Workers' Liberty #64/5 - Peace in Northern Ireland? September 2000.

IRELAND

Peace in Northern Ireland?

A kitchen in a student flat. Half a dozen people have gathered around a small portable TV set to watch something which is of special interest to them on Newsnight.

Sean Matgamna takes notes.

Tariq [a bit pissed, shaking his head and grinning in warm appreciation of what he has just seen]: It never ceases to amaze me.

Jane [affectionately]: What? How cosy the world seems when the drink begins to kick in?

Tariq: I'm used to that! No - Gerry Adams. The way that guy handles the interviewers... Brilliant! The sheer professionalism. He always beats them at their own game. He gets his message across - every time!

Jane: What never ceases to amaze me is what a soft ride Adams and his friends are always given these days.

P-J: You're so hostile to the Provos that nothing would satisfy you short of reimposing Thatcher's old ban on letting them speak in the media at all - shut them up!

Jane: You reckon? No, I'd let you speak all right. But I wouldn't let you get away with lies and double-talk and misrepresentation - sectarian misrepresentation much of the time.

Roisin: Come on, P-J, that was a ridiculously "soft" interview. And it was typical.

Jane: The Provos' and Blairites' picture of what's going on is almost never questioned. Analysis of the overall picture has disappeared from most of the media. We just get spin-liar hype and manipulation about peace.

Tariq: But peace is the point, Jane! The Good Friday Agreement is peace. That is the common ground Adams and McGuinness have with the interviewers. And they use it brilliantly!

P-J: And the Provos are doing their best to make peace and the Good Friday Agreement work. Peace is exactly the point. It is the prerequisite for a lot of other desirable things. And peace is what Jane is against, just like she's against the Good Friday Agreement and the Provos. In fact, because she's against the Good Friday Agreement and the Provos.

Jane: Ah, the peace-loving Provos! [Mock singing] All we are saying is give peace a chance! Eh? Come on, P-J? Who could be against peace if the alternative is a senseless war like the Provos waged for so long?

P-J: You are! You are for peace in general, but against every single element that adds up to the really-existing peace, the one we've got, the only Northern Ireland peace possible at present. You don't like the Good Friday Agreement. You refuse to support it. You don't like the Provos. You denounce them!

Roisin: And she doesn't like Tony Blair or his Government either! Or the Dublin government. Or Bill Clinton. You've got it, P-J, by George, I think you've got it - she's a bloody communist!

P-J: No, not like me. I want peace because I want to see progress in Ireland. And I'm prepared to support all the forces making for peace, including the Provos.

Patrick: And your double-talk doesn't help. Jane, you can't be for peace unless you throw your weight behind the forces of peace, especially those on the left who are fighting for peace. In the first place that means supporting the Provos.

Jane: I can't be for peace unless I endorse and support the bullshit, the lying hype and the misrepresentation of the Government, the media and the sectarian Catholic nationalists like Adams? Unless I positively endorse the intricately structured system of sectarian politics - bureaucratic sectarianism - that the Good Friday Agreement has put in place.

P-J: Sinn Fein represents peace, and therefore hope for the future. The same goes for the Good Friday Agreement. Whatever its faults and limitations, there is no alternative.

Roisin: Oh, my old friend TINA - patron saint of the "realists", and the acquiescent - comforter of people who have lost the will to create better alternatives.

P-J: Maybe, but sometimes also the guiding spirit of revolutionaries. The Good Friday Agreement will bring peace, and for socialists peace is the groundwork of future working-class unity in Ireland.

Jane: And to help sustain it we must sing naive hymns of praise to it? We must not criticise it too harshly for the sectarian stitch-up it is? If we do it will collapse?

P-J: Some people sing "naive hymns of praise" to it. Others can't stop snarling preconceived criticism of it. You, for example, Jane. Blind to facts. Indifferent to the realities.

P-J: At every crisis, you have been eager to jump to the conclusion that the Good Friday Agreement had collapsed. You have been obscenely gleeful about it.

Roisin: Fucking little commie! No confidence in Blair and Adams and their Agreement, that's Janie for you.

