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From International Marxist Review, Summer 1990.
Copied with thanks from the Arguments for a Workers’ Republic Website.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
>Is there an Irish national question any longer? Events since the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and, more particularly, the inconclusive struggle of the last 20 years have caused the national question to be re-examined, in a number of cases by people of genuine goodwill.
Traditionally, Marxists have described the Irish situation as being one in which the island-nation is oppressed by its neighbour and where opposition to this oppression tends to be a progressive struggle preparing the way for – and, indeed, leading into – the struggle for socialism. How this struggle is envisaged has varied. At first, Marx and Engels believed that its victory must await that of the British workers; later they supported the nationalist rising of the Republican Fenians in the 1860s; and, finally, they concluded that the constitutional tactics of the Parnellite Home Rule movement, which had started to eliminate landlordism, could also subvert the imperialist state machine that held the country. In their time, Lenin and Trotsky continued to accept the Home Rule perspective, partly because most of the landlords’ holdings had been or were being purchased by their tenants.
After the Easter Rising of 1916 had opened the way for a new and partially successful national democratic revolution, the belief that land reform had blunted Irish revolutionary fervour disappeared: communist leaders, including those such as Radek who had dismissed Irish national claims altogether, united to support the Irish Republic. What is more, this support continued after the leaders of that Republic had signed it away in the 1921 Treaty with Britain, leaving its cause to be upheld in arms by the majority of its military force (the Irish Republican Army, or IRA), unsupported by the majority of nationalists.
Opposition to the Treaty has been continued by Lenin and Trotsky’s heirs in the Fourth International. In particular, although it was not immediately clear that the partition of Ireland was to be the core of Britain’s reformed domination of the whole country (only Ireland’s James Connolly, executed after the Easter Rising, had foreseen this), Britain’s ability to surrender on everything else has established this truth. So not only does the Fourth International stand with those who fight for Irish unity and independence with all means possible, but it considers that their struggle must become one for workers’ power if it is to be successful.
This position is consciously opposed by many, including some former anti-imperialists in the Irish labour movement. Some of these insist that Irish nationalism was counter-revolutionary and anti-democratic from the start, objectively if not subjectively. Most would accept it as generally progressive until the 1921 Treaty. The subsequent partition of the country is interpreted by them, however, as being no more than acceptance of the Ulster Protestant democracy’s alleged right to self-determination. Its justification is assumed by reference to the undoubted Catholic sectarianism of the present Republic of the nationalist 26 counties. That state’s constitutional bans on abortion and divorce are considered adequate explanations – and, for some, excuses – for the political and economic discrimination maintained by the Ulster regime and its proletarian supporters’ readiness to follow some of these islands’ most reactionary politicians in the name of religion against class. After all, it is accurately remarked that most of the Republic’s workers are also tied to bourgeois parties. The weakness of their economic base compared to the Northerners’ is not recognized as a natural cause for this, or else it is used economistically to prove northern workers’ superiority rather than to start questioning why, with their advanced base, their consciousness is backward.
All this is held to prove the British dimension as either non-existent or, at least, irrelevant. Irish capitalism is as strong as it can be; its weaknesses are internal (and, if explicable, due mainly to 26-County Catholicism). If there is an outside imperialist exploiter it is the United States of America, which threatens all Western Europe equally. Irish-British relations are like those of Belgium and the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain, Denmark and Germany: states formerly in client-patron relationship but now equal partners in the (West) European Community. If the North of Ireland is to resolve its problems, this will be through democratic reforms enforced by Britain, if from outside, and, in the economic sphere, grubstaked by the EC and the USA. The 26-County Republic can contribute only by suppressing its irredentist claim for Irish unity. The fight for Irish unity will not only not lead to socialism, but is an undemocratic diversion from that end.
The social context for this viewpoint will be considered later. Here, it is enough to say that it comes out of 26-County conditions as much as those of the Northern Irish Protestant working class. More to the point in hand, it provides a challenge to revolutionary preconceptions that has not been answered by the largest Irish revolutionary nationalist party, Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin’s failure makes it all the more necessary to answer it here.
