By Rayner Lysaght

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Rayner Lysaght, who has lived in Ireland since the mid '60s, is a leading member of People's Democracy, the Irish grouping assocjated with the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (the British affiliate is the Socialist League). He was a founder, and for a decade a leading member, of the Movement for a Socialist Republic, one of the components of the present PD.

He is the author of a book, 'The Republic of Ireland', and a Britain out of Ireland; self-determination for the Irish people. Demonstration sponsored by Labour Committee on Ireland and others, Saturday May 7, 1pm from Hyde that struggle.

You will find that the two will be increasingly in conflict until either the revolutionary or the other will prevail.

The excuse for your pieces is small enough in itself, but might just as well be eliminated here. I don't know, any more than 1 think you do, of any Ulster Protestant worker (or, indeed bourgeois) disturbing him/herself from the Republican movement because it abandoned 'Federalism'. I would not expect to hear of one who did so.

'Federalism' ; or the reserving of functions to a Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People within a United Ireland was never really intended as a 'hand of friendship' for the national minority. It reassured the most backward elements who dominated the Provos' carly years, that Irish unity need not end some of the most repulsive religious sectarian features of Twenty-six County life that had been enforced under partition.

Russia The Protestant ethos would dominate Ulster: the other three provinces would be saved for Rome. It might be called an insurance against the Permanent Revolution.

However the . said process asserts itself. After thirteen years, federalism' has been ended by the same people who are pushing for Sinn Fein to oppose the Anti-abortion Amendment, (by the way, John, you are wrong again, here. Sinn Fein as a whole is not in favour of the amendment; it abstains to appease its old 'Federalists'. Even so, ten years ago, these latter would have had it supporting the move, at least in principle).

More serious than your defence of 'Federalism' is your denial of the relevance of PermaPark (Speakers' Corner]. number of pamphlets about Irish politics. Bloody Suriday 1972 ÷ before the nent Revolution to Ireland and, a most serious new development, your bolstering of this position with a medley of half truths and Unionist propaganda.

This last is new. Your view on Permanent Revolution has remained constant, though it has covered a number of contrasting positions. In 1969, it was held to justify a call for the repartition of Ireland.

MAY troops opened fire Some seven years later, you told me firmly that, after all, the Ulster Protestants were simply 'colons. Now you return to your original line. However, this is no longer justified by ignorance.

After 14 years in the Irish Solidarity movement, the contradiction between your revolutionary tasks and your view is becoming critical. Your recent articles are a major part of the process in which a slight scratch is becoming a threat of gangrene.

You deny the relevance of the Permanent Revolution to Ireland because "Ireland, north and south, is n advanced bourgeois society". There are three replies to this.

The first is that it is based on an over-simplification. of the normal conditions for Permanent Revolution. The second is that if the said over-simplification is accepted then it should be applied to Ireland throughout this century.

Orangeism After all, Ireland in 1914 had a larger proportion of its population employed in industry than had Russia. As far as the peasantry was concerned, more than half its land had been taken from the landlords. Perhaps, then. Connolly should not have gone out in the national democratic Rising in 1916? Such is the conclusion of Militant Irish Monthly. the Irish branch of the Interna•i cd Tod Grant Fan Club.

For, in practice, if the way forward for the Irish workers is not through the said process and strategy, then ways would be open that would otherwise be diversions.

It might be possible to unite on a lasting basis within the borders of the Six County state Catholic. and Protestant workers.

In a Permanent Revolution scenario, this would be to try to unite vanguard and rearguard without the centre. Without such a concept, a shortcut appears to a workers' state, regardless of the democratic aim of national unity..

(Again, you claim that Britain would grant this only for the Protestants: and against all publishea evidence, that it has been manoeuvring to this end since 1964).

Obviously, such a shortcut would have to be used by socialists and it has indeed been followed by, amongst others, Paddy Devlin, Conor Cruise O'Brien, the Workers' Party (formerly Official Sinn Fein), the British and Irish Communist Organisation and, of course, Militant Irish Monthly.

Two factors link this motley crew. All deny Permanent Revolution's validity in Ireland and all have moved steadily rightwards in the fourteen years since the start of the present struggle.

Why should this be so? It is because all the above have tried to unite an anti-imperialist section of the working class with a section that opposes imperialism politically, if at all, from the right: from positions that counter specific British Government was the case in 1886, in 1894, in 1912, in 1920, and indeed in 1974. (Had any • normal strike enjoyed the collusion of the forces of law and order' to the degree that the UWC did, it would have been won in half the time).

Sections of the Protestant working class do sometimes vote for socialism and may even march against an overconfident Unionist government as in 1932. Many, if not most, of these combine such a vote with a reluctance to do anything concrete to abandon the small but real privileges that give Protestants as Protestants advantages as against Catholics.