P-J: It's not a question of confidence in Blair, but confidence in the Irish people who voted overwhelmingly for the Good Friday Agreement.

Jane: Isn't it a bit early to be talking about the end? It does look like the Belfast government is settling down. But if there were an election tomorrow, a majority of Protestants would most likely vote against Trimble. What then?

P-J: But you want them to vote against Trimble, don't you? Yes, the power-sharing executive could still collapse.

Roisin: It's supposed to be about reconciling the Protestants and Catholics. Finding a way for them to live together.

P-J: Come on! You should side with the oppressed - with the Catholics, with Sinn Fein. So long as the Protestants keep quiet and don't cause too much trouble, that's all that matters. Otherwise, who cares? They are the oppressors. To be for Protestant rights is to be against Catholic rights.

Patrick: Yeah. They disgust me! Waving their Union Jacks, beating their stupid drums, wearing their ridiculous clothes. Remember that ad for Home Pride Flour - all the identical busy little men in their bowler hats self-importantly sifting the flour? Orangemen - just add a strut and a swagger!

Tariq: And the others - the fascist-style thugs with their bulging muscles, tattoos and cropped heads. Yuk!

Roisin: What snobs you are! Inverted snobs, too! Did you ever see an old-fashioned full-dress Catholic Irish Hibernian march, Pat? No bowler hats and best suits there, but green kilts, white blouses, saffron-yellow shawls and lovely big berets!

Jane: The Orangemen wear the clothes of Sunday-best plebs about the year 1900. It has become formalised.

Patrick: The way they dress shows what they are, what they aspire to, their ideal.

Roisin: J-e-e-e-sus. You don't like their dress sense on parades, so you dismiss and demonise a million Irish people and their rights and traditions. Who cares about them unless they kick up a fuss? Rise out of your own fucking prejudices.

Roisin: I'm not making fun - I'm drooling. The sight of a man in a green skirt: best turn-on I know. You should see my collection of photos!

Roisin: I'm being as serious as you are with your stupid prejudices - bowler hats! If only the Orangemen had learned to wear orange skirts under their sashes and bowlers then everything would have been all right.

Roisin: Don't inflict your English-imperialist vocabulary on me, toots. I'm not an idiot. An Irish female idiot is an oinseach.

Jane: And what's the name for an English idiot who is a vicarious Irish Catholic nationalist?

Roisin: And the Protestant Irish are not my people too? You vicarious Irish nationalists can pick and choose. Us natives are stuck with what Ireland is. Ever hear about Wolfe Tone and the idea that all the people of Ireland, Protestant and Catholic, are equal? No - obviously not! You people aren't even nationalists - Catholic communalists!

Jane: Yes, he has heard of Wolfe Tone. He just thinks that Adams the Catholic communalist knows better. Start by being politically serious, P-J. I'll tell you what's wrong with the Good Friday Agreement and why no socialist or democrat should support it. It may be better than the old war of bullets and bombs. But the new system institutionalises sectarianism. It gives politicians on both sides a powerful vested interest in perpetuating sectarianism. It is a system of bulwarks and roadblocks against the development of working-class politics in Northern Ireland. Coalition is built into the constitution - coalition built on Protestant-Unionist and Catholic-Nationalist blocs. You have to declare yourself Unionist or Nationalist.

Roisin: Yeah. But there are precious few "others". Anybody who wants to desert her own communal bloc will have to be willing to risk giving "the other side" a commensurate advantage. The pressure against breaking out of your communal bloc is massively strengthened by this bureaucratic political sectarian structure, the pressure against working class politics is massively greater

Tariq: But Jane, you can't think war is better? Or that working-class politics will have a better chance if the war resumes? And that's the only alternative now.

Tariq: You have to choose - peace or war. A sectarian peace is better than a sectarian war. It is still plainly the lesser evil.

Jane: Well, yes. But why do I have to pretend that a political system of intricately structured and formalised sectarianism is anything other than what it is? Why do I have to endorse something I know stinks, or be branded bloodthirsty? Why do I have to pretend that it is a solution?

