[Speakers include: Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Soley…]

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Speakers include: Tony Benn, Ken Livingstone and Soley. • Iime: 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 «eunification, and the right of Ireland to maintain its traditional neutrality (i.e. not to be pushed into joining The conference will focus on the situation in the trade unions and the problems of raising the issue of Ireland, particularly where British unions have members in the The confcience is open to delegates (£3) tish troops out D. further information from Box 189, Orange General Strike, there was stalemate. Essentially, it has continued for ten years, during which the British government has defended the status quo in the Six Counties, leaning heavily against the Catholics to do it.

Northern Ireland was carved out for rule by the Protestant majority. Britain had to aborgate that rule in 1969 and abolish it in 1972.

Majority rule was abolished because it was recognised as inevitably being Protestant sectarian rule.

Then power sharing proved impossible because of the determined opposition of the Protes. tants. But the unavoidable conclusion, that the whole entity is unviable, has been resisted and rejected by British governments, Labour and Tory alike.

The result has been & long stalemate.

After the General Strike toppled the power sharing Executive, it took the British government a long time to recognise that its whole strategy had been destroyed.

In 1975 they tried having a Constitutional Convention elected to hammer out an agreed power-sharing arrangement. But that experiment merely showed once more that the Protestant and Catholic communities can reach no agreement within the Six County framework.

One of the clearest proofs of this was the fate of William London SE1.

NATO).

Loadoe NW1. Craig, who was cut down as Brian Falkner had been before him.

Craig had been the Six County home secretary responsible for the batoning of the Catholic civil rights marches in October 1968. He had founded the very powerful Protestant Vanguard movement to organise Protestant resistance after the abolition of the Six County Home Rule Parliament at Stormont.

He had made blood curdling speeches about slaughtering Catholics. He seemed to have great influence. Then in 1975, he advocated a voluntary, temporary wartime' power-sharing arrangement with the Catholic constitutional nationalists of the SDLP: (The SDLP was then a great deal less green nationalist than it is now).

He was instantly discredited and isolated, within the Assembly and within Vanguard.

In its final report, the Protestant majority in the Convention recommended the restoration of Protestant majority rule in the Six Counties. Britain decided that it had no option but to continue direct rule.

All this had been entirely predictable.

The Labour government of and observers 32 Ivor Place, Bro-pt sui ci..:.

Tra v. . 15E

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The Provos' last serious advance was in March 1972 when Britain • presence, grauuduy, aner.! ucs and because of the antiinternal conflicts, became host- political legacy of their origin ile to it. It came to emphasise:... in the split of 1969-70. the all-Ireland framework as Radicalisation has been equal.: the precondition for progress ly slow and patchy. ly of different labels. One of em, Ivan Cooper, was a Protant who had been a Derry pour Party candidate. Fitt was epublican Labour' and also a Batminster MP. Devlin was an | IRA internee and a socialist. rie had been in the old contutional 'Green Tory' Nationet Party.

John Hume, present leader of I SDLP, was a businessman ongly linked to the Catholic rarchy and the Southern urgeoisie.

Moribund the SDLP was designed to Lace the long-moribund NatMist Party and to condense energy of the roused Catholand others, into a reinvigor1 and radical constitutional rement of opposition and re•. The left face was (it was ed) to bring it a support ider than the old Catholicarian Nationalist Party's. в the struggle escalated the P showed itself capable of lant gestures - organising a i and rates strike, for examOn the eve of internment in I it withdrew from Stormont rotest at the killing of a Cathby the security forces. benefited from the political entionism of the Republi' though it seems that a uble chunk of the recent isional Sinn Fein votę came • previously abstentionist volic voters. The SDLP soon Lover the Catholic middleand other support of the pnalist Party, but it was more than the Nationalist Party - Fitt, Cooper, Devlin, and even Hume came from a different stable than the old Nationalists. They gave the party its social democratic face, even though the body was essentially made of the same stuff as the Nationalist Party had been.

Whatever our many criticisms of them, Fitt and Devlin were working-class politicians. Fitt, after being elected to Westminster in 1966, had singlehandedly made Northern ireland an issue in the British labour movement. When Rory O' Brady talked at the Sinn Fein Ard Fheis of 'the persona tragedy of Lord Fitt' , it was more appropriate than the widespread jeers.

