[IRELAND: PEACE THROUGH DEMOCRACY Speakers include: Tony Benn…]

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IRELAND: PEACE THROUGH DEMOCRACY Speakers include: Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Time: Saturday November 26 at 9.30 am.

Place: Edrich Hall, South Bank Polytechnic, The conference aims to build up support for an end to any British presence in Ireland, an end to the Unionist veto on reunification, and the right of Ireland to maintain its uzditional neutrality (i.e. not to be pushed into joining The catere as open to detagas (83) and observers 121. further information from Box 189, 32 Ivor Place, TROOPS ( He had, he said, shared platforms with former comrades who were now in their graves because they abandoned the 'good old principle' of abstentionism. The Provisionals formed a separate organisation in 1969-70 because the old Republican movement (IRA and Sinn Fein alike) had voted to abandon abstentionism.

While the Ard Fheis voted to lift the ban on discussing abstention, it did not change the policy.

But then, towards the end of the conference, the Ard Fheis decided that while the ban remains on elected Republicans taking their seats at Westminster, Belfast, or even Dublin, if any Sinn Feiners are elected to the EEC Parliament next June then they will take their seats in the supra-national assembly.

This is close to the Labour Party's level of confusion and self contradiction!

Danny Morrison, Mid-Ulster Assemblyman, proposed fighting the Euro-elections on both sides of the border and taking situation in the trade the issue of Ireland, have members in the To understand the importance of this Ard Fheis, and to attempt an account of what it means for socialist politics in Ireland, it is

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Loyalist leaders, including shipyard workers' leader Billy Hull (right), formerly in Northern Ireland Labour Party.

atershed October 1968 a Catholic civil rights demonstration in Derry was savagely batoned. World TV audiences saw the present Lord Fitt, then MP for West Belfast, clubbed to the ground with his head streaming blood.

A tremendous Catholic reaction followed, and there were further civil rights marches and demonstrations.

Inevitably this triggered a Protestant backlash, which led, in August 1969, to serious pogroms in Derry and Belfast.

The artificial Six County state was disintegrating into CatholicProtestant civil war. The British Army went in in force to take a tight grip on the situation.

At first the Catholic areas in Belfast and Derry welcomed the soldiers, but still walled themselves off behind barricades in Free Derry and Free Belfast. These remained in existence until October 1969, when the barricades were peacefully taken down.

The IRA had been caught unprepared, largely without weapons and quite unable to defend the Catholic ghettoes. The existing Republican leadership (the future Officials) and their policies were discredited in much of the North. The reaction against the new "social' and 'extreme socialist' policies was inevitable, and quick.

Things came to a head at the IRA convention in December Sinn Fein Ard Fheis in January 1970. A sizeable majority decided to abandon abstention. About a third, almost entirely old-timers, walked out and set up the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein.

They denounced the others as 'extreme socialists' , seeking to establish a totalitarian dictatorship, and as Marxists.

It is pretty firmly established that the Provisionals, , certaint those in the North, had encouragement, including money, from elements in the ruling Fianna Fail party in the South Blaney, Boland, Haughey, and so on.

Until it made a sharp change of policy in April 1970, the 26 Counties government channelled money and other support to the Northern Catholics, and 'Prime Minister Jack Lynch said that the 26 Counties army "would not stand idly by" and let the Catholics in the North be massacred.

The Cabinet was said to have discussed invading the North.

But whatever its midwifery, and whatever Blaney and Haughey intended it to be, the Provisional movement inevitably took on a logic of its own.

It grew very quickly, essentially as a defensive militia in the Catholic ghettoes and initially with a purely defensive concept of their own role. In Belfast they numbered a few dozen at the beginning of 1970, and over a thousand by early 1971.

Where did the new recruits come from?

After October 1969, when the barricades came down in Free Derry and Free Belfast, things were quiet and stagnant. Civil rights reforms were quickly introduced, the sectarian B-specials disbanded, the RUC disarmed. The British Labour government left the Orange state in being as a facade, but put British civil servants in to share day-to-day running of Northern Ireland.

Masses of unemployed Catholie youth had been stirred up, and some radicalised. They were bitterly disappointed. They wanted action. They began to clash with the heavy-nandea British Army.

Then, in June 1970, British politics changed the course of developments in Northern Ireland. Labour lost the election. Under Labour the British government had independently been putting pressure on the Orange state to reform since the mid-'60s (and thereby it helped to destabilise Northern Ireland and give birth to the Catholic civil rights movement). Some of its key people were sympathetic to the plight of the Northern Ireland Catholics - even Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

It had built up a considerable experience of handling Northern Ireland. It handled the initial secession of Catholic Derry and Belfast with great skill after August 1969.

