Northern Ireland broke down for three interlinked reasons:
1. In the ’60s Britain began to find its Northern Ireland backyard police state an expensive embarrassment.
Especially after Labour came to power in London in October 1964, pressure was brought to bear on the new(ish) Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O’Neill to reform Northern Ireland away from Orange sectarianism. This quickly destabilised Northern Ireland because
2. The Catholics began to agitate in an unprecedented way for “civil rights”, that is equality, what they then called “British standards”. They saw themselves as part of a world-wide movement and identified particularly with the Black American civil rights movement. More and more they were not prepared to be ruled in the old way — and it was not now politically “acceptable” to London that they should be beaten down as in the past. The IRA was virtually non-existent as a military force, and could not be used as an excuse to quell the Catholic movement.
The attempt to use such methods — internment without trial, which had been frequently in use over the previous 50 years — against the Provisional IRA in August ’71, five months after its military campaign got under way, simply made Northern Ireland ungovernable. And,
3. The Unionist block fell apart. From the late ’20s this had been fervently desired by advocates of working-class unity, but it did not happen as they had hoped.
The Unionist leaders had no political skills after so long in uncontested power. They had only known how to raise sectarian Orange cries that would unite the Unionist block. Now, as a Unionist Prime Minister tried to move away from such politics, he found the old sectarian cries and alarms invoked against himself. Working-class Unionists especially feared for their jobs and status in face of Catholic demands for equality in jobs and housing. The civil rights movement way of raising it — one man [sic], one house; one man, one job; one man, one vote — seemed to imply a sharing out of what there was. The socialist approach of demanding house and job creation played no part in the civil rights agitation.
Large numbers of Protestant workers broke from the upper-class Unionists — but in the direction of Ian Paisley, militant-talking proponent of a populist Protestant sectarianism.
Large-scale sectarian fighting broke out in August 1969, and the British army moved to take control for London. Though Belfast’s parliament still existed (to March 1972) senior civil servants were put in to “shadow” Northern Ireland civil servants. The formal equality demanded by the Catholics was pushed through.
In fact, Northern Ireland remained a place of slums and unemployment for its Catholic youth. The Provisional IRA, newly formed by a split-off from the Republican movement, organised them, and changed the whole situation by launching a military campaign to “drive the Brits out of British-occupied Ireland”. They were a political sect of blind dogmatists, committed to the gun and bomb not as tactical weapons — if appropriate — but on principle; and opposed on principle to involvement in parliamentary politics.
Working-class unity?
Any acceptable way forward in Ireland demands working-class unity. We do not have working-class unity except episodically in limited trade union action.
Northern Irish workers are divided about “the Constitutional Question”. A united Ireland? Union with Britain? An independent Northern Ireland?
The chronic antagonism between the big Catholic minority and the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland has prevented working class unity developing on class politics and repeatedly destroyed it where it has existed for limited trade-union-type goals. We believe that only on the basis of an agreed constitutional arrangement acceptable to most people in the Catholic and Protestant communities can real working-class unity across the divide be built. We advocate a united Ireland with Protestant area autonomy as such a basis.
Offering no such proposals, sections of the left — Socialist Worker, for example — alternate between cheering on the Provisionals and appealing for unity on the basis of bread-and-butter issues. Two examples of spectacular unity are frequently cited: 1907 and 1932 in Belfast.
Of course, working-class unity should be sought and fought for on every possible level, however small. But, as we’ll see, both of these much-cited cases prove the opposite to what they are cited to prove: they prove that without an agreed solution to the “constitutional” question, lasting unity of the working class is impossible.
In 1907 Jim Larkin united Protestant and Catholic workers for a while. If the leaders of his trade union — the National Dock Labourers Union — had not sold out the strike Larkin was leading things would have gone better with working-class unity. But the brief unity in 1907 was followed immediately afterwards by brutal sectarian rioting.
In 1932, ‘Outdoor Relief’ for the unemployed was cut by the UK government, hitting Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants alike. Both the Protestant Shankill and the Catholic Falls areas erected barricades. Influenced by the Communist Party of Ireland, militants from both areas changed places. The Catholics went to the Shankill barricades and the Protestants to those in the Falls, so that the regular police who knew them in their home ground would not be able to identify them.
Not long after this, too, there was sharp sectarian fighting.
It is no use saying that it was a matter of deliberate ruling class divide-and-rule and the fabrication of conflict. It was, to some extent. But it is not always — and it was not in 1969 and after. The point to grasp is that conflict is built into the situation, and without agreed political answers to the “constitutional issue” there cannot be lasting unity. Without working-class political answers to the issues that put worker against worker, the unity that now exists on a trade union level can not develop into class unity for decisive political goals.