Protestants and Republicans

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"Unity will not be achieved just by preaching its advantages: antagonism is too deep and bloody... most potent 'anti-imperialist' force in Ireland.

The tragedy, of course, is that their purpose has been to restore their sectarian supremacy within the artificial 6 County state. They are concerned not with 'imperialism' but with their own interests as they see them — that is, with their relations with the Irish Catholics.

It is the Protestants who so far have defeated every British effort to collaborate with the Irish bourgeoisie in rearranging the mess it created in 1920. Britain would readily agree to a united Ireland tomorrow if enough Northern Ireland Protestants would. Britain is not 'using' the Protestants now against the rest of the Irish people as a section of the British ruling class used them 70 years ago.

Britain's crime is that it chooses to hold the ring, mainCatholics.

To picture the Northern Ireland Protestants (or any comparable community) in onedimensional terms as just politically "pro-imperialist' therefore radically to falsity reality and adopt attitudes alien to our socialist programme. It is to relate to the problems that Ireland's history has created for the working class in Ireland, and for socialists in Britain, through crude ideological spectacles, sealing ourselves off from the realities of Irish politics.

Like the Irish Republicans, Tony Richardson tries to define one million Protestants out of existence by the use of an inadequate political tag. The Protestants! Why, they are just British imperialism in Ireland: there is just imperialism and anti-imperialism. The magic words 'pro-imperialist are pronounced and that settles it. Let's move on.

But it doesn't settle it. The attitude of the Protestants is the central problem.

Either the Protestants will be conciliated in some way, or they must be coerced, subjugated, conquered, and maybe driven out.

Who will conquer them? It is inconceivable to me that we should advocate it, even if we thought it possible.

Does Tony Richardson advocate it? That's what's implied by what he writes (and also by the present policy of the Provisional IRA, not to speak of the "socialist' INLA).

This is a recipe for Lebanonstyle civil war, which would involve Catholic/Protestant mutual mass slaughter, mass population shifts, and very probably the repartition of Ireland into 'pure' orange and green segments. Britain could most likely keep whatever links it wanted with the resultant Protestant area. Nothing conceivably progressive 'anti-imperialist' could come from such a development. Nothing.

No-one proposes a confessional state for Ireland. But I can think of one thing worse than the confessional state in Lebanon — what existed there when the system broke down in communal civil war.

Yet this is the only road the Republicans' new policy leads to. By way of a trite and false 'political' labelling, the Provisionals have now, I believe, broken with Republicanism.

Over nearly 200 years there have been many different Republicanisms' in Inish history. But from. the Protestant-led jacobins whose very name, United Irishmen, summed up their programme to 'unite Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter under the common name of Irishman', to Patrick Pearse, joint leader of the 1916 Rising, who (foolishly!) welcomed the arming of the Protestants in 1914 as 'guns in the hands of Irishmen' , central to Republicanism has been the task of uniting the Irish people.

Pearse rejected any notion of coercing the Northern Protestants. So, from realism as much as from Republican doctrine, did most of those who led the 1919-21 Irish war of independence.

Democratic Republicanism is compatible with socialism -even the strain of petty bourgeois Republicanism developed by Pearse and others at the turn of the century, with its unintentionally divisive. Catholic mysticism and Gaeliclanguage revivalism. Explicitly Catholic Republicanism' not, even when it justifies itself with rhetoric about imperialism and justifies its attitude to the Protestants by calling them pro-imperialist:

We should understand and sympathise with the dilemmas of the often subjectively socialist Northern Republicans. They are locked into the 6 County bearpit, with little serious support in the South, where they did not even try to contest the recent election. The British working class movement has remained hostile or indifferent. They know that Protestant/Catholic unity is not theirs to create. • They face the bitter sectarian bigotry of the Protestants — especially of the Protestant working class. They know it is the Protestants who stand in the way of British withdrawal.

Implicit in their position for a long time, as in Fianna Fail's in the South, has been the demand that Britain coerce the Protestants into a united Ireland. They have made no progress for 1l years.

Their recent N.l. election success? They got the same proportion of the Catholic vote in the late '50s, and then could also elect a couple of (abstentionist) deputies to the Dail. The election success is anyway irrelevant for the basic problem of relations between the communities: it has been against the Catholic SDLP.

These are the reasons why partitionist and 'two Irelands' policies have entered the political soul of Northern Republicanism.

Opposite

Often in history the results of actions are the opposite of the intentions. The Provo policy now is a recipe for sectarian civil war, culminating in repartition as the final hardening-out of two fully distinct Irelands.

The mass graves of mutual communal slaughter by sections of the Irish people would mark the historic end to the great dream and grai of Irish Republicanism — which Irish and other socialists can proudly pick up — to wipe our sectarianism and foreign domination in Ireland, and to unite the Irish people.

It is no service to the Republicans, or to the Catholic or Protestant people of Northern Ireland, for us to ignore the implications. of the Republicans' position, or to praise the "social' turn when it goes together with a sectarian turn which is fundamentally reactonary.

Ireland, north and south, is an advanced bourgeois society. In the EEC the 26 Counties have political equality with, and the same formal weight as, Britain — and on issues like the Common Agricultural Policy it opposes Britain.