Ireland’s relationship to Britain cannot be explained simply in the terms provided by Lenin in his study Imperialism – the highest stage of Capitalism. His central concept of twentieth century clientelism through colonial investment by metropolitan capital has applied to the North of Ireland since its foundation, but has only been a systematic policy since 1950 when its local industrial situation became more critical. The Republic has only made serious efforts to import capital since 1958. It is only since 1972 that its successive governments have allowed it to become a major debtor. Even now, three-fifths of its debt (£15 billion) is owed to Ireland’s own banks.
Yet this formal metropolitan status cannot be separated from the historical context preceding the period when it became significant. Ireland was exporting capital before its economy was strong enough to benefit from such exports. Until the 1960s, it believed it had no easily worked raw materials – one of Lenin’s four main reasons to invest in a country. The possibility of reducing the price of land sufficiently to justify its potential for foreign investors was thwarted in the 1880s by a combination of foreign competition and rural agitation. Labour, though relatively cheap compared to Britain, was, at least from the moment of partition, expensive compared to its comrades in Africa and Asia. However, even when the last two factors – cheap labour and land – were more encouraging to investors, Lenin’s fourth condition – scarcity of capital – remained self-perpetuating. Capital left underdeveloped Ireland for the nearby London stock market and the more secure and profitable holdings of mainstream imperialism.
This direct import of Irish capital is only part (and a decreasing part) of Britain’s interest in Ireland. Its rulers (at first, just the rulers of England always had two basic reasons for their occupation: to milk its resources and to prevent it becoming a military threat. Other reasons have come and gone: the lobby first of Irish Unionists, and then purely Ulster ones, influenced British policy over the centuries (but it must now be remembered bitterly that the executors of that policy know no permanent friends, only permanent interests). On the other hand, military strategic considerations today include the possibility that Ireland will not just handicap British defence interests, but might yet become a major social revolutionary threat (‘Britain’s Cuba’, as feared most publicly by British conservatism’s right-wing, and less openly by more powerful figures). This possibility was apparent at times during the 1919–21 Anglo-Irish War and the subsequent Civil War in the 26 counties, as well as during the struggle of the last twenty years.
Both these basic reasons for occupation can be questioned and should be examined further. Certainly, the economic cause has changed over the years. At first, in the Middle Ages, it took the form of the desire of England’s aristocracy to obtain feudal dues from Ireland’s less-developed society. Soon, this was reinforced by English royalty’s need for finance, which became more important as its other supplies were controlled by its parliaments. Before this could be limited, feudal dues had given way to capitalist landlord ism for the British landed interest. The landlords cleared their estates, aided by the 1846 famine, to produce cattle for the British market. When this was undercut by competition from the ranches and freezing factories of the new world, the growth of British capitalism, industrial and financial, had provided a new conduit for Irish capital exports. The nationally-owned Irish banks had been founded during the nationalist agitation of Daniel O’Connell in the early nineteenth century with the aim of investing Irish savings in projected local industries, under an Irish parliament. In practice, not only was the said parliament postponed, but shortage of Irish coal and iron aborted such expansion in the steam age. The banks proved effective exporters of their investors and depositors’ funds. Eventually, when part of Ireland did get independence and tried to build a self-sufficient capitalist economy, the banks blocked these plans and relied on their depositors’ fear of interference with their economic self-interest to overcome their mere patriotism at the polls.
Today, Irish banks are ready to advance three-fifths of the state’s debt, but not to move their investments out of foreign industry. So special incentives are given to encourage foreign firms to invest in Ireland, with diminishing success. In this process, it is certainly true that British interests are outnumbered by those of the United States: in 1988, new British investment amount ed to a quantified £30m out of a total £270.5m of foreign investment, of which the USA had supplied £179m. The point is that Britain does have an interest, second only to that of the Americans. What is more, it is close enough to be the obvious choice as policeman for all imperialist investors.