Tariq: No-one is saying that the Good Friday Agreement is perfect. No-one says you can't criticise it, so long as you do it responsibly. But you have to support it. It is the alternative to war, and you don't have another one to offer.

Roisin: Is it a solution? It buys off the Provos' war - for now, maybe for ever. There are a lot of Republican militarists it hasn't bought off. The Protestant militarists, on ceasefire for now, are by no means confident that Trimble will save them forever from being pushed by the British and the Americans under Dublin rule.

Jane: The question is how much of a war the dissident Provos can reignite, how much support leaks from the Provos to those who continue their old policy, and how much they "detonate" the Protestants.

Roisin: Northern Ireland is divided into Protestant and Catholic warlord fiefdoms.

Tariq: Why don't you give the Provos your support in winning people over to peace, instead of encouraging the diehard militarists with your irresponsible attacks on the Good Friday Agreement?

Roisin: Peace is not the be-all and end-all! Class politics is. The GFA enshrines sectarianism. The Provos are a sectarian communalist movement. Socialists, if they are socialists, can't see themselves and their politics as small-change make-weights for the - perhaps - lesser evil of Holy Tony, Saint Gerry and the GFA. Our job is to put our own programme, our own solution - in this case, a federal united Ireland linked to Britain. Yes, maybe, the diehard militants are isolated - for the moment.

P-J: The GFA gets rid of Catholic oppression. That was the root cause of the war.

Patrick: No, it gives us the chance to start building new institutions, and new links between the different traditions in Ireland. You denounced the Provos' war. Now they are trying to make peace, you denounce them for that too!

Roisin: And the root cause of Catholic oppression? The Six County partition state! That goes on.

Patrick: And you're going to abolish it tomorrow, are you? It's all very well being very pure and revolutionary from a distance, but the Irish people have decided they want to make peace through what's available - meaning the Good Friday Agreement - and it's our job to support them.

Roisin: No, I'm not going to abolish it tomorrow. But because I can't abolish it, I am not going to endorse it, or pretend it is other than what it is.

P-J: You can't abolish it any more than we can. But we are working towards abolishing it. All you can do is talk against it - and you will, won't you? We get on with making the best of the situation.

Jane: The first action is to say what is! Those who do not dare say what is will never bring into being something closer to what should be.

Roisin: Indeed, but to formalise what exists in an intricate structure of sectarian checks and balances, as the GFA does, is to freeze it. To structure politics like that is to create a mass vested interest of politicians in cultivating, sustaining and perpetuating sectarianism.

Tariq: I simply don't understand what you are saying: the structures reflect the reality. You can't wish it away.

Jane: There are other ways of dealing with the realities of Northern Ireland than to create an entire political system of bureaucratically structured sectarianism.

Roisin: And even if there weren't, the job of socialists is to describe the new structures for what they are - institutionalised sectarian political warfare within an artificial Six County entity: communal structures in which Protestant-Unionist or Nationalist identity is the organising principle. If you accept the GFA structures, there is not much room left for arguing the sectarianism of this. What do you say? I accept the Good Friday Agreement and its state-structure, and state structuring, but the whole thing stinks and I'd really like a different system. The job of socialists and anti-sectarians is to try to build up cross-community support for different non-sectarian structures. "What else are we here for?", as old Freddie Engels once asked.

Tariq: But it is probably the best political system, given the sectarian and political realities.

Jane: It is a bourgeois system of bureaucratic-sectarianism inside an artificial and unviable Six County entity. It is not our system. Those of us who are socialists. It is a partitionist system: the "necessity" for all the bureaucratic sectarianism comes from sticking to the framework of the Six County entity, which compels them to balance an artificially created Catholic-Nationalist minority and the Unionists, instead of working out a system based on the whole island.

Jane: Even if, given the bourgeois and sectarian domination of both Protestant and Catholic "masses", even if it is the best of all possible systems, it is nonetheless the bourgeois political system of rule in Northern Ireland. Our job is to criticise and expose what's wrong with it and in this way prepare over however long a time it takes a better alternative. In fact, it stinks of sectarianism and cannot but be a breeding ground for sectarianism.

