Socialist Democracy Blog

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IMPORTANT NOTICE - WEBSITE RETURNS

2009-03-17T14:13:00.002Z

The transfer of our domain to a new host is now complete. Our full website can be viewed again at its normal address - www.socialistdemocracy.org. We apologise to our readers for the disruption of the last two weeks.

Armed action in Ireland

2009-03-14T11:58:00.002Z

Sinn Fein's Michael Collins moment

12/5/09

John McAnulty

There has been a unlted response by all the Irish and British political parties to the killing of British soldiers in Antrim and the later killing of a policeman in Craigavon. They all say that:

Republican militarists have nothing to offer.

The militarists have no support

The political process in the North of Ireland is secure.

Only one of these assertions is true.

It is true that the militarists offer absolutely no way forward for Irish workers. It is not true to assert that they have no support nor that the political process is secure. In fact, it is precisely because the political settlement is failing that the militarists are gaining in support.
It is highly unlikely that any outside the most frantic of Sinn Fein supporters believed that that the end result of the peace process would be a united Ireland. What they all believed was that that the Northern statelet could be reformed to become a more equal society.

Right from the beginning that proved too much. Democratic rights were mutated by the Good Friday Agreement into supposedly equal sectarian and communal rights. It was a settlement that didn't give enough to Britain's Unionist base and it was tweaked towards Unionist majority rule in the St. Andrews agreement.

During St. Andrews the DUP agreed to devolve policing and justice and Sinn Fein were promised sops around a centre recording the hunger strike and a unified sport stadium and an Irish language act.

It proved impossible to get the DUP administration to honor these promises and a Sinn Fein work to rule blocking the functioning of the executive failed. The British gave them substantial backhanders to compensate them. More recently, alongside the decision to block any full investigation of state terror came an offer of £12 000 to the relatives of those killed. Unionist outcry led to the withdrawal of the offer. Even the backhanders have dried up.

On the economic front the shootings led the Sinn Fein and DUP leaders to cancel an investment tour of the USA - one of many such trips, all failures, serving to underline the absence of any real economic strategy for the North of Ireland.

This has not led to a mass nationalist rejection of the Northern settlement. The Irish capitalists will support any imperialist plan. The power of the Catholic Church has greatly increased under the sectarian setup. The middle class wallow in sectarian privilege marked by 'equality' positions in public service earmarked for one confessional group or the other. Sinn Fein itself has a backbone of 'community workers' paid by the state.

A minority of republicans have rejected Sinn Fein and the partitionist settlement, aiming to revive a military campaign against British rule. They have been completely ineffective because of the demoralisation caused by decades of militarism and state repression, because of their fragmented and divided movement and because of the absence of support. Above all, the total absence of any political program has fatally handicapped them.

They are still not large, but they have now seen the exodus of the last of the militarists holding on in the Provos. More generally there is a growing revulsion at the aroma of corruption around Sinn Fein. A growing number of working class youth are unable to see the new world that the Shinners promised. . The result of that growth is that state intelligence has degraded. They still know the old hands, but have only partial penetration of the new cells. There is also the growth of a new infrastructure of supporters willing to provide money, intelligence, safe houses and weapons dumps.

For all that their opponents are right when they say that republican militarism offers no way forward. In the tradition of pure physical force republicanism, RIRA boast that they have no political organisation.

Without a thought they include pizza delivery men as targets, apparently unaware of the extent to which the policy of the 'soft target' demoralised their own supporters and besmirched the name of republicanism in the past.

They have no explanation, other than betrayal, for the abysmal failure of decades of military struggle and the relatively easy absorption of their compatriots into the structure of colonial rule. Above all they seem completely unaware that the southern capitalists are the most frantic supporters of the settlement and the chief mechanism through which the political dissolution of the Provos was obtained.

Yet within the narrow grounds of the physical force tradition, the republicans have a clear strategy. Their military capacity represents nothing in relation to British military might, but they believe that even a low level of activity will be enough to bring down the new Stormont regime.

A major target is Sinn Fein. The republicans calculate that the pressures of their campaign will collapse the organisation and win supporters to the RIRA. They also calculate that it will act as a recruiting sergeant, bringing disaffected nationalist youth into their ranks.

Politically their belief that armed action can bring down the northern statelet makes little sense. It is true that the Good Friday Agreement has been decaying since its inception, but it has been decaying to the right, into a more naked and reactionary expression of imperialist interest, driven by increasing unionist reaction and republican capitulation. Militarism can only play a traditional role of stirring up and accelerating the political process - in this case speeding up a drive to the right.

A sign of that drive to the right came quickly, with what one reporter called 'Martin McGuinness's 'Michael Collins moment'. (Collins was a leading figure in the Irish war of Independence who then led the Free State repression of the republicans). McGuinness called the republicans 'traitors to the island of Ireland'. He called on his supporters to inform on them and to support state repression.

