic and trade union struggle as its alternative to the republican and reformist traditions.
All new attempts to lay the basis for a revolutionary leadership in Ireland are foredoomed unless they can pose a thoroughgoing programmatic alternative to the politics of nationalism and the traditions of economism and syndicalism.
The tasks of British socialists
As the left faction in the International Socialists and as Workers Power we have always argued that the crisis of the British ruling class in Ireland poses the sharpest of tests for revolutionaries in Britain. We must do all in our power to hasten the defeat of our ruling class in Ireland. A victory for the British Army in Ireland would be a blow against the working class movement internationally and in Britain itself. A defeat for the army is a defeat for the British ruling class, its strategy and perspective.
We must therefore campaign in the labour movement actively for solidarity with all those republicans and socialists fighting our ruling class and its army. We have our criticisms of the leading detachments in that struggle — the Provisional IRA — and it would be an abdication of our international duty to refuse to make those criticisms. But we have not the right to criticise except on the basis of our clear and unqualified support for the struggle against the British army and the Northern state it seeks to defend.
But we do not confine ourselves to propaganda in solidarity with the Irish struggle. British socialists must campaign to build an Internationalist Troops Out current within the British labour movement. We must build a current that can campaign actively against the British Army’s presence in Ireland and argue that position amongst the mass of workers.
The existing Troops Out Movement has the avowed aim of building such a campaign. But its record to date shows that its leadership puts publicity seeking, winning ‘influential’ supporters, before building a real campaign at the base of the labour movement. In order to maintain their own credibility, the TOM leaders were prepared to decorate the platform of the SWP (IS) Bloody Sunday rally — even though IS had once expelled one of the TOM leaders who fought in that organisation against the IS line on Ireland. They were prepared to bloc with the IS to stop other socialists speaking at the rally. They unashamedly boosted the pretence that IS have ever, or will ever, seriously support the struggle in Ireland.
The tight control of this same TOM leadership threatens the possibilities afforded by the LMDI to extend the campaign into the labour movement. Workers Power and its supporters will do all in their power to ensure that the Labour Movement Delegation initiates a serious and principled campaign for the withdrawal of British troops from Ireland now. We will work alongside all other socialists who are prepared to push that Troops Out campaign into the trade unions, into the workplaces, into the Labour Parties.
