British casualties of the war in Ireland

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JOHN O'MAHONY argues that our attitude to the conflict in Ireland cannot and should not be determined by the 'politics of the last atrocity'

THE TARGET was a coachload of soldiers. But the major casualties were a 60 year old widow who died with a six inch nail through her heart and a youth who died three days later.

22 of 23 soldiers on the coach were injured; so were 18 others, civilians walking in a Chelsea street. Some are seriously injured.

The bomb, a vanload of nails and bolts, was exploded in the crowded street by remote control by someone watching from 100 yards away, who was concerned only to get the passing soldiers, and (at best) didn't give a damn about the people in the street.

Thus Mrs Thatcher's gory victory over the prisoners in Long Kesh boomeranged against innocent British civilians, and the Northern Ireland war returned to the streets of London last Saturday.

"This was the most brutal attack I have ever seen. I shall never, never give them political status – never", said Mrs Thatcher. Smugly and somewhat gloatingly, she took the chance to tell people whose pricked consciences had begun to prise open their minds on the Irish question – 'I told you what they were like. I was right to let ten of them starve to death'.

Most British workers will be likely to agree with her – including many who had been forced to begin to think by the self-sacrifice of the hunger strikers.

This was no accident of war. When the IRA deliberately sets off a massive nailbomb in a crowded street, British workers will be likely to respond to indiscriminate maiming and risk of slaughter with nationalism and chauvinism.

Of course we can only condemn the setting off of bombs which are aimed at or which are likely to hit civilians. Saturday's bombing was against a military target – against members of the army which has repressed and brutalised the Catholics of Northern Ireland for ten years – but to get at it the IRA cut a swathe through a streetful of civilians. This is unjustifiable and indefensible, and it will not weaken the vicious Tory government but help them to rally British support for repression in Northern Ireland.

Between what happened in Chelsea and a Birmingham scale slaughter there is a thin line of chance and accident.

But socialists must atrocity. We must not lose sight of the basic issues.

Incidents like Chelsea happen because of what successive British governments, Labour and Tory alike, have done to the Catholic community in Northern Ireland.

In the last six months they have marched and demonstrated in their tens of thousands for the hunger strikers. Not since internment has there been such massive Catholic mobilisation, or such unity.

They used all the channels. They voted 'for the hunger strikers' where the chance was offered, in Belfast city council elections as well as in Fermanagh/South Tyrone. They found that it all counted for nothing.

The British government let one hunger strike after another waste and die. The mass of the British people didn't care. This fact must have branded itself in the mind of every politically conscious Catholic in Northern Ireland.

It is now scarcely to be denied that the big majority of the half-million Six County Catholics actively or passively support the IRA and recognise the guerillas as theirs. It was the entire Catholic population, not the supposedly unrepresentative 'men of violence', who counted for nothing with the British government on the thing that mattered most to the Catholics.

The British government dared not concede the five demands. It balances between the protestant community (of one million) and the Catholics to maintain the Six County status quo: and therefore pursues a basic policy of beating down the Catholic community.

The helplessness of the entire Catholic community to save its own reflected their basic situation: a section of the Catholic majority of the Irish people, but also a permanent minority locked inside the artificial Orange majority state of Northern Ireland, created by the British in 1920 against the wishes of the majority of the Irish people.

Within that state, the two communities are locked in a chronic antagonism. No democratic processes are available to the Catholics to achieve their liberation from it. It was carved out by British and Orange violence that overpowered them and kept them down for 50 years, so that there was a built-in Orange majority, backed up by a British government guarantee that the Orange community would have its way and no change could be allowed that it did not approve.

Partition

That is what the experience of the hunger strike spelled out again for the Six County Catholics.

Let us look briefly at how this situation came to exist.

In 1918 75 per cent of Ireland's constituencies were won by candidates pledged to secede from Westminster and set up an Irish parliament in Dublin. When they did this, Britain retaliated with a campaign of shootings and burnings (of 'economic targets' and some towns) for 2½ years, before a Treaty gave the southern 26 counties independence.

In 1920 the Government of Ireland Act partitioned Ireland.

Various partition schemes had already been debated.

Ulster (9 counties) would have meant the Protestants were in a minority. The four county area in which would be a massive Protestant majority and a 'manageable' Catholic minority was considered too small to be viable.

The six counties were settled on as the maximum area within which there was a 'safe' Protestant majority (two-thirds). It included Fermanagh and Tyrone, two whole counties with Catholic majorities.

Even with a four county/28 county partition there could have been no clean Catholic/Protestant break – the communities were too interlaced for that. The six county/26 county partition imprisoned a bigger Catholic minority in the Six Counties than the Protestants of all Ireland would have been in a 32 County state: such a 'settlement' was possible only because the British state imposed it.

It was the opposite of a democratic solution to the Catholic/Protestant conflict – a solution with the maximum autonomy and safeguards for the minority compatible with the rights of the majority.

Two sectarian states emerged in Ireland, each repelling the majority in the other. They differed, however, fundamentally.

The Catholic minority in the Six Counties were largely working-class and small farmers, people who were ground down and suppressed, deprived of civil rights, kept down under a permanent Special Powers Act and under the guns and clubs of the Orange police, the B-Specials and the RUC.

The working class was permanently split.

In economically deprived Northern Ireland, Protestants had privileged access to jobs. Job selection (amid permanent high unemployment) was on the basis of religion, and the sectarian division in society gutted the unions – unity was possible only if the situation of the Catholics was not raised.

The civil rights movement in the late '60s – for equality in voting and an end to sectarian discrimination – brought the Catholics onto the streets – and, in backlash, the Protestants too.

It was a movement with an inescapable nationalist logic. The basic civil right they lacked was self-determination, the right not to be an artificial minority.

When sectarian fighting broke out, the British Army was sent in to 'keep the peace' – within the framework of the Six County state.

Within eleven months of going in to stop anti-Catholic pogroms, the British Army was imposing a curfew on the Falls Road and fighting gun battles with the Catholic militia.

The Catholics who had been roused for civil rights turned to an attempt to break out of the Six County state.

In a matter of months the IRA became a mass movement.

For the ten years since then, every attempt to find a solution within the Six Counties has failed completely. Britain has held the ring, normally by beating down the insurgent Catholics.

But there is no solution within the Six Counties. The Catholics have a right to fight for the only solution – a united Ireland with autonomy for the Protestant areas. They have every right to strike at the British army which oppresses them and whose fundamental role in Northern Ireland is to preserve the status quo.

Support

Socialists must insist on raising these issues, however. An oppressed people fighting our own government has a right to the support of British socialists, even though we disagree with – or condemn – their tactics.

The British Left will have a right to denounce the nationalism of the oppressed Six County Catholics when we have wiped out the reflex nationalism in the British labour movement which helped Thatcher to be able to starve ten Republican prisoners to death.