Ire and : a Way to Workers' Unity?

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In Socialist Organiser no. 109 we carried an interview with a Belfast NHS shop steward, Micky Duffy. Duffy, a 'Militant' supporter, argued that the workers' unity in the NHS pay struggle opened the way to political clas!

unity in Northern Ireland, which could be achieved by setting up a Northern Ireland Labour Party. Last week on our letters page, the Nottingham SO group argued that this interview was an unacceptable 'propaganda piece for the national chauvinist politics of the Militant'. This week John O'Mahony looks at Militant's politics and how they point of view, the basic various incarnations of the problem about the Six Northern Ireland Labour County state is that in that Party runs in parallel to state framework working this. Today a very tiny class unity developed on a Unionist rump, the NILP trade union level has al- has at various times grown ways shattered at any to a significant size. political test. So long as the It attempted to confine 'constitutional question' re- itself to bread and butter mains at the heart of poli- working class issues, that tical life there, it always is, to generalised trade unwill shatter on the rooted ionism, bargaining in the communal antagonism be- working class interest on tween Catholics and Protes- the level of provincial and tants, Nationalists and 'United Kingdom' society. Unionists. It evaded, hedged and comThere was no chance that promised on the issues that Bobby Sands' funeral: the Border issue will not melt away in the NHS dispute could divide Northern Ireland's open the way to unity in workers. entity. Even spectacular an unsuccessful candidate examples of Protestant/ in the last 26 County elecCatholic working class un- tions, talked recently about itv have Droved to he mere hin nunnwinnon in the NITT D Inere are oner examples, tral to the civi rights both before and after struggle.

Partition. Even after it split, - Socialist Organiser Alliance should bé answered.

FROM A working class the sectarian Six County episodes.

Outdoor relief

For example, in the well-known 'outdoor relief' fight in 1932, unity in working-class resistance to cuts in social security payments was possible because both Catholics and Protestants were hit impartially. Barricades went up in the Protestant Shankill Road and in the Catholic Falls Road. Activists went from the Falls to man Shankill barricades, and from the Shankill to defend the Falls against the police. (Some on both sides were influenced by the Irish Stalinists).

Within weeks of this spectacular unity, no less spectacular sectarian rioting had been fomented. ML .. -l-Or The experience of the John De Courcy Ireland, ms experience me be deli in the '40s.

Their speakers on the Falls Road, he recalled, campaigned under the nationalist tricolour. In the 'mixed' centre of Belfast they campaigned under the Red Flag; and party leader Harry Midgley campaigned on the Shankill under the Union Jack.

Such a balancing act could not get far. Sectarian suspicions soon disrupted the party and scattered its forces.

To reject Militant's view of a Labour Party as the cure-all is not to say that socialists_ should not work in a Labour Party if it existed. Serious work was done, for example, in the late '60s in the Derry Labour Party: which became cen41. - .. -1.1Eamonn McCann could get 9000 votes on a revolutionary socialist platform as the Derry Young Socialists candidate in the mid-1970 Yet McCann's experience, too, underlines the basic point that simply trying to generalise from trade unionism within the Six County framework is no solution. The Derry Labour Party left wing tended to ignore the national question, and was bypassed by the eruption of the Republican movement. Their forces scattered, too: some went to the Officials and then to the IRSP, one or two to Militant.

Tricks

Many well-intentioned tricks have been tried to unite Northern Ireland workers. In 1907 Jim Larkin had united Protestant and Catholic workers on a trade union level. When it came to the marching and rioting season on July 12, he tried to preserve the unity by organising his own united Orange/Catholic working class parade around the walls of Derry.

The Protestant workers, said Larkin, would march in honour of King William, who secured their liberty in the 'Glorious Revolution' The Catholics would march to honour the Pope, who at that time had taken the Papal State into the international alliance against France of which • William was part!

They had a successful, and unique, parade round Derry. Within weeks sectarian rioting had shattered the working class unity.

In 1969, again, Cyril Toman, a member of the socialist People's Democracy (different then from the present PD) tried preaching socialism to Protestant workers by erecting the Union Jack above his platform. In the years since Protestant sectarianism has hardened, and Toman has moved , to become one of Sinn Fein's 12 candidates in the recent Six Counties election.