This links in with the military issue. In 1169, Henry II of England moved to prevent his vassal, the Earl of Pembroke, from doing as Henry’s great-grandfather had done and establishing his own independent state (then in England, now in Ireland) from which to attack his liege lord. To block this possibility, Henry became ruler of all Ireland, as vassal of the Pope. Neither he nor his heirs could enforce their rule over the whole island until after they had renounced their own vassalage nearly four centuries later. Even then, they could not secure its allegiance. So, to keep down the Catholic Irish, the English – and later their partners, the Scots – settled Protestants from their own island, most effectively in the north-east. New insurrections of the natives led to Catholics being deprived of most civil and political rights during most of the eighteenth century. The repeal of many of these penal laws and the 1789 revolution in France raised Irish hopes, the disappointment of which led to a rebellion on a new, Republican programme. Its defeat was followed by Ireland’s incorporation into a parliamentary union with Britain. Complete equal rights for Catholics were promised but postponed long enough to keep nationalist sentiment from dying. New uprisings once again impelled the senior partner in the union to jettison the Irish landlord interest and then consider a federal relationship (‘Home Rule’). This was blocked by the north-eastern ‘garrison’.
A new and more than ever before sustained and broadly-based national democratic revolution ended in a compromise by which the garrison was given its own federal relationship within the union, while the nationalist majority obtained what its leaders claimed was a ‘stepping stone’ to full independence, which it proved to be if independence excluded territorial unification.
The garrison that forms the majority in the province of ‘Northern Ireland’ has kept it in being so that the 26-County Republic can enjoy its neutrality without worrying the British government. Many would claim that Irish neutrality is not such a cause of worry in the nuclear age. In fact, countries have been destabilized for less (notably, the Micronesian island of Palau). No country with pretensions to great power status is likely to feel happy, even now, about a neutral country the size of Ireland relative to Britain, that blocks its approaches, unless it is neutral itself. As it is, nuclear submarines belonging to Britain and other NATO powers are known to patrol in the Irish Sea. A united neutral Ireland would be in a position to block such craft passing through the North Channel between Larne in the North of Ireland and Portpatrick in Scotland, the narrowest and shallowest sea division between the two islands. To keep the Channel open, the British government has to control both its shores; it does so under the present status quo.
So British imperialism has an interest in Ireland that involves keeping it divided. Only complete and public acknowledgement of its authority by the rulers of allegedly independent Ireland, literal and open acceptance of its satellite status – including entry to NATO – and the maintenance of this position for at least a decade could justify Britain allowing Irish unity. Ideally, it would probably prefer such a solution to the present instability, or even the lesser instability that existed before 1969. The trouble is that, while the Republic’s response to the struggle to its north has not been very favourable to the freedom fighters, it has tended to compensate for this over the years by taking a firmer stand on one issue open to it: neutrality. This is arguably more formal than real. NATO planes fly across Ireland and are even guided by a communications beacon in west County Cork. Nonetheless, such collaboration remains covert – more so than NATO desires. In the last 25 years, neutrality has been turned slowly but definitely from a bargaining chip in negotiations for EC membership into a matter of principle. Over 80% of the people of the Republic agree with this.
This makes it all the more important for Britain to maintain its alibi. It will not spurn the wishes of its garrison population in the Six-Counties of ‘Northern Ireland’ on the basic issue of the province’s surrender to the Irish majority. It might even have got away with this had it been prepared without mass or military duress on insisting that the partitioned state be administered according to full democratic norms. Instead, from within a year of partition, it left matters to its garrison, the Ulster Unionists. They had begun their fight against Irish nationalism on an openly anti-democratic and imperialistic plat form, denying the Irish the right to self-determination. As the struggle progressed, they organized around the Orange Order, which had been created to fight against the first Irish Republic rising on that very basis. Its central role as organizer of Unionism made it impossible for the North of Ireland to be run save on a sectarian basis that upheld and extended the discriminatory hiring practices common in the area. Today, Protestants have two-and-a-half times better job prospects than Catholics in all sectors. Britain allowed this to happen – it was interested in its security, not Six-County democracy.
However, after 1945, the British welfare state was applied to its province on a non-sectarian basis, without changing its sectarian politics (if anything, they worsened) but at the same time raising hopes that they could be ended peacefully. The failure to fulfil these hopes began the present struggle. Although, forced to make democratic reforms, Britain’s good will remains suspect. Its attempt to end the basis of Orange power through the Fair Employment Bill actually bans positive discrimination in favour of Catholics. The only other way to end discrimination, ‘levelling up’, needs more more money than is forthcoming – or even more than the £500m guaranteed by Britain and the United States when Britain persuaded the 26-County regime to accept a consultative role at Hillsborough in 1985 in the Anglo-Irish Agreement. (Even here, only £130m has been paid out.)