P-J: Sinn Fein is preparing an alternative. The demographic trend is with us - in a decade or so there will probably be a Catholic majority in the Six Counties. The GFA allows for a bare majority in referendum to opt for a United Ireland. Unlike you, we know how to work the system. All you can do is screech your "opposition". Your opposition is irrelevant.

Roisin: I've heard about the "demographic trends". It used to be killing and dying for a united Ireland - now Catholic fucking and breeding will win the day. History has finally found a progressive use for the priests' ban on contraception!

Jane: The Unionists' worst nightmare came true at last: rabbit-fecund taigs breeding them into a minority in "their own" state.

Roisin: Have you heard the rumours about a baby farm in abandoned British army barracks in South Armagh? No. Neither have I. Stick around.

Jane: Come on, Roisin, you're pissed. Stop being offensive. That was a joke too far. Patrick has a right to be annoyed.

Roisin: Indeed, it is a joke - a very bad one. But it isn't my joke. All I do is point it up a little.

P-J: Stop being offensive. And stop inflicting your self-hate on us. The argument that demography is working for a united Ireland is an observation - objective trends, not a breed-for-all-island-unity policy.

Roisin: Perhaps I have a right to be annoyed at socialists accepting such a policy. It's not just Adams and McGuinness, the sainted John Hume writes articles that the Provo war is unnecessary because "we" are breeding so much faster than the Prots.

Roisin: Think about it. Republicans, people who swear by Connolly and Pearse, whose underlying "peace policy" - sectarian war by other means policy! - is rooted in the idea that one Irish religious/identity breeds faster than the other, and may in a decade be able by voting to reduce the Protestants to an unwilling minority in an all-Ireland state - what the Catholics have been in the Six Counties for 80 years.

Roisin: Natural? Natural only to bigots and chauvinists and racists. What, P-J, would you say if people who in London went on about "ethnic" birth rates and ethnic ratios? Who built policies on such things? Who would look at an area of ethnic conflict and say - it'll be all right soon - we'll outbreed them? We'll be the majority in this borough, or whatever. You'd say they were racists - or nutters, or both. In any case, as far from working-class politics as they could be. Would you feel tolerant towards them? Think their approach compatible with working class socialism or with democracy?

Roisin: You'd be right to: but you don't support the Unionists in this? The left wouldn't support the Unionists.

Roisin: No? Telling the truth - the "offensive" truth - can change the consensus, can cut through some of the Blairite-Adamite bullshit.

Roisin: But I can't understand why socialists, or even half-way decent liberals, who don't find the sectarian head-counting on which the GFA is based grotesque - who don't notice and don't care. I can't understand any Irish Republican, or even penny-plain nationalist who is not nauseated by the Provo and the SDLP mix of pseudo-nationalist self righteousness in words and de facto communalism and sectarianism.

Jane: Working class politics in Northern Ireland cannot be based on one community. That would be true even if relations between Protestant and Catholic were rigidly structured to the disadvantage of the Catholics as, say, black-white relations in the pre-civil rights movement USA.

Roisin: No, they haven't - or anything like it for 200 years! But let me make the point. If you are a socialist - you say you are, P-J says he is - you have to have class politics: that means policies for the working class of both sides. It means a working class answer to the division. It means being against present or possible future oppression of either side. It means treating all the children of the nation equally. Anything that works against that is the enemy of working class politics. Sectarianism - "spontaneous" sectarianism, or state-sponsored and organised sectarianism - is the enemy of working class socialism. You cannot overcome sectarianism and nationalist identity conflicts and create Protestant-Catholic working-class unity without fighting sectarianism/communalism. You cannot fight it if you bring peace with bureaucratic state sectarianism. Even if the Good Friday Agreement arrangements stick and bring peace, the idea of supporting one communalist side rules out working class politics.

Jane: P-J and Patrick think "fighting sectarianism" means fighting the Prots! The outbreeding "strategy" is the old Unionist triumphalism inverted. To do other than condemn such things is to rule out teaching our own people - the working class - what's wrong with it. Why anybody aspiring to working class politics should loathe and despise it. Roisin: So most people, most workers, on both sides, are communalists? We begin by saying what is wrong with that. So most Catholics support the Good Friday Agreement - one in two Protestants, probably more now, oppose it. They want peace. God! But socialists say what is...

