Workers' Liberty

The Memory of the Dead, better known as Ninety Eight, one of the best-known of Irish Republican songs, was first published in Thomas Davis’ paper, The Nation in 1842. It was written overnight after its author John Kells Ingram had spent an evening arguing Irish politics and history with a group of fellow Protestant students at Trinity College Dublin. Ingrams dared to speak of 98!

Who fears to speak of Ninety-Eight?
Who blushes at the name?
When cowards mock the patriot’s fate
Who hangs his head for shame?

(full poem)
From May to September of 1798 the power of Britain in Ireland was threatened by fierce rebellion. The rising had the character of a forest fire. It was rarely clear where the main centre was. When any significant source of unrest was identified and attacked it appeared that the real danger lay somewhere else.

In August 1994 the Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire in its “Long War”, which by then had lasted 24 years (interspersed with some previous, temporary ceasefires). The 1994 ceasefire was interrupted by a partial return to bombing between February 1996 and July 1997, but eventually the ceasefire proved permanent. The Provisionals entered negotiations.

1919 was a year of turmoil all over Europe.

In March 1947, an immense crowd of people, 200,000 of them, many of the men bare-headed in freakishly Arctic weather, marched through Dublin behind the coffin of Jim Larkin, the founder of the modern

For earlier articles in this series, covering the breakdown in 1968-9 of the old Northern Ireland political system — the biggest crisis in the UK state for many decades — and the reactions of the left, see www.workersliberty.org/node/10010.

What is the socialist movement?... To a contemporary Socialist the socialist movement does not look anything like it did to a [utopian] Socialist in the [18]30s [for whom] 'future history resolves itself into propaganda and the practical implementation of their social plans...

This article reviews the way that the biggest activist-left group of the last 35 years or so in Britain — the SWP, then called IS — dealt with the biggest internal crisis the British state has seen since the early 1920s, the breakdown of Northern Ireland into civil war in 1969. It continues a series about the British left and the decisive early stages of the nearly 40 years of “Troubles” in Northern Ireland.

[This is an edited and augmented version of the text in Solidarity. It includes excerpts from the minutes of the leading committees of the International Socialist organisation, which are not in the version printed in Solidarity.]

• Section 2 of this instalment of the series

• Part 1: Why Northern Ireland Broke Down
• Part 2: The Irish Workers' Group, I S and the "Trotskyist Tendency"
• Part 3: Why Northern Ireland Split on Communal, Not Class, Lines
• Part 4: When militant sloganeering meant promoting communal war
• Part 5: When socialists looked to "Catholic Power"

One thousand men and a few women, one quarter of them the trade union militants of the Citizen Army, badly armed and with little training, went out into the streets of Dublin to challenge and to fight the greatest empire the world had seen. Many of them knew — certainly the leaders knew — that, given the isolation of Dublin, they had little chance of success.

(First section: click here for continuation)
This article is the fifth in a series by Sean Matgamna about the British left and the events in Northern Ireland in 1968-9 — the biggest internal crisis the British state has seen since the early 1920s.

• Part 1: Why Northern Ireland Broke Down

• Part 2: The Irish Workers' Group, I S and the "Trotskyist Tendency"
• Part 3: Why Northern Ireland Split on Communal, Not Class, Lines
• Part 4: When militant sloganeering meant promoting communal war

Click here for section one of this article

McCann: We have failed to get our position across. We keep saying parrot-like that we are fighting on working-class issues for working-class unity, that our objective is a workers’ and farmers’ socialist republic.

The last three issues of Solidarity have carried Sean Matgamna’s series about the British left and the events in Northern Ireland in 1968-9 — arguably the biggest internal crisis the British state has seen since the early 1920s. The last article (Solidarity 3/120) summed up the turning-point debate at the National Committee of IS (forerunner of the SWP) in January 1969, and the initial positions mapped out by the IS/SWP majority and by the Trotskyist Tendency within IS (forerunner of Solidarity and Workers’ Liberty).

