International News International News International News SINN FEIN NAILS THE OLD LES

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The Assembly election results have nailed lie that the trouble in N.Ireland is isolated

For 60 years the Republican movement has abstained from elections, arguing that to participate Trish neonle's vote in 7918 for a united and indenendent state. Its switch from this dogma has p Sinn Fein candidate Gerry Adams out campaigning FOR a dozen years British governments - Tory and Labour alike - have justified their policies of repression in Northern Ireland with the lie that the ¡RA is a mere terrorist apparatus, without real support in the Catholic community. The SDLP was said to 'really' represent the overwhelming majority of the Catholics. The Republicans' refusal to participate in elections helped give credibility to that lie, of course.

Now the lie is well and truly nailed. 12 Provisional Sinn Fein candidates in the election for the Six County assembly got 10% of the votes cast, 35% of the Catholic nationalist votes cast, and won 5 seats.

The Sinn Fein vote seems to have come from previous non-voters and youth rather than from the SDLP. Nevertheless, no-one will now be able to pretend that the IRA is unrepresentative of the Catholic population, or represents only an insignificant section of it.

Terrorist It was always a stupid lie. For no mere terrorist apparatus could sustain a war for 12 years against military forces vastly superior in men and equipment.

The IRA could not have existed unless it had wide support. In fact, as Socialist Organiser has always insisted, the IRA is the militia of the Catholic community. The latent or passive support it can count on is probably much greater than its share of the Catholic vote.

The lie that the IRA was a terrorist gang, to be dealt with by police methods and repression, led to the criminalisation policy introduced by De Lorean fan Roy Mason when he was Labour secretary of state SINN for Northern Ireland. Concessions to the real status of captured IRA soldiers -that they were prisoners of war — granted by the Tories in 1972 were taken away, and for five years all the might of the British state was brought to bear to crush the spirits and the bodies of the Republicans.

The blanket protest followed, culminating after years of heroic resistance within the prison camps in the hunger strike last year TONE - when ten men were allowed to die.

And the hunger strike, and the campaign to org anise the widest support possible to force the government to concede the hunger strikers' demands, led to the political wing of the Republican movement standing in elections. The policy of electoral abstention was dramatically reversed. Sinn Fein decided that though it would boycott the assem* VOTE SINKEEIN 10AMS MISAT The Assembly was foredoomed from the word go, more of a political gimmick than a serious attempt to break the logjam in Northern Ireland. It was a feeble third attempt along lines that had already failed twice, in 1974 and 1975.

Sinn Fein's success, however, means that now not even a feeble hope remains to Prior that the Assembly will 'take off' 30% of the voters backed candidates - SDLP and Sinn Fein - pledged to boycott the assembly. The Sinn Fein vote probably makes it politically impossible for the SDLP to renege on that commitment, even if it wanted to. The result will be a Protestant assembly, and a small group of non-sectarian Unionists from the Alliance Party.

Its role will be to act as a platform for the Paisleyites and the Official Unionists to harry the direct rule authorities. The Paisleyites will agitate for the Assembly to be given back the powers of the old Protestant Ascendancy Stormont parliament. Prior and the British government have committed themselves very firmly against this, and Prior has said he will prevent the assembly setting up any 'unauthorised' structures - that is, structures that do not have the agreement of, or command the allegiance of, the Catholics.

On the Protestant side of the communal divide the s to accept the denial of the 'duced dramatic results. Paisleyites lost ground to the Official Unionists, who favour integration of Northern Ireland with. Britain rather than restoration of the pre-1972 Stormont system. This seems to represent a certain loosening of the tight polarisation to the extremes in both communities that accompanied the hunger strike and the vast mobilisation of Catholic support for the hunger strikers.

Sinn Fein's dramatic breakthrough, though, suggests parailers will bite -1- 11-l--idh than election of 1974.

In 1974 the power-sharing executive was set up, amidst bitter hostility from the Protestant population. The Faulkner Unionists broke their election pledges to take part in powersharing and the then Council of Ireland. Yet the power-sharing executive was in being, and the Paisleyites were reduced to impotence within the Assembly. The executive had prospects of using its vast powers of patronage and so on to build a base for itself and win over a big section of the Protestants.