The vanguard of the struggle against the occupation is – as it has been from the beginning, save for sympathetic upsurges on specific issues in the Republic – a minority cross-section of the Six-County minority. In this cross-section, unemployed workers and the younger children of the petty-bourgeoisie have a disproportionate influence since they suffer most from the area’s sectarian hiring practices. At the same time, such is the institutionalised discrimination at all levels that the local national bourgeoisie is also reasonably represented. The result is a strong, active revolutionary nationalist movement representing 35%–40% of the Six-County’s nationalist population, with a majority in areas such as West Belfast and the border regions of County Armagh and County Fermanagh and a significant influence in those counties across the border whose economies have been weakened by partition. In all, up to now the necessary struggle for Irish unity is that of the political minority of the religious minority within Ireland’s territorial minority.
This continuing three-fold minority position of the revolutionary nationalist movement gives superficial justification to the arguments that the crisis in the North of Ireland can be ended in the North of Ireland itself, arguments that are not only put forward by pro-imperialists. Whether this was ever possible is doubtful; its current impossibility is certain, given the problems of levelling job opportunities between the religious communities. In practice, of course, this cannot be done without outside aid, either to hold the ring or to supply money to level up the difference. For most of its proponents, then, the ‘internal solution’ is an internal United Kingdom solution. The only supporters of an internal Six-County solution (called, significantly, UDI à la lan Smith’s Rhodesia) are, spasmodically, groups and individuals adhering to extreme right-wing Unionism who understand it as an assurance of permanent Protestant power.
The one further point about the ‘internal solution’ that is advocated by all its supporters – from the Communist Party of Ireland (who hope to create the conditions for selling Irish unity to the Unionists) to the Loyalist terror group, the UDA – is the North of Irish Bill of Rights. All the drafts of this include provision allowing it to be suspended by the provincial regime ‘in case of emergency’. More fundamental in the Bill’s inability to heal the the North of Irish rift is the fact that such measures cannot impose unity on divided societies – indeed, such Bills of Rights can only function insofar as there is agreement around the nature of the rights they guarantee. Such agreement does not and cannot exist on a Six-County basis.
So the question confronting revolutionary socialists must be: where can Ire land’s revolutionary minority seek allies if it is to win? Of course, there have been, and still are, those who would insist that it does not need to win allies, only benevolent neutrals. For them, the war will be won by the Republican movement’s (the tern generally used for the major nationalist organization Sinn Féin and its armed wing the Irish Republican Army – IRA) superiority of arms – notably supplies of Libyan Semtex [plastic explosive], heat-seeking missiles and superior mortars. The first objection to this argument is that it supposes an aggressive armed struggle. Yet this is not the basis on which the Republican movement gains most of its support, but rather because its arms protect the nationalist areas in the North of Ireland against even worse attacks from the British and Loyalists. Already, it is doubtful whether the Republicans have the numbers to hold the supplies they need and protect their people.
The second objection is reflected in the fact that those who assert the possibility of their lone victory can also recognize, unlike the proponents of the ‘internal solution’, Britain’s determination to keep its Irish base. Such determination will not be beaten by weapons alone. As yet, Britain has been able to fight a partly military and partly democratic struggle; it hopes to hold all the six counties and to win an internal settlement satisfactory to it. However, if the Republicans ever looked like forcing its withdrawal, Britain would be able to take the offensive, rebuild its bridges with the Unionists and abandon civil rights to fight an immediate and terrible war. This might provoke workers in the 26-Counties, as previous British atrocities have done. Whether this result would tip the scales for Irish unity if achieved in this way is doubtful, and becomes more dubious the longer the current struggle is prolonged. More likely, such a war would let Britain lose the less prosperous Ulster hinterland west of the River Bann, while it kept a more secure position in the are as of the largest Protestant majorities on the west shore of the North Channel, with some population exchanges.
