Workers' Liberty

This article was republished (slightly revised) in the pamphlet "Ireland: The Socialist Answer".

Lie no. 1: Ireland is a single unit.

Geoff Bell: There is nothing wrong in reassessing Marxist interpretations, but where this has led Socialist Organiser as far as this particular exercise is concerned is to the other side of the class divide. This is illustrated in the January edition of the magazine Workers' Liberty and an article therein by Sean Matgamna.

An analogy may help to explain the issues - the case of Ceylon/ Sri Lanka. I assume Geoff Bell and Socialist Outlook are in favour of the right of the Tamils to secede from the Sinhalese-dominated Sri Lankan state and set up their own state. But how did things in Ceylon/ Sri Lanka turn out like this? Look at the history.

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.

I have read with interest — and some amusement — Sean Matgamna’s history of the “Irish debate” in IS and elsewhere on the left in the period from the late 1950s to (presumably) the early 197

Chapter 3: The Troops. Part 1
Part 2
Part 3.

The situation in Northern Ireland came to a head in August. The reaction to these events was a decisive test for revolutionaries - who spend their entire existence preparing themselves precisely for situations of a breakdown of the system. IS's reaction was to do an about-face, abandoning its previous opposition to British government intervention - thus adding a final astonishing political twist to an already chequered record over the preceding 10 months of involvement on Ireland.

Part 2 of this chapter | Part 3 of this chapter | Download whole pamphlet as pdf (3 MB)

Part 1 of this chapter | Part 3 of this chapter

EDUCATION AND ACTION.

To say that agitation and propaganda are both essentially educational is not to say that they don't lead to action. It is to say that education and action must be integrated, must interact, that the most important and chief reason for anything to be said and done is that it educates the masses any rE!ises their consciousness, preferably in action. The distinction between agitation and propaganda being a matter of scale, the immediate effect often varies in scale.

Part 2 of this chapter | Part 1 of this chapter

FREEZING THE SITUATION

Alongside the talk of British imperialism being a lesser enemy, came the talk of the troops freezing the situation - inevitably suggesting passivity, almost paralysis, on the part of Britain and further minimising the dangers from the troops. The main effect was to eliminate any real perspective, to foreshorten the political sights to the immediate tactic relating to the "short run" - i.e. acceptance of the troops.

What follows is an account of the politics on Ireland of the Trotskyist Tendency, the forerunner of AWL, especially in 1968-70 — that is, of one side in the dispute in IS (forerunner of the SWP), which previous articles have described.

Ian Paisley did not jump out of the position of First Minister of Northern Ireland. He was pushed. Nudged, anyway.

In August 1969 the major group on the far left in Britain, panicked by the pogroms in Belfast and Derry, were so relieved to see the British troops go into action that for nearly a whole year they dro

Let us start on 12 October 1968. It was seven days after the RUC had batoned peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Derry. The reverberations were already hitting Northern Ireland and the rest of Ireland.

This instalment is the tenth in a series on the Northern Ireland crisis of 1968-9 and the left. The series is focused on the IS. There are good reasons for that.

An 81 year old retired Irish cardinal, Desmond Connell, has gone to the High Court in Dublin for a writ to stop his successor as Archbishop of Dublin from handing over church files on paedophile priests to a state-organised inquiry into clerical abuse of children.

This article is part nine of a series on the breakdown of the Northern Ireland state in 1968-9 — the biggest political crisis in Britain for a very long time, and one that shaped decades of ensuing "Troubles" — and the response of the left.

The wreckage of the previous policy and analysis — in so far as there ever was anything remotely resembling an independent IS analysis — cluttered the special "Irish issue" of Socialist Worker published on 21 August. It was flimsy, even as a hastily put together effort.

The leaders of IS had brought out an issue of Socialist Worker on Thursday 14 August, the same day that the troops were put to work in Derry after two days of fighting there, and just before Belfast exploded.

Part eight of a series on the Northern Ireland crisis of 1969 and the left.

• 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"
• Part 6: SWP (IS) and Northern Ireland in 1968-9: Advocating civil war — until it starts!
• Part 7: The end of the old order in Northern Ireland

Part seven of a series on the Northern Ireland crisis of 1969 — the start of nearly 40 years of “The Troubles” — and the responses of the left.

• 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"
• Part 6: SWP (IS) and Northern Ireland in 1968-9: Advocating civil war — until it started!

THE EVENTS OF AUGUST1969

Before the general breakdown of “law and order” between 12 and 15 August 1969, parts of Northern Ireland are already on fire. Serious clashes between police and Catholic youth had erupted in Derry on 12 July.
Section 1 of this article
Section 3 of this article

The aftermath

The crisis that erupted in Derry on 12 August, the breakdown of the Northern Ireland state system, would be followed after October — after the decision to abolish the B-Specials and a major gun battle by RUC and British soldiers against Protestant gunmen on the Shankhill — by a lull. Then it would erupt again, in old and familiar forms.
Section 1 of this article
Section 2 of this article

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"

(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.