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From International Socialism (1st series), No.40,October/November 1969, pp.1-3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
When the population of Derry drove back the police on October 5 twelve months ago, they ensured the end of the 45-year-old suspended animation of Northern Ireland politics and put the Irish question back at the centre of British politics from which it was skilfully relegated by the settlement of 1921.
This settlement was a compromise between the forces of Irish bourgeois nationalism, frightened of the emergence of a radicalised republicanism, and British imperialism. It also represented a reconciliation between the dominant industrial wing of British capitalism and those sections close to the Anglo-Irish industrial and landed interests of the north-east. The establishment of the border meant not only than an enclave of British rule was maintained, but that the Free State, cut off from the only area of intense industrial development in the island, would never be able to put up more than token opposition to British hegemony. De Velara’s ‘economic war’ of the 1930’s was bound to give way to the policy of ‘inducements’ for foreign (still mainly British) investment and the aim of free trade. At the same time the Republican movement was crippled. To the successive secessions to the lusher realms of free state politics (Fianna Fail in the twenties, Clan Na Poblachta in the forties) it could only counter courageous but futile actions – the bomb planting of 1939, the border raids of the fifties.
Ireland was anchored to Britain by the Orange enclave in the north-east. This ensured that the national bourgeois development in the south would be a ‘safe’ one. The pre-condition for this, however, was that the regime in the six counties could not be a ‘normal’ liberal democratic one. It had to depend for its survival, on the one hand, on building up a mass base for Unionism by systematically encouraging bigotry and discrimination among the Protestant working-class and farmers, by institutionalising these in differential unemployment rates, etc. and, on the other, by a systematic oppression of the Catholic, and therefore nationalist or republican, population, through electoral gerrymandering, armed bodies of Orange thugs in or out of uniform, periodic pogroms, and the Special Powers Act. In its attempts to bind the Protestant working-class to it the Stormont regime has been overwhelmingly successful. But what allowed Stormont to survive for decades was not just this mass sectarian base and armed apparatus. Jt was also the interlocking with the needs of British imperialism. In the last analysis British troops guaranteed the border. In riots in the twenties and thirties troops intervened against the Catholics.
It has been the weakening of this interlocking of interest that has been one of the preconditions for the events of the past year. For, while the industries of the north-east have tended to undergo a decline, there has been a rapid development of industry in the south, until today there are more than 300,000 workers in manufacturing and allied industries there, as against only 230,000 in the north. Between 1961 and 1965 gross fixed investment grew in the south from £108.5 million to £193 million, in the north from £94.9 million to £152.9 million. Given that much of the investment in the south is by British companies, or by international companies also active in Britain, the effect has been to make the ties between British capitalism and the south as important as the traditional ones with the north-east. This has, on the one hand, made a substantial section of British capital join Irish capital in seeing the border as an irrational division in what should be a single economic unit. There are growing pressures to accompany the economic rationalisation that will be brought about by free trade in 1975 with a degree of political rationalisation. Already there are ‘working relationships’ between several ministries. On the other hand, British capital fears any development in the North that might make its position in the South more difficult.
It is these changes that laid the basis for the developments of the last year. British ruling-class opinion was moving towards wanting some sort of united, although of course, not economically independent Ireland. It was also beginning to find the behaviour of its colons in the North embarrassing. When Catholics – or at least the ‘respectable and responsible ... Catholic middle-class’ of the Cameron report protested against discrimination and gerrymandering it felt a degree of sympathy with them. No longer was its reaction to send the troops in with the RUC to batter them back into the ground. Official opinion hoped for a gradual and peaceful solution of the problems of the border and of the northern Catholics.
In the six counties, however, what exists is precisely the sort of structure that is not amenable to peaceful change. The official and semi-official apparatus through which the Unionists rule is interwoven with a variety of unofficial mass organisations. All have one thing in common: they aim to control the Protestant workers through an anti-Catholic ideology and the Catholics through crude repression (for instance, making certain through differential unemployment rates, etc., that emigration ensures that the 47 per cent of the primary school population that was Catholic in 1964 never became 47 per cent of the voting population). At every level this apparatus depends upon the support it receives from ordinary Protestants because of its positive discrimination in their favour. Hence the failure of the regime to satisfy even the most elementary demands of the Catholic middle-class, let alone the mass of Catholics.
