What does Britain want?
Ireland has been many things to England and Britain over the centuries. The first colony. Land and people to rob and plunder. A strategically and militarily crucial area to guard Britain’s sea lanes. An area that had to be held onto to prevent other powers using it against Britain.
What does Britain want in Ireland today? Though as late as World War II Britain had serious plans to invade the island to regain the sea ports that she gave up in 1938, strategically Ireland has no value to Britain now.
It would perhaps have been useful to NATO to have had bases in the South during the long stand-off with Russia: partition ruled that out. Partition did not help imperialism on this count, it hindered. Sean MacBride, as foreign minister in 1949, when NATO started, offered bases in return for reunification, so his Cabinet and Party colleague Noel Browne says.
Economically, Northern Ireland is an immense waste of British resources, costing probably over £2 billion a year.
Britain stays because states do not abdicate and abandon part of their own territory to anarchy and civil war. Britain stays because it has not yet been able, or dared, to promote a political solution that would allow it to go without terrible consequences. Britain has learned to live with the limited war of the last 20 years.
There was widespread belief in the late 1960s that Britain was preparing the way for Irish unity within the EC. It was one of the things that stirred up Protestants. The Provisional IRA war has set back Irish unity, not brought it forward!
Troops Out?
Troops out is the fetish of a British left which seems to believe that Troops Out means a united Ireland.
This is gross delusion. Troops out without a prior political settlement would put it up to the Protestants to secure their own self-determination against the rest of the Irish, arms in hand. Open civil war would ensue in the Six Counties, and probably the South would be drawn in. In areas where the populations are interlaced, there would be Bosnia-style “ethnic cleansing”. Belfast, which is 40% Catholic, would become what Beirut was in the ’80s; so would Derry. At the end of all this you would still have two Irelands, with the border redrawn and a united Ireland much farther away than now. Even the Provisional IRA calls not for “Troops Out Now” but for a negotiated withdrawal. For many on the left in Britain it is not a matter at all of what happens in Ireland. They are concerned above all else with “militant” posturing in Britain — secure in the knowledge that the government will not comply with the Troops Out demand. Such nonsense rules the left out of serious discussion of the real issues.
Troops Out should be demanded as part of a political settlement — and the political settlement is the harder, and more important, thing to get.
Permanent Revolution
On the “Trotskyist” left it is an article of faith that Ireland is going through or can experience a “process” of “Permanent Revolution”.
What is permanent revolution? In history the bourgeoisie have made revolutions — in Britain in the 17th century, and in France in the 18th century for example. They overthrew the monarch and established the rule of law; they destroyed feudal remnants, and opened the way to capitalist economic development and trade; they set up republics based on equal citizenship.
Tsarist Russia was an absolute monarchy needing such a revolution. But from the end of the last century Russia — unlike 17th century England and 18th century France — had a powerful militant class-conscious industrial working class, which wanted a socialist revolution. Trotsky — and Lenin in 1917 — argued that the working class could and should make both sorts of revolution in quick continuous succession, taking power and allying with the peasantry to smash the absolute monarchy, but going on without interruption to carry through socialist measures against Russian capitalism. At the same time the workers in backward Russia, which was unripe for socialism, would form part of an international chain reaction involving the advanced countries of Europe, which were ripe. Thus, the “Permanent Revolution”.
The national Russian part of the perspective was brilliantly realised in 1917; the spread of the revolution failed and went down to defeat with the revolutionary socialist workers of Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary and elsewhere.
The notion that Permanent Revolution is a scenario for Ireland depends on the belief or the unanalysed assumption that “the bourgeois revolution” has not been “completed” in Ireland, and that Irish unification is the completion of the “bourgeois revolution”. But that is scholasticism gone mad, or pedantry raised to the level of idiocy!
All of Ireland is bourgeois; the south has far fewer of the trappings of a pre-capitalist era than Britain has. The division of Ireland is fundamentally a division of the people of Ireland, neither a matter of pre-capitalist division nor even, fundamentally, of a foreign imposition on the people of Ireland.
Central to the development of Ireland into what it is now is the fact that “Northern Ireland” experienced its bourgeois revolution together with England and that the plunder and exploitation of the rest of Ireland in the course of this English bourgeois revolution held back the “bourgeois revolution” in the south for centuries, so that Michael Davitt could plausibly identify the fall of Irish landlordism with the “fall of feudalism in Ireland”.
