The problem of the Protestants

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James Connolly warned that partition "would help the Home Rule and Orange capitalists and clerics to keep their rallying cries before the public... All hopes of uniting the workers - irresnertive of relipion or old molitical battle cries would be shattered... ship for the Irish working class.

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ated areas within a united Ireland. possible.

WRITERS in Socialist Organiser have been talking about the rights of the Protestants for over four years, and I have been writing about them for over 16 years - ustally, for the last 11 of those years, in articles defending and explaining the Republicans.

We usually express it as a general idea — 'as much autonomy as is compatible with the democratic rights of the majority of the Irish people' - because to advocate some precise scheme would be panaceamongering. (I think the best unit for federalism would be the 4 counties where a very big majority is Protestant). In my view there are only two other alternatives: conquer the Protestants, or drop the whole idea of a united Ireland for now and accept Partition as it is. A focus on "socialism now" and proposals for working class unity is a variant of the latter.

The defence of federalism has not been instead of support for the Catholic revolt and (against Britain) for those leading it: it has been argued for as a necessary part of a policy to bring that revolt to the successful conclusion of a united and politically independent Ireland.

For anyone to assert that Socialist Organiser or myself *dissolves' a defence of the Republican movement 'in a mass of words defending the Protestant community' is a straightforward libel. The central focus of the paper, front-page articles and so on, has consistently been defence of the Catholics and Republicans, and denunciation of the British government, its allies and its policy.

I think Tony Richardson (letters, SO 115) wants to say that any criticism of the Republicans on this score, and any reference to a solution involving rights for the Irish Protestants as a community, is impermissible. He should say that and argue for it without libellous demagogy.

In this article 1 want to spell out my conception of what is involved, and hope thereby to provide the starting point for a more detailed and serious discussion than we have been able to have recently.

Back in 1972, when the Provisionals forced Britain to abolish the Protestant supremacist government at Stormont, and victory seemed in sight, they adopted federalism (albeit in a peculiar form) as a democratic framework for coexistence between Catholics and Protestants in a united Ireland.

Against the opposition of veteran Republican leaders like David O'Connell and Rory O' constitution three months ago. 'Recognition' as a distinct segment of the Irish people has been withdrawn, and now the Protestants are defined as just "pro-imperialist'.

O'Connell has described this move as the withdrawal of 'the hand of friendship offered to the Protestant people of ireland' in the heady days of 1972. I think he's right.

Thus the Republicans' turn to 'radical campaigning', led by northerners like Gerry Adams, is unfortunately accompanied by a plainly Catholic-sectarian turn. Arguably, it was always implied in what™ they have been doing, as distinct from what they have been saying, but now the Northern Provos have followed the INLA into explicitly leaving themselves no possible way of relating to the Prorestants but by an attempt to conquer them. The politically lightweight INLA Protestants as a licence for open, or very thinly disguised, sectarian assassinations.

But the Protestants are a distinct community, a separate section of the Irish people, with their own history, culture and viewpoint. They are entitled to equality and respect for what they are in so far as that does not mean oppressing or denying the rights of the much bigger Catholic Irish population.

Though at an earlier period some of the Protestants were the democratic and revolutionary vanguard, it is true that they have played a bad role in modern Irish history. It is true that they have more than had their interests looked after because of their alliance with key sections of the British ruling class.

However, to say, as Tony Richardson does, that 'insofar as they are a 'community', they identify themselves through their pro-imperialism", , is both untrue and beside the point. Debate It is to substitute a different question (their relationship with Britain over the centuries) for the one we are in fact discussing under the heading of 'federalism' — the question of what they are in Ireland, and how they have related, do relate, and should relate to the 3 million other Irish people. The problem is to change their relationship with the rest of the Irish people.

They are a community put down in Ireland mainly by free immigration from England and Scotland and, much less importantly, by official British colonisation. Close connections joint states - Scorland even gets its name from a kingdom of Irish colonists there, the Irish then being called Scots -have existed between Northern Ireland and parts of Scotland from time immemorial.

After the Reformation and the English conquest of Ireland in the 1590s, such settlers developed a special relationship with the English rulers against the much less developed Catholic natives. Lands were taken in a series of confiscations. Something like a replica of British bourgeois society evolved among the settlers, especially in the North, during the 17th century and after.

