The recent Loyalist riots should remind us that the Good Friday Agreement was a palliative not a solution – only the end of Partition will achieve that
Yesterday was the
anniversary of the death of Bobby Sands, MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. Sands
died on hunger strike 40 years ago. Despite being elected to parliament he was
allowed to die because Thatcher was determined not to concede to demands for
political status for the IRA prisoners.
In the end the demands of the hunger strikers
were conceded because even the stupidest member of the British ruling class
came to understand that their intransigence had simply resulted in massively
increased support for the IRA and Sinn Fein. In 1983 Gerry Adams was elected as
MP for West Belfast displacing Gerry Fitt ‘the Brit’.
Of course Bobby Sands was
deemed a ‘terrorist’ as have all those who took up arms against the British in
the colonies. And Ireland was our oldest
colony. If you are a British racist then the British army could do no wrong
wherever it ventured whereas those who took up arms against it were always in
the wrong.
Israel has the same policy today.
Anyone who opposes Israel’s occupation army is considered a terrorist whereas
Israel, despite its atrocities against children even is never considered a
terrorist state.
However the days of Unionism
are numbered. Britain no longer has a strategic interest in maintaining the
union. British investment today is in the South not the North. The shipyards and engineering factories of
Belfast are gone. That is why successive governments from Harold Wilson onwards
have refused to resurrect the Protestant Supremacist police statelet that
existed between 1921 and 1969.
Brexit has produced some
uncomfortable truths for the Unionists. Large sections of the Protestant
farming community look towards the South and the European Union today, not the
mainland. That is why Boris Johnson, despite promises to the contrary, reneged
on his promises to the DUP and placed a tariff border down the Irish sea in
order that Northern Ireland could stay in the customs union.
The days of the Unionist
veto are long since gone. The Protestant community itself was split during the
2016 referendum over Europe. The DUP, being a stupid party, never thought that
Brexit would hasten the end of Unionism.
There is probably a majority
for Irish unity today in the north of Ireland. I would expect that if such a
referendum were held and Boris Johnson will resist one to the end, that a chunk
of the Protestant community would also vote to unite.
History is against the
Loyalists of Ulster. They are an anachronism of the Empire. The days of the
Curragh Mutiny are long since gone. Of course the Protestant paramilitaries
would promise civil war and violence should a referendum be held on the border.
When I visited Northern
Ireland in the 1980s as part of a Labour Party delegation from Brighton we
visited the headquarters of the UDA, a Protestant terrorist group who were
legal at the time, because some forms of terrorism were acceptable to the
British army.
Speaking to Andy Tyrie, the
commander and John MacMichael, who was later assassinated by the IRA, was like
being taken back in time. They looked to the golden days of Empire. They told
us of the days in Liverpool when there was a sectarian Protestant party on the
Council which allied with the Tories never asking themselves why working class
people should vote Tory. In Liverpool that party disappeared but not in
Northern Ireland.
The Protestant working class
voted against its own interests and for Unionist parties allied to the Tories since
1922. That is the effect of settler colonialism. It creates an alliance between
the settler working class and ruling class even if, as in the case of Northern
Ireland the privileges that the Protestant working class gained over their
Catholic neighbours were minimal.
The Good Friday agreement
which ended the struggle of the IRA and led to a power sharing agreement in the
Northern Ireland Assembly was in essence a palliative. The British ruling class
was under immense pressure from the American ruling class to resolve the crisis, which Blair did.
However the situation in the North has not been resolved as the latest riots
demonstrated.
Beneath the surface the old
antagonisms remain. The Protestant working class is embittered that they have
been ‘sold out’ as if the British ruling class every owed any loyalty to those
who pledged fealty to them.
At the heart of the problem
is the border, Partition. Of course today it is a notional border without
customs posts. It is a border without any natural geographical features such as
rivers. Its basis for existing was the
need to produce an artificial majority for the Protestants in the North.
As James Connolly, the
revolutionary socialist who was executed for his part in the Easter Rising
said, Partition would create ‘a carnival
of reaction on both sides of the border’. He was of right in his prediction
Not only in Ireland but India, Cyprus and Palestine. Partition and communalism
were the favourite divide and rule tactics of the British in their efforts to
maintain neo-colonial rule.
