Britain is weak link of Irish solidarity

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"IT HAS become increas ingly clear in recent weeks that the Provisional leadership would be prepared to accept almost any concessions to end the hunger strike" , said Mary Holland, one of the best-informed reporters working from irefland, in the New Statesman recently.

Michael O'Leary is leader of the Irish Labour Party and deputy prime minister of the southern Irish government. "It is my personal opinion" , he said in a radio interview a week ago, 'that the matter would have been settled if any other person a prime minister of Britain Fitzgerald, whose party was baptised in Republican help, become a card-carrying supporter.

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Address CLP.. blood in the Irish civil war, has branded Thatcher as 'intransigent' Nine Republican prisoners of war have now died on hunger strike during the last fourteen weeks.

Yet according to reliable reports a deal acceptable to the H-Block prisoners was worked out early in July. It fell through because clinching it would have involved government representatives discussing it directly with the prisoners!

Like a World War 1 general Mrs Thatcher is prepared to dig in and let the bodies pile up around her. She must calculate that Britain can gain by letting waves of Republicans break themselves against the rock of Tory Phorie TU.... intransigence, if they are seen to thereby gain nothing and the IRA can finally be forced to back down.

No greater miscalculation has been made since General Maxwell tried to tidy things up after the 1916 rising by shooting 15 prisoners of war. Mass Catholic support for the hunger-strikers is now enormously greater than regular support for the hunger-strikers' organisation. 12,000 people • in Dublin tried to march on the British Embassy on July 16th.

Thursday's by-election for the Fermanagh/South Tyrone seat won by Bobby Sands in April may see the defeat of the Republican candidate, Sands' election agent Owen Carron (the law has been changed to exclude prisoner candid. ates), because both the Republican Clubs and Alliance Party candidates may take enough Catholic votes to tip the fine balance and let in the Unionist 'candidate Maginnis, a former UDR man.

Yet so strong is the mass Will We y Dillare bauver tunes.. me.. ..in din if Dritich Inhour does not act. Catholic swing to the hunger-strikers that the main Catholic constitutional party, the SDLP, would have split down the middle had its executive gone ahead and stood a candidagainst Carron.

Throughout much of the world there is very widespread support for the hunger strikers, and the British government is seen as bloody and bloodyminded for its attitude. Significant here is the decision last week by a New York city court not to extradite a former IRA man on the ground that he was 'political' (Britain appealing).

Meanwhile Princess Anne and her husband Phillips have cancelled a private visit to the USA rather than brave the demonstrations they would Britain is the weak link: the deaths have had less impact in Britain than in almost any country in the world.

The first death, Sands' had the impact of a cliff crashing into a calm sea - and only partly because he was an MP. But the bipartisan line on Ireland held: Labour still backs the guarantee by Britain to sustain the Orange veto on any moves towards the only solution - a federal united Ireland.

The bloody Thatcher government is called a peacekeeper' by the official. labour movement.

Meanwhile we have got used to the tolling of the death knell. Four months ago who would have believed that it could have reached nine?

It can reach many more, unless the labour movement in Britain intervenes.

The British labour movement has the power to stop the carnage in the prison camps. Labour Parties and trade union branches, YSs and Trades Councils, should pass resolutions and send telegrams to Michael Foot and the NEC of the Labour Party, demanding that they support the campaign to gain the five demands of the hunger strikers for changed prison conditions. Manwor balt