[illegible] the question of Ireland, British [illegible] demands for [a] social[ist] [illegible] Ireland, and those demands it is appropriate to raise in Britain, in solidarity with struggles in Ireland. Obviously what we want to see is a socialist Ireland, but we must be quite clear that the achievement of this is the task of the Irish working class, and its allies among other sectors of the Irish people, such as the small farmers, the students, etc.
Having stated this, let us proceed first of all to analyse briefly the situation in Ireland today - both North and South. The situation in Northern Ireland has changed dramatically over the last six months. Up till then, Northern Ireland had remained depressingly the same for nearly half a century. Since its creation as an entity in 1921, the province has been ruled by one party, the Unionists - a bourgeois party representing the interests of the British and Anglo-Irish capitalists and landlords, and basing itself on the Protestant two-thirds of the population. It has retained the support of these people, overwhelmingly workers and small farmers, on the basis of maintaining the Union with England (i.e., separation from Catholic Ireland) and the privileged position of Protestants.
The religious bigotry which makes this state of affairs possible goes back to the Seventeenth Century, when Ulster was colonised by British Protestant settlers who drove out the native Irish. Since then the Ulster Protestants have always clung to the link with Britain for "protection". The poor Protestants have been and are used by the ruling class like the "pied noirs" in Algeria and the "poor whites" in America's deep south. They collaborate in discrimination (religious, cultural, economic, political) against the Catholics. The ruling class are thus able to have the Northern working class divided and unable to fight as an effective force. Northern Ireland has remained politically divided primarily along religious, not class lines. Economically wages have remained the lowest in the United Kingdom, housing conditions among the worst in Europe, and unemployment very high (over [illegible], equivalent to 1.4 million unemployed in Britain). All these problems have been more acute for Catholic workers, who get the less skilled jobs, the worst housing, and suffer most from unemployment. (In Catholic Derry the rate is 17%, in Strabane [illegible], in Protestant Belfast, [illegible].)
The central problem for socialists in the North has always been how to unite Catholic and Protestant workers. This has seldom been done. (It was being done prior to partition, in the strikes of 1906 and 1915, for example. Since then, only to a certain extent in the thirties). The Labour Party in Northern Ireland has always been bedevilled by the problem of the border. To accept it means driving the Catholic workers into the arms of the middle class nationalists. It has been afraid to attack the border for fear of alienating Protestant workers. For the last 20 years it has chosen to accept it. The Northern Ireland Labour Party is today a reformist mirror of its British counterpart, and a defender of the Union - but it has the affiliation of the trade unions. The smaller Irish Labour Party and Republican Labour Party are anti-partition, and have largely Catholic support. In this situation the Unionists have retained the support of the mass of Protestant workers, the Nationalists that of the Catholics.
The situation altered sharply last autumn, with the development of the Civil Rights movement. This sprang from two sources: (1) the Derry Housing Action Committee; and (2) the People's Democracy at Queens University. The Derry HAC, a mainly working class organisation, began to campaign last year against the atrocious housing conditions in that city (500 houses built since 1919!). This became expanded into the Derry Citizens' Action Committee (a predominantly middle class body) - fighting not just the housing issue, but also on electoral gerrymandering and the denial of the Local government vote to many of the (Catholic) workers of Derry and elsewhere, and the multiple vote for property owners. People's Democracy was set up in October to campaign along the same lines, but has done so in a much more aggressive and militant way, obviously inspired by the escalating struggles of students internationally. The split between People's Democracy and the middle class leadership of Hume and Cooper of Derry CAC, and Currie and co. of the Nationalist Party, has been obvious since the beginning of this year (the Belfast-Derry march, etc.). The militant leadership from People's Democracy has elicited a response among the Catholic workers of Derry and elsewhere, who are much more militant than their leadership - viz., the effective occupation of Bogside by a workers' militia for a week.