The British working class has
never been distinguished by its support for the struggle of Irish people or the
IRA but during the miners’ strike, when there were massive confrontations with
the British state, the Police and reputedly the army in civilian uniforms, this
began to break down,
I worked closely with miners
from Kent coalfield and visited and stayed with strikers in Yorkshire. I heard
repeatedly the same sentiment after the failed IRA attack on the Grand Hotel in
Brighton in 1984: ‘Pity they didn’t get
her.’ Indeed to my surprise, as I was volunteering in an old peoples’ home
at the time (when Councils ran such things) one of the cooks in the kitchen
expressed her disappointment that Thatcher had survived.
During the bitterest episode
of class struggle in the last century, elements of the British working class began
to see that the struggle of colonial peoples against the British ruling class was
also their struggle.
Below is the article I wrote last year and beneath
that Peter Bolton’s article in the Canary.
Tony Greenstein
The Stupidity of
Thatcher and the British Government in Refusing Political Status for Republican
Prisoners led to the growth of Sinn Fein North and South
Bobby Sands wasn’t the first Irish hunger striker nor
was he the last to die. Terence MacSwiney, the elected Sinn Fein
Mayor of Cork, died in Brixton prison in October 1920 after 74 days on hunger
strike. He had been arrested by the British government on a charge of sedition,
a clearly political ‘crime’. 10 hunger strikers
died in 1981.
|
Roy Mason, Labour's Northern Ireland Secretary, behaved like a typical
British Colonial Secretary |
Their demands were for the return of political
status which had been removed on March 1 1976 by Merlyn Rees, Labour’s Northern Ireland
Minister. He was succeeded by the hated Roy Mason who was worse than any Tory
imperialist ruler.
At first the reaction to the removal of political
status was the blanket and dirty protest where faeces were spread on the
walls. Eventually that led to the hunger strikes. The behaviour of Roy
Mason in provoking what became the hunger strikes led to the defeat of the
Labour government when Frank MacGuire,
the Independent Republican MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone abstained in
person.
Of course there are racists and imperialist dupes who
chime up that the IRA were ‘men of violence’ and ‘terrorists’. The same people
have no problem in supporting the ‘men of violence’ when it comes to the
invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Libya, Israel’s war against the Palestinian
people and any other imperial adventures. But when people fight back against
colonialism and imperialism it is terrorism. The same is true in
Palestine. The only ‘terrorists’ are the Palestinians, never the Israeli
state.
 |
|
The 10 Hunger Strikers Who Died |
During the 16th and 17th
centuries Ireland and in particular Ulster was subject to the Plantation, the colonisation
of Ireland by thousands of settlers from Britain, Scotland in particular. This
was enabled through the confiscation, i.e. theft of land from the indigenous
population. This Protestant population was then used as a foil by the British
state in order to undermine and subvert Irish unity.
The same happened in Palestine with the settlement of
Jews from Europe and it is what the Indian government today is intending to do
in Kashmir.
|
Bobby
Sands funeral cortege accompanied by 6 IRA men |
I was a member of the Troops Out Movement and I
arrived on a fact finding/solidarity tour on 8th August 1981 as the
9th hunger striker, Thomas McElwee died. I’ll never
forget the scene on the Falls Road, the main road through the Catholic ghetto
of West Belfast, with hundreds of women banging dustbin lids on the road to
announce the death.
Here was a working class community basically in
insurrection. I had never seen anything like this and wasn’t to see anything
like it until I stayed during the miners’ strike in the South Yorkshire village
of Armthorpe in December 1984. Armthorpe had been subject to a siege by
the corrupt and murderous South Yorkshire Police.
Although he died, it was
Bobby Sands who won out against Thatcher
The British strategy in Northern Ireland was
criminalisation. According to this fiction the IRA and INLA were merely common
criminals like any bank robber. This has always been the reaction of the
British to colonial uprisings. Whether it was the Indian Mutiny or
the Mau Mau Uprising
in Kenya the only reason that people rebelled against British rule was for base
criminal reasons. There was nothing political about it. This was the
self-deception that the British comforted themselves with. It was an illusion
and a lie.
|
The 5 Demands |
The fact is that the Catholic population of Northern Ireland had never accepted the constitutional set up. In 1918 Sinn Fein won the all-Ireland general election winning 73 out of 105 seats. The Liberal government under Asquith had refused to implement the Home Rule Act of 1914 as a consequence of the Curragh Mutiny by army officers. After the Easter Rising in 1917 and Sinn Fein's election victory, which the British refused to accept, there began the war of independence.