Power-sharing

But then the British class struggle intervened. The miners' strike pushed the Tory government into calling the election of February 1974. The Orange genie, so recently corked up in the bottle and raging fiercely, was allowed to escape.

11 of the 12 Northern Ireland Westminster seats were won by opponents of power-sharing. That massively undermined the executive and legitimised the Orange general strike of May 1974 which led to the power-sharing executive's collapse.

Sinn Fein's unexpected electoral strength has disrupted the schemes and plans of the Tory government, and rendered even a charade such as Prior planned unviable.

But. nothing like the events of 1974 are possible for the minority Catholic community: 35% of the population, they have much less industrial weight than that because of job discrimination.

What is likely is a new military offensive by the IRA. The Republicańs have used the election as a means of building support for their military campaign, not as any sort of alternative: their slogan is that they will wage the struggle with an armalite rifle in one hand and a ballot paper in the other.

In an editorial last Sunday the Observer said that the election revealed a state of latent civil war. It went on to say:

''The election of prominent IRA men - let us forget the 'Sinn Fein' figleaf - shows that the Catholic community, to a great extent, consciously supports the campaign of political violence that has been going on now for more than 17 years..

The state of civil war 1 Northern Ireland:is kept at a level of latency" + that is, several politico-sectarian murders every month - by Northern Ireland's contin uance in the United Kingdom, and by the presence of British troops. There can be no doubt now, if ever there was any doubt, that British withdrawal, would be followed by a full-scale Lebanese-style civil war in Ireland, with incalculable further consequences"

It is certainly true that there is latent communal civil war in Northern Ireland. The Paisleyites' small loss of votes to the Official Unionists may mean slackening off of last year's polarisation, but the sectarian assassination of two Catholics shows just how tense things are.

In a limited sense the Observer is even right that the British Army keeps the communities apart.* But the general pieture painted is fundamentally untrue. The British Army keeps the communities apart within a strategic British framework of maintaining the artificial sectarian state which keeps the Catholic/Protestant, Nationalist/Unionist antagonism at boiling point. Fundamentally the British Army maintains the framework for the chronic communal antagonism It keeps the communities apart by beating down the rebellious Catholics. The fact of mass Catholic support for the IRA has meant, on the ground in Northern Ireland, that throughout most of the '70s the British Army has terrorised and brutalised the entire Catholic community in its war against the IRA.

The election proves yet again that nothing is being solved by the British policy of 'holding the ring'. In the last decade, the sectarian tensions, have been murderously intensified. It is probable that the effect in the Protestant community of the electoral support for the Republicans will be a new increase of indiscriminate sectarian assassinations.

The Provisionals have pointed out that though the kidnapping of a sergeant in the British Army part-time force, the UDR, may have triggered the kidnapping and beating to death of a man in Belfast, and the shooting of another in Armagh, the sergeant was in the Army and the two victims were picked at random because they were Catholics.

Tinkering

That is true and significant. Yet the sectarian antics of the Irish National Liberation Army during the election cannot but encourage the Protestant sectarians to behave likewise. The scene seems set for sectarian assassinations on both sides.

The Observer relies on the police power of the British state to freeze the latent civil war indefinitely.

Bút British policy of holding the ring, tinkering occasionally with the politIcal structures and beating down the Catholics as a staple activity, is stoking the fires of 'latent civil war. It is creating the conditions that could well lead to a Lebanon situation developing in Northern Ireland, with mass communal slaughter and bloody repartition at the end of it. The demonstration of solid support for the Republicans by 10% of the electorate, and the probable counterpolarisation on the Protestant side, probably does bring sectarian civil war nearer.

The only way out of this situation is to recast the entire framework. The sectarian Northern Ireland state must be replaced by a broader framework within which the Catholic and Protestant communities can learn to live together.

The Labour Party should commit itself to abolish the Six County sectarian state and to work for a federal united Ireland that will offer the fullest rights, guarantees and autonomy to the Protestant population that are compatible with the rights of the majority of the Irish people.

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Jenny Fisher reports on

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