• Part 1: Why Northern Ireland Broke Down,

• Part 2: The Irish Workers' Group, I S and the "Trotskyist Tendency",
• Part 3: Why Northern Ireland Split on Communanal, Not Class, Lines
  
  

IS AND IRELAND

Continuing the series about the events in Northern Ireland in 1968-9 — the start of the long-running turmoil there, still not resolved today — and the debates and disputes as the left tried to orient itself.

In Solidarity 3/118 we began a series of articles about the events in Northern Ireland in 1969 — when the nearly 50 year old Northern Ireland state broke down, and the British Army went on the streets to hold it together — and the debates and disputes which that provoked in the British left.

Part 1: How and Why the Six-County State Broke Down

Recently the British army in Northern Ireland was withdrawn to where it was in relation to Northern Ireland society before 14 August 1969, when it was put on the streets to be an emergency scaffolding for a state and society that had begun to break down into Protestant/ Catholic civil war.

By Pat Murphy

The story of the United Irishmen, and the uprising of 1798.

Who fears to speak of ‘98?
Who blushes at the name?
When cowards mock the patriot’s fate
Who hangs his head for shame?

By John O’Mahony
Ian Paisley calls himself the "Leader of the Ulster People". By that he means, leader of the Protestant-Unionist 56 per cent, or thereabouts, of the people living in the 6-Counties. Now Paisley looks set to form a 6-County coalition government in partnership with Sinn Fein-IRA.

By John O'Mahony

Constance Gore-Booth led the well-off life of an “Anglo-Irish” ruling class family until she was 40 — introduced as a debutante to Queen Victoria in the late 1880s, art student in Paris, part of the aristocratic hunting fraternity in her home county of Sligo.

By Sean Matgamna

The well-known author Tim Pat Coogan once made the true comment that Irish history has the only example of Communists and bourgeois nationalists joining together against imperialism, in which it was the Communists who were gobbled up.

Against the priests and the bosses

By Sean Matgamna

In the years before the First World War, the great Jim Larkin organised the savagely oppressed workers of Ireland's capital city and made them a power in Ireland.

The events of 1912-22, and their consequences for Ireland today.

Introduction

From the mid-1960s a sizeable minority of the people of the USA turned against the war their government was waging in Vietnam. They marched, demonstrated and lobbied to force their government to stop the war.

by Donagh MacDonagh

In Dublin City in 1913 the boss was rich and the poor were slaves

The women working, the children starving, then on came Larkin like a mighty wave

April 23 marks the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, in many ways the defining event in modern Irish history. The Rising, its consequences and aftermath shaped the situation Ireland faces today. It offers important lessons for the Irish workers today against both imperialism and indigenous exploitation and reaction. Mike Rowley tells the story.

From Workers' Libety 56, June/July 1999

Constance Markievicz and the other women who fought in the Easter Rising struggled to be accepted on equal terms by the Irish labour movement and among nationalists. Their experience holds many lessons for today's socialists and feminists.

The peace agreement drawn up after hours of exhausting talks in Belfast on 10 April holds out the pospect of an end to the 30 years war in Northern Ireland. That should recommend it to socialists even though little else about it does. It certainly isn’t a solution to the conflict. At worst, what it does is institutionalise the sectarian conflict at the heart of Northern Ireland society. At best it provides a new framework within which the leading communal politicians on each side can manage that conflict.

In the election to the Westminster Parliament, the “moderate” Ulster Unionist Party led by David Trimble — who lost his seat plus four others — was almost wiped out by the Paisleyite Democratic Unionist Party.

Parables for Socialists 17

Thomas Carolan continues his series on the history of Irish republicanism

The little boy, Tommy, perhaps eight years old, watched the schoolmaster, Sean Gormley, prepare to flog his brother, Mickey. Mickey was a year or two older than Tommy, but smaller.