Workers' Party- No Answer for Irish Workers

Scan page 10

John O'Mahony reports on the recent conference of Sinn Fein The three Workers' Party TDs whose votes gave Haugher power AT ITS conference (Ard heis) at the end of April, Sinn Fein The Workers' Party transformed itself into 'The Workers' Party' The party holds the balance in Dail Eireann (the Dublin parliament). Without its three Dail votes, Charles Haughey could not have set up the present Fianna Fail government.

The change of name represents no change in what the party is. But paradoxically it does symbolise and sum up the evolution of one strand of the Irish Republican movement towards more or less complete integration in regular Irish bourgeois politics.

When a Dublin solicitor, Pat Mc Cartan, argued in favour of the name change that it would allow professional people and tradesmen' to feel at home with the party, he wasn't making a music hall joke. He knew what he was talking about.

Secret

A report in Magill magazine recently suggested that the Official IRA, the armed wing of the party, said to have ceased to exist in the mid '70s, continues to exist in secret, unknown to most members of the party. Given the organisation's history, it would be most remarkable this were not true.

Yet the dropping of the Republican name 'Sinn Fein' certainly follows a sweeping repudiation of traditional republican attitudes, while the Workers' Party' name has not stopped it voting for Haughey as prime minister.

The Ard Fheis decided to support the 'Prior initiative' for 'do it yourself' devolution in Northern Ireland, and to denounce Fianna leader Charles Haughey for his opposition to it.

Criticise The WP does criticise Prior initiative, as:

* sectarian in approach,.

* not providing a proper legal framework for the new Northern Ireland government, * not having democratic safeguards (the party favours a 'Bill of Rights'), * not dismantling the repressive legislation, * giving the Northern Ireland government powers too limited to allow it to deal with the economic problems.

Still, the WP thinks Prior's proposals are a small step forward. An attempt should be made to get the proposed Northern Ireland devolved government working. Then it can be improved, via the workings of 'the democratic process' President Tomas Mac Giolla denounced Haughey for breaking his promise to SFWP during negotiations on the formation of the Fianna Fail government to give the Prior initiative 'a fair hearing'. They were now, he said, in total conflict with the government on the Northern question, and would vote accordingly in the arose SI ouna "the Provc Irelat cal e to wr Nortl "pear and c noun fessio curre TI build estan Of a meml year, was c the PI TI debat name ents i It ern d Sinn barrie Prote: Garlai appea drag t the fl forme Offici propo they l that t the ra ion 0: erialis the occasion peakers bitterly dened the contention of Fianna Fail/SDLP/ › axis" that Northern 1á had failed as a politintity. It could be made ork. The solution to the hern conflict was ce, work, democracy ¡lass politics" he party calls for a new lern constitution, decing the Catholic con›nal character of the nt (1937) constitution. he WP calls for the ing of a workers' party in all-Ireland basis. It s to be recruiting Prott workers in the North. substantial increase in bership during the last 40% in the North, it laimed, had been from rotestant community. he long and emotional e on the change of showed the cross-currn the party.

was argued by Northelegates that the name Fein was major I when campaigning on stant doorsteps. Sean general secretary, appealed to delegates not to the dead or flags across OOI. et Cathal Goulding, : Chief of Staff of the ¡al IRA, supporting the ›sal, told delegates that had to convince people hey were not deserting idical republican traditr the fight against impMeans, not ends, were being revised.

But means such as support in the Dail for Fianna Fail, or support for Prior's plan, are incompatible with seriously radical or working-class ends - they are means to become embedded in the establishment structures.

Influence has frequently been gained by Labour and socialist parties in Northern Ireland on the shallow ground of trade union level economic issues, but it has never withstood the disruptWILLAS ive power of communal and sectarian, not to speak of republican, politics. The leaders of the WP should have learned this the hard way in the late '60s, when the supposedly unifying civil rights campaign aroused the Catholics but alienated the Protestants. And after leading Catholics to take a first step of calling for civil rights, the second step was to tackle the root reason why they had been deprived of civil rights - partition.

The WP's solution to the communal divisions il n the North is essentially to bury its head in the sand an d pretend that this time, di espite the experiences since 1907 (when Jim Larkin b riefly united Protestant and Catholic workers on ecor 1omic issues, only to see the unity soon shattered by com Imunalism),. working class unity can be built on a ba: sis of economic issues and soi cialist propaganda.

In the meantime its basic approach is to be a res ponsible and I 'constructive' muuğrcy - we wurners rarty in mainsiream politics, putting forward reasonable and balanced proposals on all the issues of the day - within the parameters of the existing system.

Involvement in the Southern political establishment on this basis is already ravaging the WP's socialist credentials. Its commitment to the existing structures -both to partition and to the partitionist parliaments will inevitably mire it compl etely in the bog of bourgeois, anti working class politics.

There is a precedent.

In the '40s, a regroupment of Republicans, seeking a way out of the blind alley politics of physical force on principle and abstention from the existing political structures north and south, formed a party called Clann Na Poblachta, led by Sean Mcbride, a one-time chief of staff of the IRA.

It was a mildly reformist organisation. It played a big role in bourgeois politics for a while, holding the balance in the Dail, and joined a Fine Gael/Labour coalition government in 1948. When the Catholic Bishops vetoed the establishment of free medical care for pregnant women, mothers, and infants, the party repudiated its. own Minister of Health, Dr Noel Browne. The coalition collapsed and Clann Na Poblachta rapidly fell apart.

History never repeats itself exactly, but the WP has all the ingredients of a slightly more radical version of Clann Na Poblachta. s enoice as tesser evil' The additional feature of the WP is the Stalinist influence, strong among the people now leading it since the mid '60s. The WP supports General Jaruzelski's military rule and the suppression of the workers' movement in Poland.

A resolution condemning martial law and the internment of Solidarnosc leaders was on the agenda of the Ard Fheis. But Sean Garland said that: "It was clear that the Polish armed forces had to take action to stop it sliding into anarchy and total chaos and ultimately ending in the hands of imperialism". (Nobody should accuse these defenders of Prior's initiative of forgetting about imperialism!)

Garland added that it was important that they did not appear to have a simplistic approach to international affairs, as suggested in the resolution. The resolution was withdrawn.

But quite a few of the WP's rank and file activists probably think that it is a real working class alternative. to traditional Irish nationalist politics. Whether some of them can go on to break with it and help build a real revolutionary socialist working class party is an important question. It will probably be determined by the speed with which the WP gets itself badly splashed with mud from the sort of politics it has engaged in with its recent deal to support Haughey for Taoiseach, and its current support for Prior.