Further, because the Orange apparatus is not centralised effectively (typical is the lack of real control over the weaponry of the B-specials, or even any clear official knowledge of their numbers), the economically dominant section of the ruling-class is far from being in unambiguous command. The weight of its own past threatens to topple it politically, as it did O’Neill, the moment it makes any move towards the most minimal of reforms. Having spent more than 50 years building up and arming Paisleyite elements, it cannot jettison them now.
The British government finds itself in a similar position. It dare not really deal with the Orange apparatus either. It it was forced to send in troops to protect the Catholics against pogroms because it feared the possible consequences in terms qf a civil war involving the south, it quickly made it clear that it did not intend to get involved in any massive restructuring of the northern regime. The 6,000 troops it has sent in are not enough to deal with the 7,000 B-specials, let alone with the tens of thousands of guns in the hands of Orangemen. Instead, the army is used to prevent any renewed massacre, while helping the regime that produced the pogrom to remain intact, and even to reassert its control over the liberated Catholic areas.
The result of these various factors has been an impasse which no political or social force found itself able to resolve. The Paisleyites are able to prevent any dismantling of the Orange regime, but, increasingly deprived of the economic forces that used to back them, can do no more. The Stormont regime cannot afford to separate itself from the Paisleyiles too radically, while the British government cannot afford to turn against the Stormont regime, even if the support provided is cooler than in the past. Finally, the hopes of the Catholic middle-class of being able to ‘play its proper part’ in the life of Northern Ireland – raised by the changing British attitude, the O’Neill-Lemass meetings, the promises of reform – have been frustrated by the realities of the Stormont regime. At the same time the traditional leaders of the Catholic community have been unwilling to lake the risks of mobilising the mass of the Catholic population to change these realities (it too owns factories that get burnt down).
It has been this paralysis of all the other forces in the situation that accounts for the crucial role the Civil Rights movement, and in particular the People’s Democracy (PD), has been able to play over the last 12 months. By taking action at certain key junctures (in Derry last October, with the Belfast-Derry march) an ad hoc group made up of those with different backgrounds and ideologies and no single clear perspective was able to shatter the fragile facade of established politics. In the process its members moved from the world of small political groups and student politics to the centre of the political spectrum. As those most determined and consistent in their opposition to the status quo they were able to lead tens of thousands of Catholic workers who were far from accepting their overall political views.
The successes of the Civil Rights movement depended upon it being able to exploit the differences within the ruling block, in particular between Stormont and Westminster, that prevented old-style repression smashing the movement before it got off the ground. This permitted for the first time for fifty years the real mobilisation of the Catholic masses. But there were always limits within which the Civil Rights movement had to operate. These were the limits on what could be achieved by such a mass mobilisation within the borders of the six counties. For if the Orange apparatus could not repress in the old manner, neither could it give real ground. Indeed there was bound to be a point at which in order to maintain control of its own right it would unleash it against the Catholic population. Although the Catholic population had more time to mobilise than in the past, it still had to come to terms with the reality that forced on it the choice of giving up its demands for civil rights or facing civil war – civil war for which it was unprepared, against an opposition made up in the main of the Protestant working-class.
These limits were reached on August 12. When its police were defeated in Derry (they hardly resorted to their guns, presumably through fear of southern intervention) the Stormont regime sent the B-specials into Belfast’s Catholic ghettos, knowing the certain consequences. Only the intervention of British troops stopped the pogrom.
Faced with a structure incapable of more than marginal reform, the Catholic population has the choice between acquiescing in it and struggling to overthrow it. Already it is clear that the ‘respectable and responsible middle-class’ prefer acquiescence. At the same time the Catholic workers in the ghettos are not prepared to wait much longer.
This provides enormous opportunities for the Irish Left. At a time when all the structures established with the border in the twenties are being put into question by the development of capitalism itself, it can lead the only force capable of changing these. But to do so it has to set itself clear organisational and political perspectives in a way it has not in the past.