There was a civil war in the Free State in Southern
Ireland between 1922 and 1923. The British had threatened war and destruction
unless the Irish accepted Partition. Partition, the favourite solution of
imperialism to its divide and rule tactics in settler colonies, was imposed on the
Irish people. The nationalist population of the north of Ireland had never
accepted Partition and the IRA was the consequence.
|
Some of the thousands of mourners at Bobby Sands funeral |
Partition has had disastrous consequences wherever it
has been imposed in the world, be it Cyprus or India or indeed
Palestine. As James Connolly predicted, Partition
would mean a carnival of
reaction both North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would
destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour movement and paralyse all
advanced movements whilst it endured.
The Northern Ireland police statelet was created in
1921 and until 1972, when direct rule was imposed, there was what was called a Protestant state for a
Protestant people with gerrymandering widespread. For example in Derry, there
was a perpetual Unionist council even though Catholics formed the majority of
the population by the simple device of making Catholic wards larger.
There grew up a civil rights movement
in northern Ireland. In 1967 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was
formed. It was a completely peaceful movement but it was met with state and
unionist violence.
On 4 January 1969 a People's Democracy march from Belfast to Derry was violently attacked at Burntollet Bridge.
This was the beginning of the Troubles in
Northern Ireland.
The march had been called in defiance of an appeal by
Northern Ireland Prime Minister Terence O'Neill for an end to protest. The
Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association
and some Derry nationalists had advised
against it. Supporters of Ian
Paisley, led by Major Ronald Bunting ,
denounced the march and mounted counter-demonstrations along the route.
At Burntollet an Ulster loyalist
crowd numbering in the region of 300, including 100 off-duty members of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC), attacked the
civil rights marchers with stones as well as iron bars and sticks spiked with
nails. Nearby members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did nothing to
prevent the violence.
In the Battle of the Bogside, from 12-14 August the B-Specials, an all-Protestant paramilitary force and Unionists tried to invade what became Free Derry. It was repelled by a civil insurrection and barricades were thrown up. It was a colonial rebellion by the Catholics of the north. It was euphemistically called ‘The Troubles’.
At that time there was no IRA. The IRA was
reformed and split into the Officials ‘stickies’ and Provisionals. The
former claimed to be Marxist but ended up as the right-wing Workers Party in
Southern Ireland. In 1969 the IRA stood for ‘I Ran Away’.
In 1981 the Hunger Strike began on March 1st
with Bobby Sands, the officer commanding the IRA in Long Kesh refusing his
breakfast. On March 5th the sitting nationalist MP Frank MacGuire
died. Bobby Sands was nominated in the by-election that
followed and he defeated the sole Unionist candidate, Harry West by some 1,400
votes. Sands never took his seat. He died 26 days later.
This was the context in which the hunger strikes took place and the sacrifice of Bobby Sands and the other 9 men. Eventually the relatives of the hunger strikers insisted that the strike was called off but the demands were effectively won by then. In any event the British government had lost politically and northern Ireland would never be the same again.
The hunger strike led to the rise of Sinn Fein and in
1983 Gerry Adams was elected as the MP for West Belfast defeating the sitting
MP, Gerry ‘the Brit’ Fitt. The continual accusation by supporters of Britain’s
occupation was that the IRA didn’t have the support of the Catholic population.
The election of Bobby Sands by the voters of Fermanagh and South Tyrone and
then the victory of Gerry Adams proved once and for all that the IRA had the
passive, if not active, support of the working class Catholic population of
Northern Ireland.
In the succeeding years the right-wing Social
Democratic and Labour Party, the ‘moderate’ nationalist party, was eclipsed and
Sinn Fein became the majority party of the Catholic population.
British colonialism has always been led by stupid and
arrogant imperialists and none was more stupid than Thatcher who believed that
her attempts to criminalise the Republican struggle would somehow stop the
march of history.
With the Good Friday Agreement
under Blair in 1998 the violence in Northern Ireland stopped, at least for the
time being but as long as Ireland is partitioned, there will never be peace.
Below is an excellent article
from Canary.
Tony Greenstein
We
should never forget Bobby Sands, nor the brutality of the Thatcher government
in Ireland
Today marks the 40th
anniversary
of the death of Bobby Sands inside the H-blocks of Long Kesh internment camp.
On 5 May 1981, Sands laid
down his life for his and his comrades’ right for recognition as political
prisoners. On this day, we should remember the sacrifice he made for the cause
of Irish freedom. But his struggle does not just provide an example that all
anti-imperialists should follow. It also serves as an important reminder of the
ruthless brutality of the British government in Ireland under the leadership of
then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher. And that is equally something that we
should never forget.
