ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From International Socialism, No.49, Autumn 1971, pp.2-4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
TURMOIL in Northern Ireland during the summer has made more remote than ever the settlement which imperialism had been aiming at for several years. This settlement, generally canvassed as the ‘federal solution’, involved essentially the consolidation of bourgeois rule in Ireland by means of rapprochement between North and South. It would have meant the implementation of a reform programme for Northern Ireland under the direction of Westminster, and the removal of those features of Northern Irish society most offensive to the Catholic bourgeoisie. It would have marked the culmination of a steady process of greater incorporation of the Irish economies into the British economy. The trend is marked in the increasing proportion of trade from Ireland which goes to the UK and further reflected in the 500 per cent increase in trade between the Six and the Twenty-Six Counties over the past 10 years. It was in line with this historical movement that the role of British troops was originally conceived in 1969: to stabilise the situation, to separate the communities, in order to allow the gradual introduction of norms of bourgeois democracy in Northern Ireland.
Not all sections of the Irish and British ruling classes recognised clearly such objectives as the necessary conditions for the maintenance of their rule in Ireland. In Britain, it was the social democratic policies which were most in keeping with them; Jim Callaghan, Labour Home Secretary, was the most aware representative of imperialist interests. In Ireland, ruling groups North and South have been severely strained by the events of the past three years, with many members incapable of thinking outside the framework of the traditional dichotomies of Nationalist-Unionist, Catholic-Protestant. The conflicting loyalties within the ruling class have been a major factor in the failure to realise, even in part, the federal solution.
The strain has been greatest within the Orange-Unionist bloc. A very significant section of this bloc has never seen the necessity to modify social and political relations in Northern Ireland and, through its intransigence, has produced a continuing rightwards movement of the whole apparatus and ideology. The inability of British governments to resist this rightwards shift has encouraged the Provisional IRA.
The ‘Provisionals’, a loose organisation born out of the need to defend the Catholic communities against attacks by Paisleyite gangs, have maintained and increased their support on account of their capacity to provide a defence against attacks by the British Army. When the military’s changed strategy forced the IRA to leave the ghettoes, and go on to the offensive, it retained its support. The determination of the Provisional IRA has further polarised attitudes and made any resolution under imperialism and capitalism doubly difficult. In spite of its very evident political limitations, it has affected events and circumstances more deeply than many would have thought possible in 1969. But as Ireland moves to the brink, the political limitations and confusion among supporters of the ‘Provisional’ become more apparent.
British imperialism wished to maintain a balance between Catholic and Protestant bourgeoisie, and to have its army appear neutral between the two communities, or between the warring factions of both. The determination of the IRA, as well as the intransigence of the loyalist Right, has made this impossible. However much the politicians and officers may have wished to preserve the appearance of impartiality, they have had to recognise that the IRA represents the most serious threat to imperialist rule. The radical aspect of republicanism has always meant that it has contained the potentiality of transcending a fight to defend certain communities or to disrupt the Orange state, to attack capitalist property relations.
In the endeavour to put down this threat, the British government had little option but to adopt the traditional stances of the Unionists. The British Army came to dominate security operations and to take over functions of the RUC and the ‘B’-Specials. When the Faulkner regime was clearly losing its grip on the situation, and the policy of internment of suspects was introduced, British troops engaged in a campaign of terror alongside Orange extremists. All pretence of impartiality or of an intention to keep the peace between the communities disappeared. British soldiers terrorised the nationalist population, and tortured and brutalised internees, all of them members of republican, civil rights, and socialist organisations. If, as rumoured, there was a promise to Jack Lynch, Southern Prime Minister, that Paisleyites and armed loyalist extremists would be interned, it was not kept.
Such actions were the admission that the balancing game had failed! This was further emphasised in the response of the Catholic bourgeoisie to internment in the North. However great their antagonism to the radical, republican and socialist forces who were the victims of internment, they saw that to retain support they would be required to oppose the repression. It was a reflection of the pressure on the Lynch government and of its weak position at the time, that the Southern Prime Minister also took a strong stand against internment and for the abolition of the repressive regime at Stormont. The Catholic bourgeoisie was laying its credentials, but it was also moving to co-opt the movement of resistance to the military and political repression. The resistance movement involves greater numbers of people than actively supported the first mass phase of the civil rights movement in 1968-69. Moreover, it uses forms of action which were not used then, and which had a more pronounced, radical content: rent and rate strikes, the withholding of HP payments, and industrial action. In order to regain an initiative which briefly and locally appeared to be with the republican and socialist Left, the Catholic bourgeoisie went further in its actions than it could have conceived possible a short time before. The Social Democratic and Labour Party adopted a traditional republican abstentionist attitude only a few weeks after welcoming Faulkner’s initiative aimed at broadening the base of government in Northern Ireland. When protest strikes against internment were called in towns like Newry, Cookstown, Coalisland, Strabane, Derry and Armagh, Catholic businessmen and shopkeepers were obliged to respond.
The pressure on the Unionist Party to take a firmer line, against the IRA and to restore the situation prior to 1968 was more consistent and more menacing. The Orange rank and file was led by figures such as Craig and Paisley, who reiterated the traditional message of unqualified Protestant ascendancy. Organised support for such ideas and for policies of more vicious repression broadened in August 1971 with the formation of the Unionist Alliance. In the same month, the armed loyalists were in action. Faulkner saw that in order to survive he had to encourage a modicum of sectarian strife. At the same time as the introduction of internment was announced, a ban on parades which specifically hit the march of the Apprentice Boys in Derry, was also made known. It is notable also – as a reflection of the contradictory pressures on the Faulkner government – that as the gap between Catholic and Protestant appeared widest, and Lynch was holding ‘war councils’ with representatives of the (abstentionist) parliamentary opposition in the Six Counties, Faulkner’s government published a White Paper intended to refute allegations that it was slow in implementing the promised reforms.