That the Catholics' current struggle is just does not mean that it is socialist, or that we can gloss over the question of the Protestants' democratic rights by saying it will be solved by the socialism allegedly implicit in the Catholics' struggle. The only anti-imperialist programme for Ireland is an anti-capitalist, and that means a working-class, programme. It thus requires the unity of the workine class, or of a big maiority of it.

That unity will not be achieved just by preaching its advantages: the antagonism is, and was even before 1968-9, too deep and bloody. The approach of preaching unity is essentially that of Militant. It has no purchase on reality, and less now than at the beginning of the present cycle, when in 1970 a revolutionary socialist candidate could get 9000 votes in Derry.

The anti-imperialism of the Provos and of the Northern Ireland Catholics is deeply felt, but limited by their politics, by the traditional Republican fetish of 'physical force'; and by the position of the Northern Ireland Catholic community -centrally by its relationship to the Protestants.

The populist socialism of the Provos and INLA, which. has militarist elitism at its core and assumes that the Protestant Irish proletariat can be ignored or coerced, is in no way a working class policy.

The division in the Irish working class simply rules out the possibility of a socialist strategy being developed out of se present muttary struggle. Talk of 'permanent revolution' is just a self-consoling way of ignoring the realities, and in Ireland it serves to make most 'Trotskyists' indistinguishable from the nationalists. In Britain too it has helped to shift the bulk of the left to acceptance of the crudest 'Catholic nationalism'.

The notion that there can be Irish socialism created or initiated by a military formation against the probably armed opposition ('pro-imperialist' opposition, if you like) of about half the Irish working class, is a strange one for a Marxist to hold.

Tony Richardson (and other comrades) not long ago used to advocate for Northern Ireland a united working-class militia based on the trade unions there. This is an attractive idea, but a fantasy, because the sectarian division also goes deep in the unions. The mass UDA of 1912 would have had good claim to being the 'trade union militia'.

What does that position have in common with Tony Richardson's present position, and his current - diametrically opposite - attitude to the Protestants? Everything. For in neither case does he base himself on a concrete picture of Northern Ireland reality and its problems and possibilities.

In his attitude to the Protestants he has swung from one side of the political spectrum to the other without ever touching hard ground.

Jim Denham (SO 116) is therefore absolutely right about Tony Richardson's method dogmatic socialist Phrasemongering in form, and unintentional) acceptance of a sort of narrowed down Irish Catholic nationalisa.

Whereas Marxists mEs = to understand realis. to sE ter to equip our dass asé pcselves to change it. the perest monger seides for sarseyiee words which mirror his ber emotions and serre to segi him/her off from the real pratlems. And if you do not try : think things through concrete. ly, and settle instead for hollow 'Marxist' phrases, the actual politics which pile up behind the barriers of dead phrases will inevitably come from random impression, emotional attractions and repulsions, and empirical adaptation to powerful forces operating in the given situation. You only package emotions, wishes, fantasies about N.Ireland in the acceptable form of familiar ideas (permanent revolution, imperialism/anti-imperialism, "soc¡alism is the only solution' etc.)

With this method facts can be disturbing, and to try conmental,, in think thronah imnlications would risk collapsing the whole tantastic structure oi words. You end up not with Marxism but with a sort of kitsch 'Trotskyism' Of course none of this proves that I am right about anything. I think it shows that i would have to be an accident if Tony Richardson is right about Ireland.

We should support the Catholics for the justice of their cause and because of the fundamentally reactionary character of Orange politics and of the partition of Ireland maintained by British military force. We should fight for a Socialist Unired States of Europe; for a workers' republic in Ireland; for unconditional withdrawal of the British Army; for a united Ireland; and within that for a democratic settlement between Catholics and Protestants, 10 include autonomy for the heartlands of the Protestant. community, details of such a system to be negotiated.

But if we indulge in vicarious romantic Irish nationalism, private fantasies about "permanent revolution' , or pretences that the Irish socialist revolution is in the offing, then it will only hinder us — as the various Irish solidarity movements have been hindered for over a decade - from winning that support in the British labour movement for the Catholics which it is our responsibility to win.

Finally, an analogy. Talking to US socialists in the early *30s, Trotsky insisted on brutal honesty about the racism of the American workers.

To the blacks, said Trotsky, "the American workers are hangmen"

He did not then advocate that the socialists turn their backs on the 'pro-imperialist"

sections of our class. Hangmen they were; but still, our class.

His programme was class unity - and, immediately, defence of the most oppressed against all the hangmen.

And, after all, when we discuss the Northern Ireland Protestants, we are talking abour a big section of our own class — probably close to half the Irish working class — and as much as a quarter of all the people who live in Ireland! Our starting point has to be James Connolly's dictum against all abstract nationalism - 'Ireland apart from her people means nothing to me"

CORRECTION: A typing error in the first part of this artice made it refer to 'the Englisb conquest of the 1590s'. # should have been 'the Eliza bethan conquest'.

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lobless youth used to attack iobs

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taining the partition settle- ment, and to beat down the