‘Criminalisation’
leads to ‘blanket protest’
On 1 March, 1976, the
British government announced
an end to ‘Special Category’ status for members of paramilitary organisations
imprisoned for offences related to the conflict in Ireland. This formed part of
a multi-pronged propaganda strategy to falsely
portray the republican insurrection against British rule as some kind of
aggravated crime wave.
In response,
republican prisoners began
a series of protests to regain the lost privileges, as well as the symbolic
importance of prisoner of war status. This included the right to
wear one’s own clothes, free association and exemption from prison work. IRA
volunteer Kieran Nugent began
the ‘blanket protest’ when he refused to wear a prison uniform. Thrown into his
cell naked, he draped
himself in the only thing available – a grey, prison-issue blanket.
The
‘dirty protest’ and the 1980 hunger strike
After suffering
beatings from prison officers on their way to the shower areas, republican
prisoners began
the ‘no wash protest’, in which they refused to bathe, cut their hair or shave.
When prison officers refused
to empty their chamber pots, republican prisoners were forced to smear their
own excrement on the walls, which marked the beginning
of the ‘dirty protest’.
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In 1979, their
prospects became even bleaker with the election
of the right-wing
government of Margaret Thatcher in Britain. When it became clear
that Thatcher wouldn’t grant even the most modest of concessions, republican
prisoners began
a hunger strike in 1980. It ended
without any deaths when her government appeared to concede some of the
strikers’ demands. But the document containing the terms of the agreement turned
out to be vague and open to interpretation, and the prison regime was quickly
returned to a situation little better than how it was before.
A
second hunger strike, and this time to the death
Determined not to be
double-crossed again, the new Officer Commanding (OC) of the republican
prisoners, 27-year-old Bobby Sands, launched
a second hunger strike with a crucial difference from the last. The strikers
would stagger
their joining of the fast one-by-one and two
weeks apart so that each would near death one at a time. As OC, Sands volunteered
to go first, making him the most likely to die. On 1 March, 1981, Sands refused
his prison food, beginning the second hunger strike in Long Kesh just over two
months after
the end of the first.
On 5 March, less than
a week into Sands’ fast, Frank Maguire, the independent
nationalist member of parliament for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, died
suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving his seat in Westminster vacant. The
republican leadership on the outside hatched a plan. They were forever getting dismissed by
political opponents for not having a mandate, but if they stood Sands as a
candidate in the resultant by-election
and won, they could demonstrate
to the British government and the wider world that the hunger strikers’ demands
had popular support in the community.
A
bittersweet victory
On 9 April 1981,
Bobby Sands won
the election with over
30,000 votes – almost 10,000 more than Thatcher
had won in her home constituency of Finchley in the 1979
UK general election. The victory provided the republican
movement with a powerful morale boost and demolished the British government’s
argument that they had no support.
But in spite of
Sands’ victory, along with international
pressure from the Irish diaspora abroad and others around the world,
Thatcher refused
to budge. On May 5, 1981, Bobby Sands died
of starvation 66 days into his fast at 27 years of age. Over 100,000 mourners lined his cortege in one
of the largest
political funerals in Irish history.
International
outcry
Sands’ death led to international outcry at
the treatment of the prisoners and Thatcher’s intransigence in meeting their
demands. Critics pointed
out that as members of a guerrilla army operating in contested
territory, republican prisoners were entitled
under the Geneva Convention to be recognised as prisoners of war. One letter,
sent from one Bernard
Sanders (then-mayor of Burlington, Vermont in the US), stated:
We are deeply disturbed
by your government’s unwillingness to stop the abuse, humiliation and degrading
treatment of the Irish prisoners now on strike in Northern Ireland…
We ask you to end
your intransigent policy towards the prisoners before the reputation of the
English people for fair play and simple decency is further damaged in the eyes
of the people of Vermont and the United States.
In October 1981, the
British government eventually conceded
most of the prisoners’ demands; but not before nine more republican hunger
strikers had followed
Sands to the grave.
This episode perhaps shows
more than any other the utter depravity, brutality, ruthlessness and lack of
humanity that lurked within the twisted soul of Margaret Thatcher. All but one
of the men were under
30 years old and left
behind grieving mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and, in some cases, children
– all for the ‘crime’ of fighting back against foreign oppression and
discrimination in their own country.
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