Short-term and long-term needs thus clashed. But is there a longer term for Faulkner, or for any Unionist government? When Faulkner came to power in April 1971, he was generally seen as ‘Ulster’s last chance’. Within two months, observers were saying that his position was precarious. Finding it necessary to bend to the constant and increasing pressure from the Unionist Right, Faulkner’s government followed the same course as that of Chichester-Clark. Westminster, too, made many of its policy decisions with an eye over the shoulder on the Craig-Paisley faction and its supporters. The British government was obviously prepared to consider almost anything rather than the politically difficult direct rule. It seemed most likely to buy its time with some coalition-commission arrangement.
The severe social and political crisis has occurred against a steadily declining economic background. In Faulkner’s own words, ‘there has been a shortfall in private investment in the last two years’. In the South, too, investment in manufacturing has gone down. Unemployment is increasing in both parts of the country. In the Twenty-Six Counties this increase is somewhat hidden by the removal of certain categories (single men without dependents in rural areas) from benefit. The preparation of the Irish economies for entry into the Common Market has borne its toll in terms .of redundancies and moves to curb unofficial trade union action. However, the political crisis has remained a crisis of the ruling class; the temporary resolutions are made in terms of new alignments of ruling groups.
In a socialist perspective, the Irish situation has been structured around an absence for the past few years. What is absent is a revolutionary working-class party. At a time when the Left is straining to survive the effects of internment and a calculated attempt to destroy all serious oppositional political organisation, the question of the revolutionary party might appear not to be the most immediate. Yet, the willingness of many sections of the republican and socialist movement to rely on ad-hoc arrangements – united fronts, alliances, etc. – has arguably been an explanation for the capacity of the bourgeois nationalists to manipulate the movement of resistance in the North. It has also arguably been a reason for the failure of socialist politics to penetrate the Protestant working-class, and to weaken the continuing allegiance of Protestant workers to forms of extremist and near-racialist loyalism. Against repression, and in the particular physical circumstances of Ireland, united action between socialists and republicans is inevitable. But in the absence of a solid core of revolutionaries, the actions of the resistance movement will always tend to be merely reactive.
The leftwards movement of the ‘Official’ republican movement is not to be dismissed lightly. The direction of much of the selective repression against the ‘Officials’, both in the North and in the South, is a reflection of the relatively recent awareness within the movement that the struggle against imperialism must be extended throughout the 32 Counties, that the Southern government is a second garrison of British imperialism in Ireland. The struggle in the South is important in order to counteract the impact of Orangeism on Protestant workers, and to involve a larger section of the Southern working class in a campaign for political objectives. The response in the South to the introduction of internment in the Six Counties showed clearly that the basis for such a campaign existed. The Official republican movement’s theory and practice does not yet, however, clearly indicate a recognition that the struggle against imperialism must be overtly and consciously a struggle against capitalism. It is doubtful whether the mixed social and political composition of the movement – as well as the class-collaborationist politics of some of the leadership – will allow it to move fast enough to embrace as completely as necessary the class struggle.
In the recent past, the republican movement’s leftward shifts have been determined not only by objective economic and social factors, but also by the impact of independent socialist groupings. There is still a need, however, for a distinct grouping of Marxist revolutionaries, which can relate, in theory and in practice, to the struggle for democratic rights in the Six Counties, to the physical struggle against the forces of occupation, and to the struggles of the working class as a class – for trade union recognition in international companies, against closures, against informal and formal wages policies, etc. The Socialist Labour Alliance, founded in March 1971 on the basis of a coherent and emphatic socialist programme, but beset by the difficulties born of the previous isolation of the constituent groups, does not yet meet the requirements of the situation. The SLA and most of the affiliated groups were in a weak position when internment was introduced in the North. In the campaign of resistance to internment and to the accompanying wave of military terror, individuals from People’s Democracy, and from other socialist groups played an important role. They did this, however, not as an established socialist tendency, but as a collection of individuals. Consequently, when Fianna Fail intervened, and the Social Democratic and Labour Party and political supporters of the Provisional IRA toyed with an alternative administration for the nine counties of Ulster, many were distracted from the more militant and more radical forms of struggle.
A socialist organisation for all-Ireland is at present more a concept than a reality. The fact that much of the political repression is directed against the republican and socialist Left should not deceive anybody as to the actual influence of the Left. The internment move was classical counter-insurgency: to take away the political leadership and organising capacity of the movement and thus expose the armed (and presumed witless) militants to the superior fire-power of the Army. It failed disastrously, but it did not necessarily increase the credibility and authority of the Left.
The bourgeoisie can no longer rule as it has done. Its earlier long-term objectives are fast becoming irretrievable. Before long, the Southern government, oscillating between one position and another, will have to use the repressive apparatus at its disposal to deal with the extra-parliamentary opposition. But Ireland will not be in a revolutionary situation until a force is built up which is the organisational expression of the determination of, the ruled not to be ruled as they have been. There are no substitutes and short-cuts in the process of building the revolutionary party.
Brian Trench
(August 27, 1971)
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 19.2.2008