He claimed that the new dispensation guaranteed political progress, despite being unable to show any such progress other than the presence of themselves and their supporters within the state apparatus.

Such was the determination of Sinn Fein to prove their worth that they did not stop with assurances to the British and DUP. A special meeting with representatives of the loyalist paramilitaries brought them in on the act. Apparently the fact that they retain a full arsenal of weapons aimed at Catholic workers is no longer a cause for censure.

Sinn Fein have little choice. They themselves are targets of the republicans. Any suggestion that the good Friday process failed would lead to the collapse of their organisation. They must support instant state repression in the hope that it quickly defeats the militarists. In any case any hesitation on their part might well lead to their expulsion from the administration. British Tory leader David Cameron has already indicated that he wants to replace the current forced coalition of Sinn Fein and DUP with a 'voluntary coalition' - in other words, unionist majority rule.

So already we have a step-change to the right. The Irish peace process has left behind any pretence that jaw-jaw will be enough to sustain it. There is to be war-war in the form of state repression. This new dispensation will be spearheaded by Sinn Fein and will enjoy widespread public support.

In the short term the militarists have strengthened the imperialist settlement. In the long run there are still many contradictions. Sinn Fein will be isolated from significant sections of the nationalist working class and will continue to decay. The state will want to target the repression so that the republicans are isolated, but this will be difficult to do given the intelligence deficit. The DUP leadership has welcomed the Provos role in spearheading the reaction, but that does not mean they will reward them by supporting any reform. At the grassroots the reaction of many members of the DUP to the attacks will be to look for Sinn Fein's expulsion from the administration.

The Irish peace process will continue its march to the right. A military campaign offers no solution, but then neither does the position of their opponents, which offers frantic support to the British and denounces any political criticism of the settlement as a form of terrorism.

Trade union demonstrations on the days following the deaths illustrated this perfectly. They went well beyond protests about the shooting of the two workers or more general protests about militarism to hysterical calls by TU leader Peter Bunting for unconditional support for the sectarian status quo. In an even more extreme development Patricia McKeown of unison claimed that the trade unions would act as 'civic society' in coordination with the state to make the repression successful. The widespread hysteria from all sides is not aimed at the relative handful of militarists. The disquiet about the corrupt society that has been brought into existence is much wider and a consistent theme of the supporters of the current settlement has been to demonise the opposition and attempt to convince workers that the only alternative to supporting the status quo is a sectarian bloodbath. It is this unconditional support for an imperialist settlement, rather than a criticism of militarism that makes this Sinn Fein’s Michael Collins moment and makes the organisation an obstacle to the resolution of the Irish question.

The settlement in the North of Ireland is not a democratic settlement. It hardly pretends any longer to be one, depending on popular rejection of a failed militarism and on unconditional support for the state from the formerly anti-imperialist opposition. That's not enough to prevent its eventual collapse. The former radicals bay their hatred of the militarists, but by blocking any political critique they are telling the disaffected and marginalised that only physical force remains as a response.

It is for socialists and democrats to prove the former radicals wrong and build a political opposition.

Republicans attack British Army base in Antrim

2009-03-10T11:30:00.000Z

Following hard on the heels of the controversy over the deployment of the SRR, though probably not related directly to it, came a republican attack on a British Army base in Antrim that killed two soldiers. This was the first British Army fatalities in the north since 1997, and the first time that republicans have inflicted military casualties. Claims of responsibility for this attack came from both the “Real IRA” and “ONH”.

This is latest in a growing number of attacks carried out by republicans, which have ranged from shootings to car booby trap bombs, landmines to the large 250lb-plus car bomb only last month. There is no doubt that the level of activity of republicans is growing and that they are picking up some degree of support, particularly in the most marginalised nationalist areas. The main reason for the growth of republican groups is the increasingly obvious failure Sinn Fein to make any advances on even the most minimal nationalist demands never mind a republican agenda.

There is also the ongoing decay of Sinn Fein from an activist party with grassroots support to one staffed by full timers who are dependent on patronage that flows from Stormont. In the most marginalised nationalist areas Sinn Fein are increasingly seen as corrupt and out of touch. A particular touchstone for discontent is the issue of anti-social behaviour. It has gotten much worse in recent years - serving to highlight both Sinn Fein’s diminishing authority and failure to improve policing. This has provided the opportunity for republicans to build a degree of support through vigilantism. It is this general social and political decay that has enabled republicans to build up a base to sustain a low level military campaign.

This in no way poses a challenge to the British state, but it does put pressure on Sinn Fein as they face demands from the British and Unionists to support more repressive measures against republicans. It the wake of the Antrim attack Sinn Fein are being urged to give their full support to the Chief Constable and his decision to deploy special forces.

