Workers divided
The War of Independence in the south generated sectarian war in the north. 1919 saw a great engineering strike in Belfast, linked to a contemporary mass strike movement in Glasgow. Yet the fighting in the south triggered pogroms against Catholics in the north. Catholics were driven out of the shipyards and other areas of employment. So were “rotten prods” — liberals and socialists who opposed the Orange Order and supported Home Rule for all Ireland. Refugees fled south.
The Protestants acted like this — and it is as well to remember it and avoid Catholic nationalist demonisation of them — because they feared being forced into a Catholic-majority unitary Irish state and saw the Catholics as allies of a hostile power.
The northern Irish workers were the big majority of the Irish industrial working class.
That class was thus cripplingly divided. Lacking an independent working class outlook of its own, lacking politics that could allow it — north and south — to build and maintain class unity despite the Orange-Green antagonism, its different sections followed their own bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, and let them set the tone politically. Such things as the one-day general strike mounted by workers in the south in 1918 against British militarism evoked no class response in the north, because they appeared to be just blows in the nationalist cause.
Like the Free State, Northern Ireland began life as a state with a civil war, though it was not called that. Fully a third of the population in the new state were hostile to it, especially in the Border areas, for the Border normally went not between Catholic-Nationalist and Protestant-Unionist Ireland but right through Catholic-Nationalist Ireland. They had to be beaten down and kept down. The Orange forces formed the back-bone of the new sub-state. The Royal Irish Constabulary Special Constables were in fact a legal Protestant-Unionist militia. Nationalist propaganda often demonises the Protestants. It is better to understand them. They had escaped the incorporation against their will into a Catholic-majority united Ireland which the pre-1914 British Liberal government had decreed for them only by open rebellion against that government. Their rebellion succeeded — in sharp contrast to the 1916 rising, which the Protestant rebels had indirectly primed — because of the support they had within the British ruling class. They now found themselves with their own Home Rule — but they still felt under threat from the South and its giant fifth column within the Protestant state. Fear generated repression of the Catholics, and then repression became the norm of life in the Six Counties. Since 1968, a quarter of a century of irrepressible Northern Irish Catholic revolt against the descendants of the Protestants who had sought “self-determination” in their Six Counties have bitterly illustrated the truth of Karl Marx’s saying: “the people which oppresses another can never itself be free”.
Getting rid of proportional representation, which allowed minority Unionists a chance to contest elections, the Unionist party in Northern Ireland formed itself into a powerful block of all classes, workers in town and country, manufacturing bourgeoisie, pseudo-aristocrats. Prime Minister Brookeborough said openly that Northern Ireland was “a Protestant state for a Protestant people”. More explicit religious sectarianism existed in the South, which openly let the Catholic Church’s teaching determine its laws and government policies than in the North. The essential difference was a class difference. Southern Protestants were typically middle and upper-class. They could be subjected to Catholic doctrine enshrined in the law, but they still had social weight and power and money.
In the North, Catholics were not subjected to Protestant doctrine enforced by laws. Indeed, they benefitted in not having their own church doctrines imposed on them by law — on divorce and contraception, for example. But Northern Catholics were the poorer farmers and lower layers of the working class, and the starving fringes of the working class. They had no standing, no power and no money. They were kept down by a sectarian militia, discriminated against in jobs, deprived of social housing because householders had votes, and deprived in practice even of their votes.
Blatant boundary fiddling — “gerrymandering” in Derry —for example, where there were two Catholics to one Protestant, produced for decades a Council on which there were two Protestants to one Catholic.
The boundaries were so drawn that the Catholics would win what they won with a vast surplus of votes, and Protestants would win double that with just enough votes in each of the divisions.
In Northern industry the workers remained strong, but — except during World War II — there was permanent mass unemployment. Discrimination against Catholics gave Protestant workers who had jobs real privileges. Trade unions, where Protestant and Catholics held common membership developed the practice of ignoring the fact that some of their members, and people of “their sort”, were a great deal less equal than others — and thus the labour movement was sapped of much of its strength, though, broadly, it remained a force for progress.
What the labour movement was not — and could not be in the circumstances — was a force able to resist pressure from either pole of the Catholic-Protestant divide. The “constitutional question” could always be used, in its political or debased sectarian form, to disrupt working-class unity. Only a consistently democratic, commonly-agreed approach to the Catholic-Nationalist/Protestant-Unionist divide could have allowed the labour movement to fend off the sectarian and political bigots on both sides. As it was, whenever the question of the constitutional position of Northern Ireland was raised or plausibly invoked, the workers wound up accepting bourgeois and petty-bourgeois political answers — different answers according to background — and frequently they fought each other over it.
Looked at from the 1990s, even the limited unity of the old Northern Ireland labour movement — the trade unions that organised mass demonstrations against unemployment in the early ’60s and the Northern Ireland Labour Party which was among the first to raise the demand central to the civil rights movement of the ’60s, “one man, one vote” — looks like a giant step in the right direction. But that movement, by its lack of political answers and by its tacit acceptance of much of the sectarian discrimination, prepared the way for its own breakdown and for what we have now.
Is the Six Counties a democratically valid entity? Is a Protestant-Irish state possible?
Defenders of the status quo argue that the Six Counties is a democratically valid expression of a Protestant right to self-determination. That is precisely what it is not. If it were that, the history of the Six Counties for the last 25 years would have been impossible.
The fundamental flaw in that argument — as in the foundations of the “Protestant state for a Protestant people”, as one of its Prime Ministers called the Six Counties — is the sheer size of the Catholic minority, which is now 40%. They are the majority in about half the Six Counties land area. Whatever arguments can be offered for the Protestant areas of the Six Counties to have self-determination, those arguments could not justify the partition that was made in 1922. Doing partition in the way they did it rendered it untenable when the Catholic minority got round to resisting — as they did 25 years ago, after 50 years of second-class citizenship.
Implicitly Britain recognises this: for 22 years now the majority for whom the state was created have not been allowed to exercise their majority rights within the Six Counties.
The Six Counties is an unviable entity. Nevertheless, to go — as some on the left do — from this truth to the idea that no Protestant entity is possible, is to tell yourself lies. A smaller Protestant state is possible: that is what you would get as a result of the civil war that would be inevitable if the British troops left without a working political settlement.
For this reason people like De Valera, long-time nationalist leader in the South, ruled out force as a means of unifying Ireland — they knew that it could only, at its greatest power, result in shifting the border North and East, not in a united Ireland.