So the Republican movement, being still the largest of all Irish revolutionary bodies, has a responsibility to maximize its support outside of its northern strongholds. It has three groups from which it can choose, beyond its chances of becoming a majority of the Six-County minority which cannot be an adequate substitute for any of the others. The three are:
Only one of these provides the correct strategic priority. Appealing to the Ulster Protestants leads immediately to the ‘internal solution’. The vast majority of this community has no interest in Irish unity other than as part of a socialist workers’ republic and, more to the immediate point, it cannot itself even make this exception when such a republic is not on the obvious agenda. What is more, the Protestant majority is particularly hostile to the Republicans’ armed struggle, whose aim they think is genocide against them. As long as it continues on its present offensive basis, its organizers and supporters are the very last people among whom the political leaders of Ulster Protestant ism will seek allies.
One group of former Republicans have learnt this lesson with disastrous results. At the end of the 1960s, influenced by the Moscow-line Stalinist par ties (they were then divided along the border), the then united Republican movement helped to initiate a campaign for limited political reforms that would give equal rights to both communities, mainly through the practices already working in Britain. Although these did not attempt to change the job discrimination on which the North of Ireland is founded, they did attack directly a number of discriminatory practices, particularly in housing, and started a chain reaction that exploded when the Orangemen and their state forces tried to impose military control on the Catholic areas of Derry and Belfast in August 1969. Their inability to do this immediately led to the reinforcement of the British Army garrison and its use as a police force. Indirectly, it also led to the Republican movement splitting, the minority reverting to the more traditional armed struggle strategy that, as the only movement, it continues today. The majority continued to develop the strategy of the ‘internal solution’, refining it so that it became centred around the North of Irish Bill of Rights. However, it began to go beyond its inspirers of the now-united Communist Party of Ireland (CPI). This group was content to insist on its strategy’s reformist nature against the revived armed struggle.
The majority ‘Official’ Republicans went further. On the one hand, they refused to limit themselves to the CPI’s wish that they should be the party of the national democratic stage of the struggle, and proclaimed themselves its socialist vanguard. On the other hand, seeing that the ‘internal solution’ was failing to win over Protestant workers, they have chosen to intensify their commitment to its principle: concentrating on appealing to and apologizing for Unionism (one of their most sophisticated ideologists, Henry Patterson, sees anti-Catholic sectarianism as a major source of socialism); liquidating their army; abandoning the name Sinn Féin (they are now the Workers’ Party); and attacking Sinn Féin itself as ‘fascist’. This has earned them exemption from Orange strictures against Republicanism, without winning them more Protestant support. Subsequently, they have lost nearly all their former influence among the North of Irish Nationalist minority. Their socialist programme has, however, won them votes and seats in the Republic where the Labour Party is only just breaking from a period of 17 years of collaboration with the least nationalist of the major capitalist parties.
One thing should be added. The fact that the Ulster Protestant community, even the workers within it, are not immediate allies in struggle against imperialism does not mean that they will always oppose it. The Ulster Protestant working class has had a developed economic base for longer than the workers in any other part of Ireland. It has produced labour leaders who compare favourably with most of those elsewhere. Its weakness is that the conditions that created this base also revived the sectarianism that negated its effects: the best leaders of Ulster Protestant workers have tended to be more politically isolated within their community than other Irish labour leaders. This can not always be. Faced with a genuine secular socialist revolutionary movement that hegemonizes the mass of Irish nationalist workers and seeks state power actively – a movement that has not yet been seen in Ireland, but this does not mean that it is impossible – then it can be expected that Ulster’s workers of both traditions will unite in a higher cause than that of political rights within one union.
The Stalinists of the CPI do not limit their stagist perspective just to the North of Ireland. This is but one part of a three-stage strategy, the second being Irish unity and the third socialism (on a united Ireland basis, of course, but not beyond this). This enables the Party to see its first stage in separate parts, north and south. What this means is that while they seek Unionist allies in the north they work for an apparently contradictory nationalist alliance in the Republic. In their schema, full political democracy in the North of Ireland will be the condition in which Unionists will become democratic nationalists. This underestimates the base of Unionism. What is more, it overestimates the nationalism of the Irish bourgeoisie as it has developed outside the North of Ireland since 1921.
