Behind the by-election
Socialist Organiser1981 1981-08-27Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 6 →
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JOHN O'MAHONY discusses the Fermai OWEN CARRON'S victory is good news for the H-Block campaign. But there are other sides to it, and socialists need to look at those, too.
The Fermanagh/South Tyrone constituency can be taken as Northern Ireland writ small. Catholics are in a majority there (by 5,000) while there is a Protestant majority in the Six Counties of about two to one. But despite the numerical details Fermanagh/South Tyrone brings out starkly what communal 'politics' in Northern Ireland is, and what Northern Ireland is.
For it was scarcely an election that took place in Fermanagh/South Tyrone. Before polling day there had been a sorting-out of candidates in both communities.
Given the fine numerical balance between the communities, everything depended on whether 'he rival community bloes held together, and, decisively, whether the Catholic bloc did.
Last April Unionist candidate Harry Wesi was reckoned to have lost 1000 disgruntled hard-line Protestant votes which had favoured a Paisleyite candidate. This time, with UDR major Ken Maginnis, the Official Unionist Party had a hardline candidate as the only Protestant standing.
In April Bobby Sands was the only Catholic candidate. The SDLP (which got 10,785 votes in 1979) withdrew. Carron had two Catholic standing against him, Seamus Close for the Alliance Party and Thomas Moore for the Republican Clubs - a potentially fatal disadvantage, threatening to split the vote and let Maginnis in.
Both Carron and Maginnis ran campaigns that could appeal only to the votes of their own community, and could not but antagonise the members of the other community.
Carron campaigned exclusively on the hunger strike issue. A member of Sinn Fein, he pledged not to go to Westminster if elected. He called Maginnis 'the UDR candidate' and 'the British government candidate' Maginnis campaigned on housing and "security' which is the Protestant community's equivalent of 'H-Block' The only candidates even notionally appealing to both communities were Close of Alliance (liberal, anti-sectarian Unionists) and Moore of the Republican Clubs (the Official Republican Movement).
They might have laken enough votes lo let Maginnis in. But both were extremely hostile to the IRA, Moore nagh/S.Tyrone results very outspokenly so, calling for an end to hunger strike and to the IRA's military campaign.
They failed to damage Carron's status as the candidate of the Catholic community, bound together by sympathy with the hunger strike. Even Moore and his supporters decided to maintain a low profile' after the announcement, 50 minutes after polling had started, that Devine had died.
Close got 1,930 votes and Moore 1152 to Carron's 31,278 and Maginnis' 29,048.
(In April Sands polled 30,492 and West 29,046. Harry West explained Maginnis vote by the rallying to Carron of some Catholic farmers who had voted for himself, a former Northern Ireland Minister of Agriculture).
Fermanagh /South Tyrone is a paradigm of Six County politics in the last 60 years.
Frozen communal antagonisms wiped out normal politics, especially class politics, there.
A ruling Unionist bloc congealed in the 1920s on the basis of having a common fear of the Catholics and state patronage to offer, with marginal privileges for Protestant workers (jobs amidst permanent chronic unemployment, houses).
Northern Ireland Labour Parties flowered into significance more than once, only to be wrecked and gutted when communal antagonisms erupted, as they did, repeatedly. By the 70s, the NÎLP was a puny Unionist The trade unions, affected by Protestant job preferment practices, kept united by avoiding all relevant questions, especially discrimination against Catholic workers.
Everything healthy in politics was blighted by the communal animosities made especially intense under the rule of an artificially created majority in the gerrymandered six county state.
At times of crisis the polarisation has tended to reach incipient civil war level, community starkly pitted against community.
Listen today to the chilling responses of the Protestant politicians at Carron's victory. Paisley's DUP said: "Every one of Mr Carron's 31,000 had given their support openly for the thugs who have committed murder and genocide... " The vote indicated "genuine support among the Catholic population for those who have perpetrated vile murders among the Protestant population" Paisley's supporters will read here the Bible's grim injuncSocialist Organiser, Thursday 27 August, 1981 Page 7