In this situation, what should we advise socialists in the six counties to do? The aim must be to break the workers from both Unionist and Nationalist parties, and win them to a socialist position. This can be done through fighting for a socialist line in the Civil Rights movement, and to extend it to the Protestant workers, still largely unaffected by it. The radicalised students can play a big role in such a struggle. Concurrently, a struggle must be waged for a more militant socialist policy in the Northern Ireland Labour Party, to support workers' struggles, and to campaign for the removal of the border in order to assist the whole Irish working class to wage a united fight for a socialist Ireland.
There has meanwhile been an upsurge of political activity by workers and students recently. Industry in Eire (much of it American) has developed considerably during the phase of capitalist development since the Second World War. There has over the last year been an escalating wave of strikes in the Republic, affecting many sections of workers. There has been the development of the Dublin Housing Action Committee. There has been considerable radicalising of students. In January a demonstration of 2,000 workers and students against the eviction of a squatter was broken up by police in Dublin. This growing militancy has been reflected on the political plane. The Irish Labour Party recently adopted a radically left-wing programme, including the call for Connolly's "republic of workers and small farmers". It is widely tipped to make big gains at the next election, the more so since Lynch failed to win the referendum held last year to change to the British (two party biased) voting system. For the first time in many years there is a chance for Irish workers to break from the two nationalist parties.
The task of socialists in the Republic should be to be in the Labour Party for an even firmer and socialist programme, for support of the workers' strike struggles and the Housing Action Committees. In addition, the demand should be raised to reunify the Irish Labour Party and the Northern Ireland Labour Party (the unions in both North and South are already linked by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions) and to fight for a united Ireland. Fianna Fail and Fine Gael must not be allowed to regain the allegiance of Southern workers by posing as the champions of unity and the inheritors of the tradition of 1916, as they have done for half a century.
By fighting along such a programme in North and South, revolutionaries can lay the basis for the revolutionary socialist party which will be built from the left wing in the Labour Party and trade unions, the Civil Rights movement and the radical students. It is neither possible nor desirable that we in Britain should work out a detailed strategy for the building of a revolutionary party in Ireland. That is the task of Irish marxists. We can simply sketch out a general line of such a strategy, and offer our help in every way, political and practical.
It is claimed in some quarters on the British left that the demand for a united Ireland (that is, for self-determination of the Irish people as a whole) is not revolutionary, that it is acceptable to Wilson and Lynch. We should, according to these people, demand a united socialist Ireland. This is incorrect. Firstly, the demand for a united Ireland is revolutionary. Wilson and Lynch might want a united Ireland. It would be more economically convenient, less politically embarrassing. The point is that to secure it would mean smashing the basis of right-wing Protestantism in the North, of unleashing civil war in fact. This the British imperialist Government will never do. Only the Irish working class could do it. Britain will rather send in troops to back O'Neill against the workers and students.
Secondly, if unity was achieved, it would enable the Irish workers to begin to fight as a class for a socialist Ireland. Thirdly, we [illegible] the right to question the right of the Irish people to self-determination - whether this leads to a socialist Ireland or not.
This leads us on to the question of what revolutionary socialists can do in Britain. Obviously we can and must, as already stated, give all possible help to revolutionary socialists in Ireland. It also goes without saying that we show our solidarity with workers in Ireland (or students) who are engaged in a fight with the capitalist state after [illegible] - North or South - as we should [illegible] to France, Mexico, or [illegible]. But we also have wider responsibilities to the Irish people. As revolutionary socialists in an imperialist country which is occupying part of Ireland, we have a special responsibility to campaign for the withdrawal of those troops. We do not set any conditions to our support for the struggle of Irish people against British imperialism and its servants at Stormont. This means that we: (1) support all demands of the people of the six [illegible]; (2) [illegible]; (3) demand the ending of all support, political and economic, for the Stormont Government.
[illegible] Irish people to settle accounts with the Unionist oligarchy and the Paisleyite thugs, stripped of their support from British imperialism.