When first the Tories turned to reform, and then in July 1972 all hope of a Provisional/ British government deal had been abandoned, the SDLP came into its own. Britain and the Irish middle class, north and south, both needed the SDLP. For the Orange monolith was shattered.

The combined pressure from Britain and from the Catholic revolt between 1969 and 1972 broke it up. The gentlemen farmers and pseudo-aristocrats who had long been Unionism's 'natural leaders'. lost the confidence of the Protestant masses. Private armies and big splinter-groups appeared. Old-style Unionist politicians were either forced into line with them or steamrollered flat.

The last hope of Unionism Stormont was hardliner Brian Faulkner, who lasted a year as prime minister up to March 1972.

When, in 1973-4, Britain attempted to substitute powersharing for the Orange sectarian rule for the exercise of which the Six County state had been custom-built, the Unionism it looked to for support was a disintegrating force.

Unionist leaders who accepted Britain's power-sharing policy and stood out against the Orange backlash faced quick repudiation and political oblivion. Faulkner only kept his place in the mid-1973 election to the Assembly by appearing . as an opponent of power-sharing, and got his come-uppance when the Orange elections next got the chance to vote, in February 1974.

In these circumstances the policy of restructuring Northern Ireland on a power-sharing basis became dependent on the British government being able to shift its weight decisively onto the SDLP and the Catholics who backed it — as the big majority scrapped Stormont Faulkner's 20,454.

mending.

Catholics? democratic' nreganco *t gradually, did.

In the Assembly during the first five months of 1974 there was a roughly-equal three-way division:

• The Faulkner Unionists, repudiated at the beginning of the year by the Unionist Party. It had support inside the Assembly which the February 1974 Westminster election had shown it no longer had outside it.

Allied to them was the non-sectarian Liberal-Unionist Alliance Party, an earlier Unionist splinter, and the tiny Unionist Northern Ireland Labour • A block of anti-power-sharing Orangemen - Paisley, Craig, etc.

• The SDLP was the stable core of the new regime, with Fitt as deputy prime minister. It was the axi on which the 'solution' (power-sharing, and Council of Ireland) agreed between the 26 County and British government and the Northern Ireland middle class rested.

The pro-power-sharing Unionists and the SDLP combined to outvote the diehard Orange bloc in the Assembly, and the latter were reduced to impotent post- in the North. Fitt, Devlin and Cooper (the representative Proturings and gestures. But the estant from the Derry Labour Faulknerites had little base Party) all broke from it. John outside the Assembly. In Octo- Hume, the Catholic businessber 1974, after the General man, became leader. Strike, anti-power-sharing Un- If the SDLP did not go into a ionists got 407,778 votes to catastrophic decline much quickHer in those conditions, it was The Orange general strike because the IRA also was in a shattered this structure beyond bad state.

After 1976, when Britain The Provos' last serious adturned back to beating down the vance in terms of the overall Catholics, the SDLP was out of a goal of a united Ireland was in role. What is the use of a con- March 1972 when Britain scrapstitutional political party when ed Stormont. Its advances since there is no Six County political then have been within the Cathsystem in operation, and the olic community, in competition from Westminster? What hap- province is governed directly IRA has been locked into a war with the SDLP. For 11 years the form to the perspective of re- of attrition with the British state, LOmH and progress by way of which is backed by two thirds of power-sharing and an all-Ire- the Six County population. land link-up, when Britain has abandoned attempts at reform, The destruction of all constitutional, partial, power-sharing and is trying to beat down the advance: by the Protestant genFeral strike of 1974 created the The SDLP began to fester and objective conditions for the 'conits components to unravel. It quest' of the Catholic masses began to shrink back from its by those whose intransigence social democratic pretensione on the nationalist side matched and broad society-wide concerns that of the Protestants. The Pro-Catholic communal base and and dwindle to its narrowest their present effective challen- vos have taken so long to mount identity. It became more and ge to the SDLP (they got 43% of more "green' and less 'social- the Catholic vote in the June election) only because of their From supporting the British long-term indifference to poliWHO'S NEXT 156, November 983, Page 24, FOR A

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