Ireland on the Rack: Defend the welfare state, defend the Republican Prisoners By AJ Byrne

Ireland on the Rack: Defend the welfare state, defend the Republican Prisoners

By AJ Byrne

“If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organization of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”

 James Connolly Shan Van Vocht January, 1897.

Ireland is in its deepest economic crisis since the foundation of the state in 1922. This crisis will have momentous political consequences. The Donegal South West by-election saw the election of the Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty with 40% of the first preference vote. Fianna Fáil's Brian O'Domhnaill got only 19% in a rural/fishing seat where they have traditionally polled over 50%. Belfast-based Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Féin (SF), has signalled his intention to enter southern politics. Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn Féin voted against the EU/IMF imposed austerity Budget on 7 December. And this is of immediate concern to us and to the incarcerated Republican prisoners north and south because in is now clearer than ever it was that the national question cannot be separated from the social question and why the name of James Connolly still reverberates with the Irish working class in the Labour party and amongst its more radical political formations.

A general election will certainly be held within months and Fianna Fáil (FF) face meltdown. FF has been the political glue that has held the southern state together since being first elected to office in 1932. It has held office for 53 of the 78 years since then. It emerged from the defeated anti-Treaty side in Civil War, Fine Gael from the counter-revolutionary victorious side. FF is a political party somewhat similar to the Peronist in Argentina, always with a strong working class and small farmer base because of the national question. These have now deserted it. Fine Gale, the other mainstream capitalist party, is the obvious rallying point for the right but has scarcely improved its poll ratings since the onset of the crisis, even falling at some points to the level of Fianna Fáil. At is foundation in 1933 it incorporated the small fascist ‘blueshirt’ movement, whose leader, Eoin O'Duffy briefly became the first leader of the new party. The potential for the emergence of a mass far-right neo-fascist party in Ireland is now obvious when the middle classes turn their anger from capitalist bankers, on which it is now focused, to the working class when they begin to resist the imposition of austerity in earnest.

What do we make of Sinn Féin as a ‘left’ party? It is certainly pitching very left now but its propaganda is merely vaguely radical populist and just over the border from Donegal they are in governmental alliance with the far right DUP, imposing neo-liberal austerity on that working class and presiding over the incarceration of dissident republican POWs. Doherty is a pro-life bigot opposed to Sinn Féin party policy of a woman’s right to choose. The hypocrisy is not lost on southerners, nevertheless he was elected. His election speech was full of nostrums like: “It’s a vote for a fair economic policy based on tax reform, ending waste and stimulating the economy to create jobs... As a Sinn Féin TD I will also work to end partition which has been detrimental to Donegal and to our country North and South.” This is a Fianna Fáil mark II with no better politics but without the corruption. Nonetheless the national humiliation imposed on Ireland is likely to give Sinn Féin up to 12 seats in the next general election, now likely in mid March 2011.

In Donegal the ‘left’ got 60%, (if Sinn Féin are reckoned as ‘left’) in a country now overwhelmingly working class and urban. Ireland is a divided nation, a fact studiously ignored by all the main protagonists in this crisis, including, shamefully, by the new United Left Alliance (ULA) formed in Dublin on 24th October. It involves the People Before Profit Alliance (a Socialist Workers party [SWP] front), the Socialist Party (SP), the Tipperary Workers and Unemployed Group (with origins in the French Trotskyist group, the OCI), and Councillor Declan Bree leader of the Sligo/Leitrim Independent Socialist Organisation. The ULA is a “new, left, anti capitalist formation to represent working people”. Not only does it totally ignore the border but specifically excludes the two far left groups in Ireland, the IRSP and Éirígí, who seek to combine both class struggle and the national question, albeit on the basis of James Connolly’s Marxism and not on the basis of Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution. Not all self-professed Trotskyists shun the connection between the national and class question however. At a conference in Limerick on 30 October: Rebirth of a Marxist tradition in Irish Universities? John McAnulty of Socialist Democracy says:

“At my own presentation, “The Hunger Strikes - A defeat for Republicanism, a defeat for the working-class”, caused some shock. It was clear that it had been some time since the majority of the participants had considered the national question as a class question and equally clear that a number had accepted the propaganda that the Good Friday Agreement had resolved the national question.” http://www.socialistdemocracy.

NI POA officers, taking a break from torturing Republican prisoners at Maghaberry, attended the 2010 Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival and Rally in Dorset, their membership of the labour movement endorsed by the ‘Trotskyist’ SP recruitment of their former General Secretary Brian Caton. They provided a marching band and offended socialists by flying the Ulster flag and singing Loyalist bigoted songs at night. The SP has two editions of its paper, one for the North and one for the South, lest news of nationalist Ireland insult Loyalist public opinion. They are far more pro-imperialist than the SWP. Although the SWP’s Eamonn McCann supports the Republican prisoners Richard Boyd-Barrett wants to keep all talk of socialism off the ULA’s literature, lest ‘ordinary’ people be offended.