In the main, they identify their community as anti-Catholic, not in the sense that they defend the positions of the Age of Reason, but in thè sense of defending a superior material place against the Catholies in the name of religious positions not, now, qualitatively better than those of their opponents. As long as they can get away with this, they will have no need to change.

How this happened can be understood from three episodes.

1. The Protestants did not come to Ireland. 'mainly by free immigration from England and Scotland ... (going back to prehistory) ... and, much less importantly, by official British colonis. ation' . The Protestant settlements of Cos. Antrim and Down differed from those in Central and Western Uster because. amusand more thorough.

been cleared as a war measure before 1603, after which they were leased to the clearers (Chichester, Hill, Conway) after that date. They planted their lands with Protestants. These were as much colons as those in less-effectively settled Permanagh ánd Donegal.

Their knowledge of the fact (and fear of counter-attacks like those of 1641 and 1690) would handicap their future progressive development.

2. This was seen even in their most radical moment in 1798.

Though the Presbyterian left led the Irish national revolution for a couple of months many of its number did so looking over their shoulders.

The veteran Belfast Republican, William Drennan, retreated into passive fear of the Irish majority. Henry Monroe lost the Battle of Balinahinch by refusing to use his Catholic troops- in a night attack. The defeated James Dickie remarked that victory would have meant a new CatholicProtestant civil war.

3. Such fears multiplied extensively and intensively because of the way Ulster was industrialised.

Perhaps one should be grateful to you, John, for not asking the question: why was the Protestants' part of Ireland more advanced? However, to beg a question is not qualitatively better than giving a wrong answer.

Insurance In fact, Ulster's industrial supremacy was ensured by a far greater defeat of its Protestant my where rise in thee Bartish ises.

(Its mainly Catholic opposite numbers in the rest of Ireland had stronger unions: capital, there, answered by removing itself).

• From this pauperisation developed working class Orangeism (You don't mention the Orange Order once in your historical analysis. Why not?) Trade unionism was replaced by or co-existed with workplace discrimination on religious sectarian grounds.

By the criterion of industrial expansion, Belfast had a claim to be the British Isles' Petrograd. Instead it became - Belfast.

Fear of a largely agrarian, backward and priest-ridden Cathalic bourgeois state' was only the subjective expression of renewed fears of displacement: now fears of largely unskilled • Catholic workers taking Protestant jobs.

The 1886 Anti-Home Rule pogrom came after rumours of a Catholic threat to take over the shipyards. The 1920 pogrom was aimed at expelling "Catholics employed in the wartime boom. Contrariwise, those who signed the Ulster Covenant against Home Rule in 1912 did not worry much about the right of divorce or a constitutional ban on abortion.

Historically, then, the Ulster Protestants originated as colons. Their consciousness is still a colon consciousness. Yet the objective basis for this consciousness is no longer one of colonisation. No displaced native peasantry exists on a scale that could re-settle the Belfast and the Lagan valley.

In any case, even if their colon status was an objective fact, they would still have the right to stay if they would accept the same rights as the native Irish.

The most accurate description of the Ulster Protestant workers is that they, or a nucleus of them constitute a labour aristocracy recruited by religion. More generally they are a backward part of the all-Ireland workforce, kept backward by imperialist concessions.

They will join us in struggle, they will fight, alongside us, but they will join us late and only as a result of a thirty-two county fight. Before they join us, the struggle will have spread south of Ulster. By doing so, it will fight as a• proletarian struggle as it did in 1972 and at times during the H Block agitation.

Faced by this. Thirty-Two County mobilisation, sections of and eventually the bulk of the Protestant workforce will join it.

Perhaps then, the federal Ireland will be revived as a tactical move to ease the Protestants into Irish unity. However, it remains a matter of conjuncture and of conjecture.

With all good wishes, D.R. O'CONNOR LYSAGHT P.S. One last point, John, it does not behove a British revolutionary, even one with Irish ancestors, to attack Irish revolutionarles for not doing what he thinks best to avoid civil war. Such warnings are being used far too often already and, again, usually from the pro-imperialists. (They are a tavourite gimmick of Conor Cruise O'Brien).

Quite apart from being patronising, it ignores the fact that today there is not much that can be done to avoid civil war short of unconditional surrender to the class enemy. Such struggles normally have highly reasonable causes: they are battles between social orders, objectively if not in form. Few Cubans or Nicaraguans would now deny the historic necessity for their country's civil struggles.

On the other hand, a defeat for progress as a result of such a war tends to come as a result of successful outside imperialist intervention as in Spain and ITDAADe nIITI NOW!

Labour Committee on Irelạnd, BM Box 5355, London WCIN 3XX.

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Organiser no.128 April Page

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tactics on reactionary grounds and with reactionary allies. This