In practice, what talk of “Permanent Revolution” comes down to is a rationale for uncritically supporting the militarism of the Provos. It is a phenomenon of the decay of “Trotskyism” into the kitsch Trotskyism of populist fantasies.
It is not even true that the Provo war can be a war of national liberation. It is a war of a small and isolated section of the Irish people, the Northern Irish Catholics. About one third of them, or maybe 4% of the Irish people, support the Provisional IRA.
Two nations?
From way back in the centuries, the Protestant population of north-east Ulster had been called “Ulster Scots’’ or subsumed into a general category, “the English in Ireland’’. Are they a distinct nation? This question has bedevilled rational discussion for 25 years, since the breakdown of the Six-County state.
Oppressed nations need to assert their identity against force and pressures, and are normally loth to admit complicating factors such as other peoples, or elements of other peoples, within their own claimed territory. The “Ulster Scots’’ were long used, and were eager to be used, as both instrument and argument against Home Rule for the Irish majority. They had very powerful patrons in the English ruling class.
In 1922 they were set up in their own sub-state, with not only brutal indifference to the feelings of the majority on the island — which, in the last extremity, the “Ulster Scots’’ would have had a right to defy in pursuit of their own self-determination — but also calculated disregard for the rights of the Catholic minority in the Six Counties. That minority was a bigger proportion of the Six Counties’ population than the Protestants of all Ireland would have been in a united Ireland.
On the left, since the end of the 1960s, the idea of recognising that the Protestants are a distinct people has been associated with the “Two Nations’’ theory and the politics of a group of scholastic ex-Maoists, with more industry than brains, who switched overnight from calling the Six Counties a fascist state to defending it and the extant Unionist cause as expressions of the rights of the Northern Ireland Protestants. They reprised the Northern Ireland Communist Party’s World-War-2 identification with Unionism, with a crassness all their own.
But there are worse “two-nations-ists’’. At the heart of much that the Provisional IRA and groups like the Irish National Liberation Army and the Irish People’s Liberation Organisation have done to the Irish Protestant community is the idea that the Protestants are a bad, traitorous people, against whom anything can be done if they continue to reject the “anti-imperialism’’ and anti-Britishness of the Catholic nationalists. Implicitly this is recognition that the compact block of one million Protestants forms a distinct people — a “bad nation’’, so to speak.
That is even worse than the crass Unionist apologetics of the one-time Maoists.
However you define them, it is impossible to deny that the Protestants of north-east Ulster are a distinct people. It is better for people in Catholic-nationalist Ireland to accept this fact, come to terms with it, and try constructively to build a new Ireland in the only way it can be built, with the material to hand.
The only possible united Ireland is a united Ireland that recognises autonomy for the Protestant-Unionist areas. In retrospect, it can be seen that this has been true for 150 years.
It seems that Gladstone talked privately about some sort of federal arrangement to accommodate the proclaimed identity of the Ulster Protestants, but it had no part in his Home Rule Bills. De Valera toyed with the idea, too late, in the early 1920s. The federalism advocated by the Provisional IRA between 1972 and 1981 was bizarre (four provincial parliaments, one for a nine-county Ulster), but it half-recognised the problem.
Fully to recognise it is the only way forward.
Capitalism in Ireland
Until this century Ireland was mostly a country of landlords and their tenants, small farmers living off a plot of potatoes and a few animals.
Ireland’s first industry was handloom weaving. This developed in the Protestant north-east in the 18th century. Capital was provided by merchants; the work was done by small-farmer households in their homes.
Until around 1800 almost all exports went through Dublin, but after that an agricultural south and an industrial north, developed, linked separately to Britain through Dublin and through Belfast. Factories — cotton mills, then linen mills — and, later, engineering works and shipyards, developed in Belfast, while the south was turned over to sheep-walks and cattle pasture.
In 1911 Ulster had 48% of all Ireland’s industrial workers. But over the last 30 or 40 years, Northern Ireland’s traditional industries have declined, and new industries have grown up in the South. The South is now more industrialised than the North, though it is also much more rural.