An article in the Irish Times on 11 December by Noel Whelan points to an opinion poll in the Irish Sun which puts the ‘left’ made up of the left of centre Independents and Sinn Féin, but excluding Labour, at 24%. Labour got about 10% in the last election, it peaked in the polls at 33% a few months ago, because it was the only party in the Dáil to vote against the bank bailouts in 2008, but is still running at about 25% despite indicating a willingness to enter coalition with the right-bourgeois Fine Gael (about 27%) and impose cuts, albeit at a different pace. In other words many coalitions are possible here; a right-left Labour/FG coalition or a Sinn Fein/Labour/left Independent coalition. We may also heal the Civil War wounds and see a FF/FG coalition.

And here the second major error of the United Left Alliance is apparent. Dismissing Labour  as another establishment party is wrong because it ignores the working base of the party (militant syndicalists), its links with the trade unions and crucially, for the far left, it avoids the conflict with the trade union bureaucracies, which are the main obstacle today to the development of the class struggle. Unite are making the most left sounding noises in Ireland right now with Jimmy Kelly calling for a general strike etc. but he did sign the sell-out Croak Park Agreement (see: http://paddyhealy.wordpress.com/).

The SP and SWP tail end him, uncritically endorsing this former SWP leader from Waterford Glass who infamously sought to jail the Belfast Airport shop steward, SP member Gordon McNeill, for fighting his sacking by the company in collaboration with the union. As an industrial Tribunal found. A stronger defender of capitalism, with a bogus left demagogic cover, could not be imagined.

Of course both major errors are inextricably bound together in Ireland. Joe Higgins participated in the Sóivéidí na hÉireann (Soviets of Ireland) production for the Irish-language Teilifís na Gaeilge (TG4). In part 5 of the documentary he made a strong case that the Civil War was lost in part because the trade union bureaucrats like Cathal O'Shannon, who inherited the movement from Connolly and Larkin, sold out the strikes, occupations and soviets that appeared mainly in Leinster and Munster in those years.

When the counter-revolutionary ‘free staters’, led by Michael Collins until he fell in an ambush in August 1922 in Béal na mBláth in west Cork, swept southwards in 1922 and 1923 they not only defeated the anti-treaty ‘irregulars’ but smashed up the occupations and soviets, already nationally leaderless because of the treachery of the TU bureaucrats. It takes a very able political acrobat to correctly identify an historical treachery but to condone by failing to fight the exact same treachery today.

In Gaelic but with excellent subtitles the series is here: http://live.tg4.ie/main.aspx?level=Faisneis&content=72024237057

Irish Republican Prisoners Support Group

The Irish Republican Prisoners Support Group was formed in early 2010 to campaign for political status for Irish Republican political prisoners by the coming together of some left groups and a prisoners support group. It is an umbrella group, non-politically aligned and campaigns for all republican prisoners, regardless of political affiliations. We have a programme of action to highlight the continuing torture and oppression meted out to Republican Prisoners north and south of the border in Ireland. In particular to highlight the plight of four prisoners who were incarcerated for fighting to end British occupation of the six north eastern counties of Ireland:

i) Eddie McGarrigle, ii) Colin Duffy, iii) Michael Campbell, iv) Michael McKevitt.

Following a confrontation with Republican prisoners in Maghaberry at Easter 2010, when they were denied the right to wear the Easter Lilly, the symbol of the 1916 uprising, the 32 County Sovereignty Committee reported that prisoners were locked in their cells 23 – sometimes 24 – hours a day, having to eat, sleep and go to the toilet in the same tiny space. They faced strip searches every time they had visitors. Some visitors, too, were strip searched. An agreement was brokered in October but the following post in the Until the Last Rebel website on 20 Nov tells us that it was broken by the screws before the ink was dry:

''Two POWs were today refused their legal visits when they refused to degrade themselves by opening their mouth and wiggling their tongue for the search team. This is a serious development as no access to your legal team will have a detrimental effect on any future court case.''

Some of the events we have organised are pictured on the back cover, including the 20 strong picket of the Ministry of Justice, Petty France, London on 7 August 2010. The picket involved comrades from Socialist Fight, the Revolutionary Communist Group (Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism!), Workers Power, the Irish Political Status Committee and the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal campaign. “End the torture in Maghaberry, political status now!” and “Political Status for political prisoners” were the slogans chanted on the picket to tourist buses and those emerging from St James’s Park station.

The political and ethnic diversity of the picket showed that the struggles of Irish political prisoners have powerful resonance not only among serious revolutionary socialists but also among those campaigning internationally for justice for the oppressed. It was therefore enormously heartening to see the Mumia Abu-Jamal supporters and the sacked Unite convenor of Sovereign Buses, Abdul Omer there.

The picket of the Lithuanian Embassy for Michael Campbell (above) was on 17 October. He was arrested in January 2008 in an international sting operation involving the Irish and British secret services when he allegedly handed 10,000 euro to an undercover Lithuanian agent posing as a weapons supplier. In a letter to the Irish Political Status Committee (IPSC) on 2 December 2008 he speaks of being held for almost a year without charge, 23 hour a day lock-up, and initially only a hole on the floor for a toilet, two toilet rolls a month between four and says 'the food is very bad, black tea and black bread and a lot of raw fish' and 'I am sure you are aware of the blackmail and other things that have been done out here, mental torturerers coming in and doing interviewers when not meant to' he writes.

A letter was handed in to Downing Street by the IRPSG on 10 December, United Nations Human Rights Day, protesting the ill-treatment of Irish Republican Prisoners in Maghaberry.