Get your own Free Home Page'... the fate of the province [Northern Ireland] is still, as it has been for so long, poised on a knife- edge between a slow climb back to some form of ordered existence, or a swift plunge into unimaginable anarchy and civil war.'
These words - from the closing sentence of F S Lyons’ book, Ireland Since the Famine - were published as long ago as 1973. Leaving aside the misuse of the term “anarchy', it is a measure of how little seems to have changed in the two decades since, that a similar assessment is the commonplace conclusion to virtually every present -day commentary on Northern Ireland. Just about the only sign of movement in this bloody deadlock has bee the remorselessly rising death toll. In 1972 it passes what Lyons described as 'the appalling figure' of 600; by 1992 more than 3000 had been killed.
As the bloodshed continues, year after year, with no end in prospect, it’s not surprising that opinion polls carried out in mainland Britain over the past 20 years have consistently shown that between 50-60% in favour of a British military withdrawal from Northern Ireland.
The reasons why such a view is expressed are no doubt diverse. Britain’s Ireland Problem, or as some prefer, Ireland’s British Problem, has a complex history stretching back for hundreds of years. Few people really understand 'the Irish Question' and most have no answer to it except to wash their hands of the whole sordid mess. If the Irish want to shoot and bomb the hell out of each other, they say, why should we stand in their way - just get 'our lads' out of there and let them get on with it.
The best that can be said about such people is that at least they are not organised into political groups claiming to represent the interests of the international working class .... which is more than can be said for a different element within the 50-60% who want Britain to get out of Ireland, and whose ideas we mainly want to challenge in this pamphlet.
We are referring of course to the members and sympathisers of the left-wing groups who support 'self-determination for the Irish people', and who would regard withdrawal from the 'Six Counties' as a victory for the Irish people over British Imperialism. Since 'Irish self-determination' is these groups’ goal, they naturally push the idea that it’s not for 'us Brits' to tell the Irish people how to conduct their own national liberation struggle. If you oppose the British state and what it’s doing in Northern Ireland, you must automatically give 'unconditional support for republican resistance to sectarian attacks and British terror' ( so say the Anarchist Workers Group).
In this way the left present a mirror image of one of their own accusations against the British state; while they complain that 'any challenge to Britain's role in Ireland is interpreted as support for the IRA and therefore subversive', they themselves tend to see any criticism of the IRA as justifying the actions of the British state and, therefore, as apologising for imperialism.
The way we see it, however, these 'options' - to oppose the British state and support the IRA, or to oppose the IRA and support the British state - are both wholly contained within the bounds of capitalist politics. Instead of looking at the entire range of political and military groupings critical;;y and arguing that the interests of the working class lie beyond and against this whole spectrum, they encourage the working class to line up behind one capitalist faction or another. This is one of the prime functions of the left, which it performs as usefully (for capitalism) in relation to Northern Ireland as it does with regard to many other issues.
It’s certainly not hard to grasp why the British state is regarded with such loathing in certain parts of Northern Ireland. For over twenty years the Catholic population has been on the sharp end of a repression which has been applied in many different ways, but mainly through the use of armed force and the legal system.
On a military level this has involved the constant presence of as many as 30,000 members of the British Army, UDR and RUC, who at their most ruthless have carried out such acts as the massacre of 14 unarmed demonstrators on 'Bloody Sunday', January 1972, and killing of over a dozen people (many of them young children) with plastic bullets, and numerous undercover 'shoot-to-kill' ambushes aimed at 'terrorist suspects' but frequently resulting in the violent execution of innocent passers-by unwittingly caught up in stake-outs, or of teenage joy riders speeding through roadblocks. Clearly, there are more 'terrorists' operating in Northern Ireland than just the IRA!
The legal system has also played a vital role, through the use, at various times of mass internment without trial, torture and ill-treatment of suspects during interrogation, Diplock courts ( i.e. no jury ), conviction of defendants on the basis of uncorroborated evidence provided by 'supergrasses', and the sweeping measures of the Prevention of Terrorism Act. (During the past 10 years - 1982-1991 - nearly 14,500 people in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain have been detained under the PTA, supposedly on 'very real suspicion of terrorism'; of these only 230 - 1.5% have even been charged with terrorist offences, let alone convicted). On top of all this, there is also the systematic and calculated everyday harassment of car drivers and pedestrians being stopped for identity checks, and the frequent invasion of Catholic areas by the army and RUC in order to carry out house-to-house searches (amounting in 1990 to an average of at least one house raid taking place every two hours).
Of course, there’s little justification for any expressions of moral outrage by the IRA and its supporters about any of this. To claim, as they do, that there is a war going on in Northern Ireland, and then to criticise the British state for behaving just as any state does in war-time, is like wanting to have your cake and eat it. Nevertheless, as we’ve said, it’s no wonder the British state is hated - and that many on the receiving end of its brutalities want to fight back against it. The question is, though, by what means, and to what end?
Although our argument is that the Republican struggle is not in itself a struggle for working class interests, there are certain things mixed up with it that we would support. Like, for example, the ÔFree Derry' 'uprising' of August 1969, when the Catholic Bogsiders organised themselves to repel attacks by Protestant marchers and the police with stones, petrol bombs and burning barricades.
This is no different to the solidarity we have expressed in the past with the working class inhabitants of inner city areas in Britain such as Toxteth , Brixton or Tottenham, when, fed up with daily police harassment on the streets and with having their homes smashed up in raids for drugs or stolen property (the like of which is part-and-parcel of everyday life for thousands of working class people in Northern Ireland), they have erupted onto the streets and temporarily driven out the police.
We support such riots not because we think they are somehow inherently revolutionary, but for the basic reason that they show a spirit of rebellion alive within the working class and an unwillingness to put up with attacks on its conditions of living. A class which doesn’t fight back against the hardships which are imposed on it is unlikely to ever rise up and overthrow its oppressors.
We are for the expulsion of all armed gangs from working class areas of Northern Ireland - be they the British army, the loyalist paramilitaries, or the IRA. However, the type of working class self-defence against state oppression and sectarian attacks which mainly took the form of rioting seems to have become less common in Northern Ireland.
On one side, the army and the RUC have been less willing to tolerate the existence of the semi-official barricaded 'no-go areas' which were commonplace in the early years of the present day 'Troubles. While on the other side, Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA have been equally determined to keep as much resistance to the British state as possible under their control: 'This is a special message for young people - no hijackings, no joy riding, no stone throwing at the Brits. If you want to do these things, there are organisations to do this for you.' - Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Fein.
This as an important consequence for the position we adopt towards events in Northern Ireland, because, when groups like the RCP (Revolutionary Communist Party) state that 'Workers who live in the imperialist heartland have a special duty to back those fighting against the British oppressor', what this largely boils down to at the present time is that we should support the 'armed struggle ' being waged by the IRA and the other, smaller Republican groups.
On to Part 2, The Rise of the Provisional IRA
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