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From International Socialism, No.69, May 1974, pp.26-27.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
War and an Irish Town
Eamonn McCann
Penguin 40p.
THE WHEEL has turned almost full circle. Before the present crisis in Northern Ireland began six years ago there was a ‘constitutional’ body at Stormont which represented, accurately, the ascendancy of the Protestant Orange bourgeoisie and provided the essential guarantee necessary to keep rank-and-file Unionists, the Protestant working class, in line with their masters. Necessary to the guarantee were all the paraphenalia of anti-Catholic discrimination and the continual oppression of all anti-Unionist forces – notably the (then) remnants of the Irish Republican movement.
On this side of the Irish Sea, ‘Ulster’ found its representation in 11 staunch supporters of Unionist/Orange fundamentalism and one so-called Catholic spokesman, Gerard Fitt. In the South of Ireland there was a government which sought greater alignment with the UK, while at the same time paying lip-service to the Twenty-Six County constitution’s claim on all the territory of Ireland. And behind all this conglomeration of institutional rules and constitutional arrangements the control of British capital over the whole of the Irish economy, North and South, continued its apparently irreversible increase.
Presently in Northern Ireland there is a ‘constitutional’ body – the Assembly – attempting to re-sow the seeds of illusion and presiding over the British government’s policy of outright repression. At Westminster the Orange fundamentalists are returned, again 11 strong and the man of many parts – ’Catholic spokesman’, ‘Socialist Republican’ and Faulkner’s Deputy – the notorious Gerard Fitt is still there.
In the South the faces have changed, but Cosgrave’s reactionary coalition walks the same path as that selected by the defeated Lynch. And British capital continues its increasing domination of the Irish economy. (Since April 1973 the Industrial Development Authority in the South has approved yet another £50 million investment in Ireland – see the Financial Times, 15 March 1974). The wheel has turned almost full circle. But only almost.
In the process the Orange monolith has fragmented and the Protestant working class now seeks an identity for its interests. The resurgence and the proliferation of armed bodies among Protestants is well enough known, but we have less knowledge of their politics. The hysterical cries of some of the British left about ‘fascist’ Protestant groups (the UDA and the UVF are usually cited as examples) are less than adequate and illustrate only ignorance of the nature of fascism. The Republican movement also split with one faction – the ‘Officials’ – largely forsaking the military struggle and the other – the ‘Provisionals’ – apparently forsaking everything but the military struggle.
We know more about Republican politics. The Officials accept pure reformism (practically, through their involvement with the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and their calls for the ‘democratisation of Stormont’ up to the very moment that Stormont collapsed) despite their claims to revolutionary socialism. The Provisionals’ abject lack of a revolutionary political perspective is equally well known. Their single, comprehensive policy statement EIRE NUA (now officially described as a mere ‘discussion document’) embodies some of the worst features of Irish Catholic Nationalism. British capitalism has, of course, been forced to reveal its true nature, brutal and aggressive with the introduction of its mailed fist in the form of the Regular Army, the mysterious, counter-insurgent Military Reaction Force and the less mysterious, but certainly more vicious SAS.
The result is chaos; political chaos (you only have to read the Assembly debates or an Irish newspaper for a week to confirm that) and military chaos (how else could you describe a situation where, a few weeks ago, the RUC started shooting up and killing ‘armed, plainclothes but ordinary soldiers’). The road to the present chaos has been bloody chaotic; the statistics on killed and injured are sufficient indicators of this.
So, what has all this got to do with Eamonn McCann’s book? Well, there are numerous ‘histories’ and analyses of the events of the last five years which with greater or lesser accuracy can stick flesh on the skeleton outlined above; but what they all lack is a true ‘flavour’ of the continuing crisis as it affected the people directly and indirectly involved. They lack a sense of excitement at victories (however slight), disappointment at set-backs, and despair at failure. None of this can be said of McCann’s work.
Part of the book is a highly personal account of the ‘War’ as seen through the eyes of a Derry man, deeply involved with the struggles of the people of Derry. Yet it’s not a purely descriptive account; it is constantly analytical and self-critical. For example, when the British Army intervened in the struggle between the Bogsiders and the RUC,
‘their appearance was clear proof that we had won the battle, that the RUC had been beaten. That was welcome. But there was confusion as to what the proper attitude to the soldiers might be ... anyway, everyone was exhausted, clothes torn and faces begrimed, their eyes burning from tear gas. It was victory enough for the time being.’