P-J: Come on! The Unionists are a spent force! Jane: Are they? Suppose they are. Then you'll ride roughshod over them and force them into a united Ireland against their will? You are Catholic communalists!

Jane: Don't you study your own paper, P-J? The staple now of An Phoblacht, which boasts of being the highest circulation weekly in the island, is anti-"Unionist" agitation. There ain't no "hand of friendship" there, P-J!

Jane: No, you have a nice line in sectarian agitation in the form of self-righteously denouncing the sectarianism of the other side. That is both communal self-righteousness and hypocrisy.

Roisin: More like a split personality! The Provos do, after all, on some level, pay lip-service to "Wolfe Tone republicanism" - Protestants and Catholics unite! - and to the 1916 ideal of treating "all the children of the nation equally". Except that these "republicans" are a purely Catholic movement: they know that their enemy, the enemy of a united Ireland, is other Irish people, not the British Government. Thus the revolting incoherence and hypocrisy.

P-J: Don't be ridiculous! Of course Britain is the enemy! Without Britain, the Protestants would come round.

Roisin: The 30 Years War has been a peculiar form of civil war between Unionist and Nationalists with Britain holding the entity together and trying to beat down those who most challenge the status quo - the Provos. The overall responsibility has been Britain's historically...

P-J: Balls! The Protestants, the UDR, the murder gangs, were British auxiliaries and proxies.

Roisin: More the other way around, I think, P-J. But let's focus on the 30 Year War: what the Provisional IRA/Sinn Fein is doing now, what it stands for now, makes a mockery of the long war. A variant of the GFA was on offer since 1972. A looser version, less rigidly structured and for that reason probably a better version, of the GFA was set up at the end of 1973 after the Sunningdale Agreement. If Sinn Fein had accepted then what it accepts now, a quarter-century of bloodshed could have been avoided! The Adams line now is a terrible indictment of the whole history of the Provos after 1972.

Roisin: The Provos are the measure of all things - OK! What was intolerable when the Provos were excluded from it and the Catholics were represented in government by the SDLP, is now to be supported: why?

Jane: The Provos are in it! The real wreckers of Sunningdale, those who defeated what you call "British imperialism" and its strategy in Ireland at that time, were the Protestants with their 1974 general strike.

P-J: The Sunningdale Agreement couldn't have worked. Sinn Fein will make the GFA work. The pan-Nationalist Alliance didn't exist then to keep up the pressure on Britain. The Dublin Government was hostile and suppressing the Provos not, as now, vigorously pushing for us. The SDLP was middle-class, we are working-class.

Roisin: Politically you are shameless tribalists, far more so, or more unashamedly so, than the SDLP are. In political terms they were more republican than you.

P-J: But the Irish people don't agree with you, Roisin. Politically you Trot lefties are chicken-shit. In 1973 nobody would have dreamed of a Fianna Fail-Sinn Fein Dublin government, or a government of Fianna Fail supported - and in part controlled! - by Sinn Fein. It's a real possibility now. A few Sinn Fein TDs could swing it for us. None of that could have happened without the long war.

Roisin: Of course Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA are following in the tracks laid down by the ex-republican Fianna Fail decades ago.

Jane: Peace is better than a hopeless war that could solve nothing. But no, Tariq! Peace isn't everything - not if you want to shape the future and not just pick the best options available now. Saying what is, telling the truth about what exists, defining the goal we aim for and educating the forces that can work, in peace or war, to carve it out - for socialists that is everything. To forget that and settle for the variant you think best or least obnoxious of the bourgeois - here, bourgeois-sectarian - status quo means forever to rule out working class unity and socialism. That won't come out of Sinn Fein-style manipulation and zig-zags. It won't come out of making a fetish of peace so that you don't dare even look closely at its infrastructure: intricately detailed poisonous state-structured sectarianism.

Peace in Northern Ireland?

A discussion of the issues.