Firstly it has to recognise that while the long-term goal must be Catholic-Protestant working-class unity, this will not be attained by a mechanical coming together around economic demands. At the moment the Catholic worker regards his total oppression by the Stormont structure (epitomised by the RUC, etc.) as more important than economic issues, the Protestant worker his ideology and marginal privileges. Long-term unity can only come through a political movement based in the main upon Catholic workers that fights the social and political structure of Orangeism, and by its successes poses the Protestant. worker with real achievements, not just abstract propaganda. But these will not be possible without forcing back the Orange repressive apparatus – against the desires of sections of the Protestant workers.
Secondly, it has to be understood that what happens in the six counties cannot be dealt with in isolation from the rest of Ireland. It is what happens there that alone can provide some long-term solution to the problems of the north. British troops may be preventing the large-scale murder of Catholics at the moment but they are also propping up the Stormont regime, and in this sense opening the way for a repetition of August 12. In the South, however, are forces that could intervene to transform the situation in the north; on the one hand a tradition of radical republicanism and opposition to the division of Ireland, an anti-imperialist if not anti-capitalist ideology, particularly strong among poor farmers and workers; on the other hand a working-class with the highest strike rate in Europe. Demands need to be posed that relate to the republican tradition, that even the Fianna Fail government claims affinities with, such as for the opening of the southern armouries to provide defensive weapons for the northern Catholics; further the attempt needs to be made to synthesise these national demands with class demands, as for instance with the demand for the seizure of British factories and land in the south as ransom for northern lives.
But for such perspective to become real, there has to be a coherent socialist organisation, both within the six counties and throughout Ireland. It will no longer be possible to lead the Catholic workers merely by exposing the weak points in the Orange structure; now it will be necessary to respond immediately to events so as to be able to mobilise forces capable of countering that structure.
This organisation needs to develop and agitate around a programme that is clearly in the interests of workers North and South, Protestant as well as Catholic, without, however, making any concessions to the false Unionist consciousness of the Orange workers. Central to the analysis must be the continued subordination of Ireland, South as well as North, to British capitalism, the ready accommodation of Green capital to this, and the consequences for workers and poor farmers: in the South the maintenance of social welfare benefits at probably the lowest level in western Europe in order to reduce tax costs for investors, the concentration of industrial development in the east, the failure to invest in housebuilding on any adequate scale, an emigration rate still a quarter of the birth rate; in the North, declining industry, massive unemployment particularly west of the Bann, while there is a continued drain of investable resources to Britain. (Here it is important to emphasise that the often-quoted subsidy of £140 million a year is a subsidy to the Stormont state – i.e., £70 million is to offset Stormont’s share of ‘imperial services’, i.e., UK defence, diplomacy and national debt – in other words to pay to keep Northern Ireland under British imperialism; £32.5 million goes in farming subsidies, much of this to the big landowners; only £33 million goes- to support social services. This last figure is considerably smaller than Northern Ireland’s favourable trade balance with Britain – £47 million in 1967 – and probably only a small percentage of the capital drained off in the form of profits and rent.) This makes possible the development of a struggle that is anti-capitalist as well as anti-unionist – that can be fought in the factories as well as on the barricades, in the South as well as the North.
Only through such a development will it be possible for the civil rights movement to break out of the impasse it is in, and for new life to be breathed into the republican tradition. But this is precisely the sort of struggle that the Green middle-class will refuse to join. However embarrassed the Southern government might be by what is happening in the North, they are even more frightened by the general instability that would follow any violent overthrow of that regime. That is why it is absurd to pretend, as much of the ‘Left’ of Sinn Fein continues to do, that the struggle for a workers’ republic can wait until after the achievement of a United Ireland. Such a view can only mean the movement going up the blind alleys of the last 50 years – on the one hand the brave but ineffectual actions of apolitical republicanism; on the other acquiescence in the pacifism of the Catholic middle-class.
The building of a socialist organisation out of those from a variety of backgrounds – the small revolutionary groups, Left moving republicans, those radicalised by. the experience of the last 12 months, will be hard. But without it progress will become increasingly difficult. With it, on the other hand, the contradictions of the northern statelet can lead to an enormous strengthening of the Left throughout Ireland and begin to pose concretely the workers’ republic as an alternative to both regimes.
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