[A number of letters in this and recent…]

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A number of letters in this and recent issues of Socialist Organiser have focused on the question of political perspectives for Ireland, and in particular the politics of the Republican movement and the issue of the Protestant -working class in the Six County Northern statelet.

This question is pi paramount importance both for tr British left and for the building of a revolutionary leaderBut for it to be adequately discussed involves examination of historical and political questions which cannot be adequately handled within the restrictions of a letters al of British troops. There are, however, different views among us on such questions as whether to support a federal solution giving some autonomy to the Protestant-dominFor this reason we are opening our pages for the submission of discussion articles on this and related questions on Ireland. The discussion is opened with an article, in two parts concluding this week,by John O'Mahony, who has contributed most regularly to the paper on Ireland.

We invite further articles as contributions to the discussion. While not restricting the scope of replies, we would urge readers to express themselves as succinctly as ship for the Irish working class.

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ated areas within a'united ireland. possible.

IS IT 'capitulation to imperialism' by way of the Protesrants to be concerned with the democratic rights of the Protestant Irish people? No, it is not. A basic document of the Communist International said this:

... the entire policy of the Communist International on the national and colonial question must be based primarily on bringing together the proletariat and working classes of all nations and countries for the common revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the landowners and the bourgeoisie. For only such united action will ensure victory over capitalism, without which it is impossible to abolish national oppression and inequality of rights"

This refers to the relation of the workers of the oppressed nations to the workers of the imperialist countries. It applies, I believe, with all the greater force to the relationship of the Irish Protestant and Catholic working class.

Our concern for democratic rights is primarily, of course, for those to whom these most denied, the oppressed. We must nevertheless on all questions of relations between nations, fragments of nations, and communities be, to quote Lenin again, 'consistent democrats'. The Protestants of N. Ireland would oppressed within a united Ireland which bore any resemblance to the Southern state (whose Catholic framework, on abortion for example, is defended by the Provisionals).

Everything that has happened in Northern Ireland over the last 15 years refutes the idea that the Protestants are defined as a community only by 'pro imperialism'. They have always been pro-British only on certain conditions.

The Presbyterians were discriminated against and oppressed until the end of the 18th century. Protestants' were the leaders, organisers, and in Northern Ireland the back. hone of the Irish Jacobins (the United Irishmen) and their uprising in 1798.

Even in the 19th and 20th century reactionary, Orange phase, they have felt themselves to have their own interests, and have frequently been rebellious. Often in the mid 19th century Orangemen threatened to kick the Queen's crown into the Boyne' — a reference to what they had helped do to the Catholic King James after the Whig revolution of 1688. They organised, armed and drilled to oppose British plans for Home Rule (albeit in alliance with a powerful British ruling class faction).

During tre last I1 years the Protestant workers have largely broken from the long-lasting ruling-class-led Protestant bloc - not, unfortunately, to socialist class consciousness, but to populist Paisleyite bigotry.

In the last decade the Protestant (mainly working class) masses have brought down three governments, organised powerful militias, and defeated the British government's entire strategy for Northern Ireland with a general strike (1974).

Are the Protestants the basis of British rule in Northern Ireland? Yes, in the sense that if they did not want it, it could not last long. But they have not been the basis of British strategy since the fall of Stormont, and Britain had turned its face to the Southern bourgeoisie and the new Catholic middle class in Northern Ireland almost a decade earlier.

Britain no longer has any military or economic reason to hold on to Northern Ireland. It was British government pressures after 1964 that forced the effete bourgeois political elite in Northern Ireland to try to form links (1965-6) with the Southern State and begin feeble moves to reform the sectarian statelet.

It wås this that encouraged the Catholic civil rights movement and at the same time triggered the Protestant backlash which culminated in the major pogrom attempts of August 1969, which put the troops on the streets and led for a while (until October 1969) to the internal secession, behind barricades, of Catholic Derry and Belfast.

The British government's alternative to the old system of Protestant rule that it was forced to scrap in 1972 was the 'power-sharing executive' and a Council of Ireland, set up in late '73 and early '74.

Britain was then 'basing itself' heavily on the Southern Irish bourgeoisie and on a big section of the Catholic population in Northern Ireland, the majority of whom voted for the party which then expressed the joint interests of Britain, the Southern bourgeoisie, and the middle class Catholics - the SDIP.

They were to share power with a section of the Protestled by Brian Faulkner, isolating and politically ghetto. ising (they hoped) the irreconcilable Protestant supremacists. The Protestant general strike of 1974 brought the whole strategy crashing down.

Were the Protestants in 1974 acting as tools of Britain against the rest of the Irish people: No, they were not, neither in their intentions nor objectively. And in the light of this what sense does it make to alk, as many comrades do, a *Catholic means antiIf to be anti-imperialist is to be against the British government and its policies for Ireland, and to use 'revolutionary' methods (including working-class methods, in a reactionary cause), then the Northern Ireland Protestants have been the

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Socialist Organiser is committed to self-determination for the Irish people as a whole and unconditional withdraw-