Finally, in the 20th century, they got their own sectarian statelet after a section of the British and Anglo-Irish ruling class, led by the Tory party and its future prime minister Bonar Law, had brought Britain close to civil war rather than agree to a (limited measure of) Home Rule for a united Ireland.

That's the outline of the dominant element in the historical picture.

There is also another side to it. The opposition, in the late 19th and early 20th century, of the Protestant masses, which included the main section of the Irish working class, to a united Ireland, and their availability to sections of the British and Anglo-Irish ruling class as political and military shocktroops against a united Ireland and against the social struggle of the Catholics (in the 1880s war in the South between landlords and tenants, for example) was also a matter of hostility and die-in-the-last-ditch opposition to being incorporated as a minority in a largely agrarian, backward and priest-ridden Catholic bourgeoiș state.

What bound them to England and the ruling class arose in the first place from the fact and the awareness that they were different, that their part of Ireland was more advanced, and from their feeling of being threatened.

Today it is opposition to incorporation into the Catholic confessional state that has evolved in the South since Partition.

Only if the Irish national revolution had taken a radical working-class-led form, and had been able to link up with a radical British working, class movement, could the division in the Irish people, and in the first place in the Irish working class, have found a framework within which it could perhaps have healed rapidly.

For example, the British working class militancy of 1919 to '21 found a powertul echo in Northern Ireland in great strikes in 1919 - during the •Black and Tan' war, and at a time when there were radical social currents. developing in the South ("soviets' were declared by strikers at small cooperative dairies in 1920).

But the movements did . not coalesce. History evolved differently. 1920 saw the armed struggle against Britain in the the South reflected in Belfast with savage pogroms against Catholics, and Catholics being driven out of the shipyards:

In history there are many similar tragic examples of the socially most developed section of a people being turned against the struggles of the agrarian oppressed. In Mexico workers and trade unionists were organised to fight the peasant insurgents. In Italy militant Northern workers had a quașiracist attitude to the agrarian and backward South, and to southerners in their midst; etc.

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In Ireland this intermeshed with the struggle of the British state to keep a grip on ireland, mainly. for military-imperial reasons. (In pursuit of military security the British state also carried out an agrarian revolution from above. It was complered by the Free State in the 1920s, eliminating the landlords).

It could have been different if there had existed a powerful revolutionary socialist party in Britain. If... if... Instead it turned out tragically, as have so many other situations, for lack of an adequate revolutionary movement.

The Protestant working class was isolated by Partition within the 6 County ghetto, with its massive (35%) Catholic minority. In the South the Green Tories ruled. In Britain the no.118 February labour bureaucracy betrayed and helped the ruling class defeat the revolutionary potential that existed in the '20s until after the betrayal of the General Strike.

In the "30s and '40s the Irish Stalinists gained a powerful influence in Northern Ireland -and sold it to British imperialism when Russia entered the war in 1941. They even "partitioned' the 'Communist Party' into separate Northern and Southern parties (until 1970).

Partition became 'permanent', , and the two Irish states - the Northern Ireland bour•geoisie did have full control of NI's internal affairs for 50 years — became sectarian caricatures of each other.

In the North, the ruling class, in the person of the prime minister, talked of a *Protestant state for a Protestant people' , and in the South from the mid '20s legislation based on Catholic social teaching was systematically imposed.

The Southern Irish bourgeoisie talked of Irish unity, but acted where they ruled like the backward, Catholic, bourgeois partitionist bigots they were. In the North the Protestant working class had privileges over the Catholics in better chances of jobs and houses, etc, amidst permanent high unemployment. The Catholics were "kept down'.

This discrimination was important, especially in dividing the working class. It did not create the division, and was not the primary cause of it. To talk of it as being 'exploitation' of the Catholics is to falsify the reality.

The Catholics were the worst off. But the Protestant workers, then and now, were also victims, living in slums and porerty. James Connolly wrote with terrible prophetic accuracy when, arguing that no Home Rule for any part of Ireland would be better than partition, he declared:

... the betrayal of the national democracy of industrial Ulster would mean a carnival of reaction both North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements while it endured..."

Of course concer for the Protestant workers — who comtinue to play a reactionary role - cannot override support for the democratic rights of the Irish people as a whole or for

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has long used the Provos' pre- sent 'political' definition of the