But the Heath government was allied to the ruling Northern Ireland Orange Tories, and indifferent to Ireland. Meanwhile the British Army's heavy-handed policing of Northern Ireland had brought it more and more into conflict with the Catholics who had initially welcomed it.

The Army's role was essentially to keep the balance within the artificial Six County state, which had a built-in bias in favour of the Protestants. The Catholics were the troublemakers. The Army responded with CS gas against 'rioting youths.

In July 1970 the Army imposed a curfew on the Catholic Falls, engaged in a sweep for arms, and fought a gun battle with the Official IRA.

The Provisionals had seemed like a rump of yesterday's hard men at the beginning of 1970. But as the Army came into conflict with the Catholics, they grew into a powerful force in the Northern ghettoes.

Somewhere along the line a decision was taken to go on the offensive. As one participant was to put it: The Provisionals cut through all the problems (especially the problem of Protestant working-class hostility)

the ile it and the and ia Pressed licans, with a simple message. They pointed to the patrolling British soldiers and said: 'That's British imperialism. Shoot it'.

The first soldiers were killed early in 1971, and there was a spate of bombings.

Then in August 1971, internment without charge or trial, and exclusively for Catholics, was introduced. It completed the alienation of the Catholic community.

And it led to a mass growth of Provisional influence. There was a full-scale offensive against Stormont and the British Army. From early in 1972 car bombs devastated the centres of Northern Ireland's cities and towns.

The British government was forced to seek a political solution. In March 1972 it abolished Stormont and set out to find a political arrangement within Northern Ireland which would command the support of Catholics as well as Protestants.

1972 was the high point for the Provisionals. They achieved the important victory of destroying the sectarian parliament. with secretary of state William Whitelaw).

But no agreement was possible. A brief mid-1972 ceasefire broke down (though the Official IRA's ceasefire of the same time was definitive).

The Provisionals demanded that the British should withdraw and that the 32 counties of all Ireland should be the unit for decision-making - i.e., an end to the Protestant majority's veto over any changes in the six counties and in Ireland as a whole. They proposed a federal Ireland, organised in four provincial units, including a ninecounty Ulster.

Britain continued to consider the Six Counties as sacrosanct, hough it advocated links with the South.

Eventually Britain shaped a new compromise approach. There was to be an executive in Belfast, based on a six county assembly in which the Catholic constitutional nationalist party, the SDLP, would share power with 'moderate' Unionists. At the same time there was to be a Council of Ireland, loosely linking the six and 26 counties.

The power-sharing executive which took over at the beginning of 1974 had many things going for it. It had the support and patronage of Britain, the support of about two-thirds of an assembly elected the previous June. The die-hard Orangemen were ghettoised.

SDLP The SDLI, supported by a big majority of Catholic voters, had a tremendous weight within the executive. Nationalist aspirations were accommodated in the Council of Ireland.

In early 1974 the IRA seemed to face the prospect of being marginalised. Had the new power-sharing executive taken root, probably they would have been.

Now, for the second time, British politics changed the course of events in Northern Ireland. The battle between the government and the miners led Edward Heath to call a snap general election in February 1974.

The Unionist Party in Northa party outside it. There was mass Protestant discontent with power-sharing and especially with the Council of Ireland. The Faulknerites were considered to be traitors who had broken their election pledges.

The February election allowed this discontent full expression. 1l of the 12 Northern Ireland Westminster MPs elected were hostile to powersharing. The executive's authority was undermined.

In May 1974 a majority vote in the Assembly to endorse the new arrangements triggered a Protestant General Strike, which grew to massive proportions and led to the resignation of the executive and the destruction of Britain's entire strategy.

Since then Britain has had no strategy but to hold on.

The Protestant backlash had begun against the civil rights movement and grown continuously. Held in check when the British and Stormont were beatine down the Catholics from Bloody Sunday - January 30 1972 mid-1970 to March 1972, it burst out with the abolition of Stormont.

Tens of thousands of workers struck in protest at the abolition of Stormont. The Ulster Defence. Association, formed in 1971, began open marching and drilLing in 1972, and soon numbered over 50,000. Protestant Vanguard, led by William Craig, organised a demonstration of 60,000 Protestants. (In British population terras that would be 2½ million, or, if you reckon it against the Protestant two-thirds of Northern Ireland's population, 3,600,000).

There was an orgy of sectarian killings of Catholics picked at random, as Catholica. The culmination was the reactionary general strike which smashed Britain's strategy.

That was a decisive turning-point. In a continuation of this article, next week, I will discuss the shape of Irish politics after 1974, and how it determined the evolution of the Provisionals.