The inescapable conclusion is that general political unity cannot be developed the heat of trade union struggle on the basis of the trade union ('economic') unity; and that unity in trade union action is not the harbinger of a stable class unity Dismissal But many on the left, it seems to me, go on from this basic fact to a general dismissal of any concern for working class unity. The national question, they seem to say, supersedes everything else in Northern Ireland.

The trade-union class struggle is of little importance. The Protestant working class - that is, the big majority of the working class - is no concern of ours. The struggle for socialism will develop out of the revolt of the oppressed Catholics, even though that revolt fails to mobilise, and indeed antagonises, the Protestant workers.

We concern ourselves only with the 'anti-imperialist' military campaign of organisations representing perhaps half the Catholic third of the Six County population. Only when that campaign is victorious will space here to criticise their bureaucratic, statist, and somewhat 1890s-Fabian conception of socialism).

In between sub-political industrial issues, and the political maximum, the socialist revolution, there is a great void. The void is what's wrong with their politics, not that they advocate and want to build working class inter-communal unity at any level possible, and not that they make propaganda for A working class political party that can really unite the working class in Ireland, specifically in Northern Ireland, will have to be one that can honestly answer all the problems the key sections of the working class face - and in the first place the 'constitutional question' • Milltant's answer is the same as its answer to every living struggle in Britain or anywhere else = propaganda for "socialism, the only road' , combined with a routinist and politically accommodationist apown cure-alls and nostrums, the famous 'trade union defence force', for example.

A good idea - for a different society. The workforce is heavily stratified as a result of sectarian job preference. This affects the unions, where unity has been possible only on minimal trade union questions and by avoiding politics. The unions reflect the society they exist in. The Protestant UDA is the nearest thing to a trade union militia that Northern Ireland will see this side of a revolutionary change of working class consciousness.

Democratic

Essentially Militant lacks the democratic programme which has to be part of filling the void between trade union minimalism and the socialist revolution. It relates to the political world around it by pretending that the communal divide can be ignored, and that the national question can be pushed aside.

This is a recipe for building a sect in Northern Ireland: it has as little chance of uniting the Six County working class as the previous Labour Party minimalists had.

No political formation that does not nave in its programme a democratic solution to the Irish national question and to the communal antagonisms Northern Ireland wil even begin to play a positive role in Irish politics.

The best democratic programme, I believe, is that of a federal united Ireland with as much autonomy for the Protestant community as is compatible with the democratic rights of the majority of the Irish people. An all-Ireland revolutionary movement must be built which integrates this with the direct work of educating and organising the labour movement to fight for workers' power, and which links up with the workers' movement internationally, especially in Britain and in Europe, on the programme of the United Socialist Stat- Advertisement I es of Europe.

From this viewpoint the polar opposite to Militant is the IRSP. Instead of pretending that the national question will fade away if socialists concentrate on working class unity, they preteudinar ine problem of working class unity will fade away if socialists concentrate on the national question. In effect, they pretend that the Protestant working class does not exist - and talk and act accordingly. We get the obscenity of radical - if somewhat eclectic — socialists who function as Catholic sectarians.

It is very easy for British Marxists who reject Militant's approach with contempt to lapse into an attitude not too different from the IRSP's. We sympathise with the Catholic revolt. We recognise, like the Republicans that Partition helped intensify and now perpetuates the communal divide.

We know that the overall responsibility is Britain's. We defend the right of the Republican movement to opt for armed struggle. We find ourselves, living in Britain, obliged to combat the pressures around us and to champion and defend the Republicans.

Nationalist

That explains, but does not justify, the fact that in the last decade a simpleminded petty bourgeois nationalist version of Irish history has become dominant on the left - some of it ideas that James Connolly himself was polemicising against three quarters of a century ago:

We have a duty to support the Republican movement against the British state. That does not mean a duty to side ideologically with the Republicans against Irish anti-Republican or sectarian socialists, or to consider the latter as beyond legitimate discussion. Such a conclusion would amount to denying to British, and even Irish, socialists, the right to any independent judgment on the issues.