In the smaller area, conditions have maintained the revolutionary potential of bourgeois nationalism; in the larger area, this potential is practically extinguished outside the border counties. In the Republic, the capitalists have built a secure base, with an economy more separate from that of the North of Ireland than it is from that of Britain. This base expanded industrially in the 1930s under policies of self-sufficiency initiated by Fianna Fáil. the constitutional heir of the militant opponents of the 1921 Treaty. By the end of the 1950s, the policies necessary to ensure economic independence were too radical for Irish capital. The economy was reopened to multinational firms with immediate, if short-lived, success as far as unemployment was concerned. From the end of the 1960s unemployment has tended to increase, while in this decade it has engendered a rise in emigration for the first time since the 1950s.
Despite this, the capitalist classes enjoy a measure of stability that is threatened by the activities of their fellow nationalists in the North of Ireland. Early in this struggle, to stave off its spread, they attempted to reduce economic discontent with increased government expenditure, which has increased the national debt to a level where it has come to be perceived as an even greater destabilizer than the national struggle. So, since 1982, the debt has been attacked by a series of retrenchment policies. At the same time, the more consistent constitutional nationalists have been reassured by measures such as the 1984 nationalist forum, which formally reasserted the aim of Irish unity, and then by the 1985 Hillsborough Agreement, which gave the Republic an institutionalised although purely consultative role in the British-occupied area. This Agreement was signed by representatives of a coalition of the old pro-Treaty party, Fine Gael, and the Irish Labour Party. Its limitations were recognized and denounced by Fianna Fáil, then in opposition. But in 1987, Fianna Fáil was returned to power and has since operated as though it never had any doubts.
All sections of the Republic’s bourgeoisie agree about seeing Ireland’s future through the perspective of being part of the (West) European Community, which it values as a source of funds. In fact, such funds do not compensate the Republic for its outflow of public funds. The Community is offering the whole of Ireland a lump sum of £4 billion, slightly more than two years interest on the Republic’s foreign debt (£1.8 billion). Furthermore, this money will have to be spent on reconstructing the island’s roads to bring them up to West European standards. All that can be said for the EC’s generosity is that it is considerably greater than that of the United States.
This account of the development of 26-County capitalism could be portrayed as the history of a developed, if inefficient, metropolitan bourgeoisie. This is, indeed, the interpretation made by the Socialist Workers’ Movement (SWM), the Cliffite (‘state capitalist’) group, which is one of the largest non-Stalinist and non-Republican groups on the Irish revolutionary left. For the SWM, since 1921 the 26 counties have enjoyed as much control over their economy as is compatible with capitalism. From this, it follows that it is capitalism rather than national oppression that is, subjectively as well as objectively, the primary enemy of the Irish revolution. The country is too advanced for any strategy of permanent revolution – socialist struggle emerging out of the democratic one – in the sense that it may have succeeded elsewhere. Irish unity and secular democracy are secondary, if unavoidable, demands, with the struggles to achieve them simply ‘part of the necessary training of the working class to fight oppression’ (Socialist Worker, January 1989).
The economic facts that underpin this argument are unimpressive. A large proportion of them depend on the strength of the native banks, still claiming their three-fifths of the national debt. However, in the first place, national oppression is not linked directly to economic factors – for example, Catalonia and Euzkadi have been relatively prosperous parts of Spain. What is more, Irish banking was even stronger and more independent of Britain at the time of the Anglo-Irish War. Today, all Irish banks, with one possible exception, are controlled by British interests. And the one doubtful one (but the biggest), the Bank of Ireland, has at least 40% of its stock in British hands. They were more independent in 1921. Even so, then as now, founded to fund an industrial revolution that lacked the raw materials to exist, the banks were as much an instrument of national oppression as of capitalist exploitation. They syphoned off capital resources that could have been used to fund jobs for those who were forced to emigrate to find work, whose earnings since 1921 could have provided only positive payment balances. The importance of the banks to their depositors in what was, until the 1960s, a predominantly peasant society has made it impossible for the constitutional heirs of the anti-Treatyites to deal with them. The most definite challenge to the banks, by the constitutional Republican Clann na Poblachta in 1948, almost certainly lost it both votes and seats.