Out of the exhaustion and confusion McCann eventually settled his position on the matter in Barricade Bulletin No.2:
‘This is a great defeat for the Unionist government But it is not yet a victory for us.’ (pp.61-62)
From that point onwards the story is of Free Derry, and each turn in the overall development of the crisis – the emergence of the Provos, the change in the political complexion of the British government, internment Bloody Sunday, Operation Motorman – is covered in terms of the shifts in the forces within the Bogside and the Creggan. Two short paragraphs (pp.101-102) convey all the horror of Bloody Sunday and the concluding sentences give the essence of its impact on Derry:
‘A few weeks later the Officials planted a bomb outside the officers’ mess of the Para Headquarters in Aldershot. Unfortunately it killed six innocent people. Had it killed a dozen British soldiers there would have been dancing on the streets of Derry.’ (p.102).
With Operation Motorman on 31 July 1972, the personalised narrative ends, and the rest of the book, in fact the slightly larger part of it, is taken up with McCann’s analysis of the continual crises in Ireland, before and after Partition. There is very little new in this section except that McCann’s style makes the intracies of Irish history highly readable and very intelligible. He covers the whole apparatus of anti-Catholicism within the Orange supremacy, the politics of discrimination and the part that these played in generating the illusions which held the Protestant working class in subservience to the Stormont regime.
His basic analysis is one which will be familiar enough to regular readers of IS Journal. The pace and intensity of the continual crises can only be adequately explained by a close examination of the changing relationship between British and Irish capital. The current crisis arises specifically out of the more recent reorganisation of British and European capital which (in the Irish context) started with the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Treaty of 1965 – a process whereby the ‘Border’ became an economic absurdity and would inevitably become a great political inconvenience.
Partition, in this setting, had outlived its usefulness to the bourgeoisie. It had to go; but the main reaction came from those who had swallowed the Unionist illusion of the sanctifying grace of a Protestant ‘Ulster’ and those whose political positions depended on the fostering of that illusion. Against that background the civil rights movement could, and did, trigger off the most brutal repression from the Orange state. And against that repression the IRA found its role – initially defensive and later in offensive military operations against the master state in Britain. McCann is explicit on all this.
‘There is a war in Ireland because capitalism, to establish and preserve itself, created conditions which made war inevitable. Essentially there is no other reason. There rarely is for war.’ (p.126)
What of perspectives for the future? Here you can find the Achilles heel, if not the Achilles leg, of the book. Only in the last few pages do we find any perspective. On the last page, McCann writes, ‘we need to build a mass, revolutionary, Marxist party ... to make a revolution we need a revolutionary party.’ True; but, even though he spends a few (a pitiful few) pages discussing the lessons learned from the struggle in the North, we are left only with these bald statements of political truisms. The disappointment you feel at this stage is not at all alleviated by the concluding sentence – ‘this book is intended as a contribution to the discussion of how to build it’ (i.e. the mass, revolutionary, Marxist party). But apart from posing the key issue of the relationship between Irish Nationalism and socialism, the final ‘contribution’ falls short of the expectations built on the earlier parts of the book.
For the British socialist this is an equally important question, for the answer will determine, among other things his attitude towards the Provisional IRA and how he presents the Irish issue within the British working class movement. Socialists must support all struggles against imperialism. Indeed. But does that necessitate unconditional support for purely nationalistic movements in their politics of bourgeois nationalism? Indeed not! Lenin is usually quoted in support of the first proposition:
‘he who expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it’. But he wrote this in relation to the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, which, Lenin stresses ‘manifested itself in street fighting conducted by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie and a section of the workers after a long period of mass agitation, demonstrations, suppression of newspapers, etc.’ (Lenin, Questions of National Policy and Proletarian Internationalism, p.159, his emphasis)
It remains to be added that the ‘section of the workers’ was Connolly’s Irish Citizens Army – committed to a detailed, well documented programme of socialist revolution.
That is one major difference between 1916 and 1974, and why any comparison between the two periods (not to mention the abuse of Lenin’s writings) is a dangerous exercise. The working class, the only class on which the ‘mass revolutionary Marxist party’ could be based, has no effective presence, though it does supply the ‘volunteers’ in the present struggle, McCann appears to be confident that the ‘opportunity will present itself’ for the building of such a party. And so it might. As I have implied above, the reason why the wheel has come only ‘almost full circle’ is that both Protestant and Catholic sections of the working class are in a position where they have never been before. The former is totally disaffected from the machinations of the new Stormont regime and the latter seeks a political identity outside the continuing corrosion of the Orange supremacy.
If the wheel completes only one revolution then the working class will, for the time being, remain deeply divided, the Assembly will be firmly rooted and the grip of British imperialism will be firmer than ever. But at the present time there is no sign of any slowing down, and the implications of another revolution are beyond the compass of this review.
McCann’s optimism about the opportunity for the Marxist party presenting itself is a fair enough reflection of the potential in the present situation. At the same time, however, it is a sound indication of the struggle which lies ahead for all socialists as capitalism blunders through reform and repression towards its cataclysm. For that reason alone the book should be read carefully. For the smell and the taste of the physical and political struggle against the bourgeois state it’s hard to beat.
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Last updated on 26.2.2008