The North heats up

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MANY CATHOLICS spent the month of July working in factories surrounded by a forest of Union Jacks and loyalist symbols. It's been like that every July for a hundred years.

This time the Catholics working at the May Park poultry factory in Dungannon, Co. Tyrone, where the workforce of 80 was half Catholic and half Protestant, decided they weren't having it.

They struck work and refused to return until the flag was taken down.

Then the Protestant half of the workforce walked out and demanded that it be put back:

The strikes went on throughout the marching period. At the end of July the management -Vister Farmers Investment Limited - sacked the entire workforce and closed the factory down.

This story is symbolic of the situation in Northern Ireland. It also illustrates the fact that the six counties of Ireland in July 1983 show all the signs of a society in which the commupal battlelines are being redrawn and hardening alarmingly.

In the aftermath of the hunger strikes and the Assembly elections the spirit of resistance within the nationalist community has been visibly growing stronger. The 100,000 votes for Sinn Fein in the general election indicated the depth of commitment to that resistance.

The response of the majority loyalist community has been slow and less spectacular but during the July. Orange celebrations they began to flex their muscles.

July has always been the month when the nationalists of Northern Ireland are reminded who the bosses are and when the Protestant ascendancy reasserts Purging council estates of Catholics is a frightening return to this period when the British army was put on the streets and the Provisional IRA emerged.

During the Orange celebrations the loyalist leaders banged their anti-IRA drum and called for the return of hanging • as usual. But they went further than that.

Harold McCusker, Official Unionist MP for North Armagh is generally regarded as a left wing official unionist, one who in Britain would be in the Labour Party. He attacked the Health Service for employing too many Catholics.

All the signs - the strike against the Union Jack, for example — are that the nationalist community is militant and in the mood now to challenge everything - loyalism, the legitimacy of the state, the British connection, the symbols of their oppression.

Catholics recognise that there are no reforms coming from the Northern Ireland state. Catholics have still generally been unemployed much longer and are unemployed in much larger numbers than Protestants.

The skilled engineering jobs in the major plants, Shorts and Harlands, Mackies, Fords Autolite are overwhelmingly Protestant controlled (94%, 90% and 100% respectively).

Harland and Woolf still employ 100% Protestant skilled workers.

Discrimination is rife in the Civil Service and in the Northern Ireland Electricity Service.

Loyalist councils operate discrimination openly and they admit to it, both in employment and housing. After 11 years of attempted reform by British governments the reality is clear, Northern Ireland exists on the basis purely of sectarianism and discrimination.

The British government is presenting as 'liberal' the policy of replacing the British Army with the RUC and the UDR, the locally recruited security forces.

What this policy really means, however, is an even more threatening return to the 1960s with armed sectarian militias terrorising the nationalist community.

Together with the return of interment through the remanding' system and the extremely dubious use of 'supergrasses' or 'converted terrorists' these developments amount to stepping up of repression and an increasing reliance on the sectarian machinery of the Northern Ireland state itself.

With all this evidence of a return to the militancy of the 1960s and early '70s, on both sides, it seems clear that the struggle in the North is going to become more intense and isn't necessarily going to take the course most socialists would like. "Events in the crisis-torn South will be important to the outcome but so will the response of the labour movement in Britain. The problem is that those fighting imperialism in Ireland will probably conclude that the British labour movement has hardly moved since the 1960g and is no better prepared to show them solidarity than it was then.