Here again, it is clear that what Wolfe Tone, Irish Republicanism’s ideological ancestor, called ‘breaking the connection with Britain’ must mean breaking Irish finance capital. And while schematically the reverse can be said to be true, the history of the last 20 years shows that, by spreading the struggle for unity against the uneasy stability that justifies capital’s resistance and the divided state power that defends it, revolutionaries can overcome the opposition of the banks and their depositors. Without the national struggle as the booster – in effect, if this struggle is defeated – no anti-capitalist revolution is likely to succeed in Ireland for many years.
Before 1922, two out of three national general strikes were around demands connected to the national cause. Since then, the only general stoppage unconnected to the northern issue was an impressive but isolated and unsuccessful one for a better deal for workers contributing to the Pay As You Earn (PAYE) taxation scheme. The Socialist Workers’ Movement warns against socialist revolutionaries ‘riding the nationalist tiger’. The danger is there, of course: the last years of national revolutionary downturn have seen the swallowing of socialist revolutionaries – and in many cases, their digestion – by the said tiger. The point is that these have been years of downturn. Similar phenomena occurred at similar moments during and after the Anglo-Irish War. When the struggle takes off again, an inevitable condition and result of this remobilization will be the development of the nationalist struggle towards a socialist perspective.
There is another reason given (although not used by the SWM) for denying the subjective political priority of Irish unity. This is the sectarian nature of the state established and ruled by the leaders of those who fought for Irish independence and unity. The results of the referenda on abortion and divorce have had a demoralizing effect on many democrats’ aspirations for a united Ireland. In fact, the fighters in the Anglo-Irish War did not have strong views about keeping their state free of birth control and divorce. The Catholic hierarchy did not support the freedom fighters in this struggle, lest it open its divisions (after all, most of its members were constitutional ‘Home Rule’ nationalists). It could unite only to support the Treaty, albeit with necessary token protests against partition. In the new state, with more than 90% of the population Catholic, it was natural that the majority Church be in a strong position. Natural, too, that successive 26-County governments keep in with it by ensuring that their decisions were guided by it, particularly on sexual matters. Today, Catholic dominance of the 26-County state is a necessary part of that state’s stability within the partition settlement; its political base is strong because of partition.
This does not mean that clericalism can be ignored, any more than that opposing partition means accepting capitalist economics. Not least of the weaknesses of the Communist Party’s appeal to the 26-County national bourgeoisie is that it accepts the degree to which they are tied to clericalism. Indeed, once partition had been imposed, it was the constitutional heirs of the Anti-Treaty fighters – Fianna Fáil and Seán MacBride’s supporters of the smaller Clann na Poblachta – which tended to indulge in Dutch auctions of sectarianism to keep the priests quiet on their nationalist demands. In the last 20 years, this historic fact has provided the excuse, and the current national struggle the opportunity, for many pro-imperialists to assert themselves as leaders of the only democratic causes open to them: the struggles for the right to abortion and divorce. In the campaign for divorce, its leaders’ extreme hostility to revolutionary nationalism was a factor in its defeat. This hostility was particularly shortsighted because Sinn Féin does not lean towards clericalism and has the firmest pro-abortion position of all the major Irish parties. (It is its offensive military strategy, involving attacks on Protestant non-combatants, particularly by the former West Fermanagh Brigade of the IRA, that gives Republicanism its sectarian label.) The Communist Party is trying to sell the national struggle not to the genuine democrats who campaign for women’s rights, but to the bigots who oppose them. It advises Sinn Féin to ally with people who believe that Irish unity can be achieved under the Republic’s clerically limited constitution, many of whom would not want it otherwise. The radical support for abortion and divorce rights (33% in the two referenda, against Sinn Féin’s 2% in the Republic’s general election) is to be ignored.
Finally, as for the Republic’s national bourgeoisie, the cultural expression of its inadequacy both as a nationalist force and a developed imperial metropolis is its active role as patron to the opponents of its expansion. Such opponents exist in all states. In the Republic, the smallness of the milieu and the continuing limitation of higher education to a bourgeois elite comprising a smaller share of the state’s population than elsewhere, has helped ensure that a monolithic view of the Irish situation is enforced in academic and media life. The bourgeoisie’s single-minded intellectual dumping of the struggle that led to the founding of its state may seem strange until it is understood that the majority of this class has always accepted the Treaty as its title to state power. Its new enthusiasm is benefiting it. Over the last two decades, the power of its state against civil liberties has grown with little protest, since this growth has been directed specifically against Republicans.
The national democratic revolution cannot and should not seek to expand its support among the Ulster Loyalists or the 26-County bourgeoisie. There remains the third possibility: the working class in the south. The Republic’s bourgeoisie – or, at least, its less anti-nationalist wing traces its ancestry to those who fought the Anglo-Irish War. Not all who can claim this inheritance were or are bourgeois. Despite the betrayals of its leaders and the resultant slowness of its members to go beyond trade-union consciousness, despite its backwardness that left many open to the anti-nationalism of its country’s capitalists and despite the errors of the Republican movement itself and its inability to appeal on working class lines, it remains true that the 26-County workers are less hostile to the struggle for Irish unity than their bosses. The two major advances that the struggle made into their area were also its advances towards a working class strategy. Both the strike after the British Army’s massacre of civil rights demonstrators on Bloody Sunday 1972 and the Hunger Strike agitations of 1980–81 involved large-scale, partially spontaneous, mobilizations of workers.
The problem is how to build on this potential. On the positive side, it must be recognized that bringing the struggle into the 26 counties must involve transforming it into a class one. A programme must be prepared as the centre for all future struggles around the core and present active revolutionary demand for a united Ireland. This Freedom Charter must include transitional demands. These can be developed. Of the transitional demands, however, it is clear that repudiation of the debt must be included to release the £1.8bn per annum interest for reconstruction, as well as the savings on the border garrisons. But the most important fact about a Freedom Charter is that, once draft ed, it should become the central focus of anti-imperialist strategy.
And this raises the negative point. Any front to implement a Freedom Charter has to include Sinn Féin, which is probably larger than all the other anti-imperialist bodies put together. Sinn Féin’s strategy is not even centred on its own political programme but, rather, on its minimalist duty to support the aggressive armed struggle that it sees being waged by the Irish Republican Army. Time and again, this struggle – fought as if its soldiers can drive the British Army into the sea – has inevitably blundered, killing civilians pointlessly and increasing hostility to it from 26-County workers who become more open to the enemies of Irish unity arguing against any revolution developing beyond the Catholic parts of the North of Ireland.
The Communist Party’s answer to this, true to its apocalyptic vision of a grand alliance combining Loyalists and Catholic bigots, is to call for a ceasefire. (This is the most friendly solution of all the groups that support an internal settlement.) There are two objections to this. Firstly, the IRA cannot enforce a cease-fire; there are too many armed groups already outside its control that dissident elements could join. More importantly, on the form of the two previous cease-fires in 1972 and 1975, the British and Loyalists will ignore such a move. For them, it will be a sign of weakness enabling them to smash all nationalist resistance once and for all. This reaction may stimulate a revival of this resistance and even (as such a move did with Bloody Sunday and the Hunger Strikes) stimulate the reaction in the Republic that is necessary for victory. The trouble is that, as on previous occasions, the process leading to this escalation will not have been prepared and is likely to collapse. It would be a gamble that should not be taken.
Instead, the fighters should change their strategy within the armed struggle. They should see themselves not as the vanguard of what is still a non-existent rising in arms of the Irish people, but as defenders of the Northern Catholics (on whom their actual existing support depends) and, still more accurately, guarantors that the existing state repression will not go beyond a certain point. This will enable them to adapt their tactics, like their allies, to the claims of the Freedom Charter.
The Irish national question remains acute. It can only be solved by transcending its existing minimum programme of Irish unity through the process of permanent revolution. Beyond this, it is a long speculation but it should be added that this process may mean that the solution of the Irish question in favour of the oppressed and exploited will be the greatest revolutionary change in Western Europe since 1945. As such, it is likely to be the sign that the said permanent revolution is beginning for Ireland’s neighbours.
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Last updated: 2 August 2021