If republican groups have any form of strategy it is to provoke more a repressive response from the British state that they hope will boost their own support and further discredit Sinn Fein. It is a variation of the old guerrilla concept than repression will inevitably provoke revolt. However, in most cases this has proved to be an illusion. More repression has just meant more repression and defeat. The Republicans also have a flawed assessment the Provisional campaign – putting its failure down to the development of a political programme rather than its adherence to armed struggle. The reality was that the armed struggle was defeated because of its own inherent limitations. Once it was defeated the republican political programme went down with. The critical point is that the Provisionals political defeat followed their military defeat, not the other way round as the republicans claim. Despite their criticism of Provisional movement they have actually adopted its strategy and are bound to repeat its failure.

Deployment of special forces exposes Policing Board

2009-03-10T08:03:00.000Z

The revelation that the PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde has requested support from
Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) to help gather intelligence has highlighted once again the limitations of police accountability in the north. This was clearly illustrated in the manner the information was made public. Only hours after the Policing Board conducted its monthly question and answer session with the chief constable, in which the activities of republican groups had been raised, the local BBC evening news broke the story on the deployment of special forces. That Hugh Orde chose not to inform the Policing Board about such a significant and politically controversial development is a clear indication that the leadership of the security forces feel no obligation towards it. Indeed, the likely leaking of story by security sources reveals some degree of contempt.

The deployment and the manner in which it was reported are particularly embarrassing for Sinn Fein and the SDLP, who have sold the peace process to a large extent on police reform and the creation of new policing structures. Orde’s request for special forces support exposes the limitations of that reform. It demonstrates publicly that the security forces in the north are not wholly accountable to local political representatives. The SSR is not under the scrutiny or the control of the Policing Board. Nor would would this unit of the British Army be accoutable to any future justice minister from the devolved administration at Stormont. Like the MI5 officers based at its regional headquarters in Holywood, County Down, this unit answers only to military commanders and ministers back in London.

Predictably Sinn Fein and the SDLP registered their complaints over this. The SDLP issued a statement claiming that the decision to deploy the unity raised “the issue of who is in control". Martin McGuinness said army special forces were a "major threat”; that the decision to deploy them had "shaken his confidence" in the chief constable; and that he had raised the matter with Gordon Brown and Brian Cowen. (The British and Irish governments subsequently indicated their full support for the deployment.) However, the anger from the nationalist parties derives more from the pricking of the illusions they had built up around the Policing Board than the substance of the decision to deploy special forces. The reality is that the Policing Board does not, never had and never will have a scrutiny role over matters, such as the activities of republican groups, that are deemed to fall within realm of “national security”. This was set out clearly in the St Andrews Agreement that set the terms for the restoration of the Assembly and Executive, and Sinn Fein’s participation in the Policing Board.

To a degree the deployment of special forces is largely symbolic. Despite being officially withdrawn in 1997 they never stopped operating in the north. Indeed, there are indications that the SRR have been targeting republicans for more than two years. Last October the Irish News revealed how a special unit was already operating against republicans. It was reported that nine members of a special forces unit carried out surveillance on three suspects arrested in connection with a mortar bomb find near Lurgan in March 2007. At that time the Secretary of State issued public interest immunity (PII) certificates banning the soldiers or their unit being identified. In October 2008 the soldiers gave evidence in the subsequent trial via satellite from Afghanistan and Iraq were they were stationed. Others units, such as the successor to the notorious Force Research Unit (Fru) which was revealed to have been involved in more than a dozen murders, also continue to operate. Now known as the Joint Support Group, is thought to have around 50 undercover soldiers in the north carrying out human intelligence operations handling informers.

The SRR itself absorbed the 14th Intelligence Company ('The Det'), a special plainclothes surveillance unit created in 1973, specifically for operations in the north. Though only in existence since 2005, the SSR has already been linked to a number of high profile incidents. It has been reported that that SRR personnel were involved in the intelligence collection effort that lead to the shooting of a Brazilian man on the London underground in July 2005. Later that that year Iraqi police arrested two SRR personnel in Basra who were acting suspiciously - it was reported that they were disguised in Arab dress and that weapons and explosives were found in their car.

The SRR is also thought to be active in Afghanistan, assisting the SAS in seeking out Taliban leadership targets. The fact that their presence in north has now been publicly acknowledged suggests an intensification of the crackdown on republicans.

IMPORTANT NOTICE - TEMPORARY WEBSITE

2009-03-05T16:06:00.004Z

A version of our website can be viewed at the following address.

http://members.lycos.co.uk/socialistdemocracy

Our most recent articles will be posted here until our full website is restored. We again apologise for the disruption.

IMPORTANT NOTICE - WEBSITE UNAVAILABLE

2009-03-04T11:16:00.000Z

Our website is currently unavailable as it is in the process of being transferred to another host. For the time being we will be using the blog to publish our most recent articles. We apologise to our readers for this disruption.

A Better, Fairer Way?

2009-03-04T11:13:00.000Z

ICTU’s 10-point plan to capitulation

John McAnulty

3 March 2009

The vote for strike action presents workers with something of a dilemma.

On the one hand workers want to protest the pensions levy, the wage cuts, the cuts in public service and the contrasting reward of the crimes, thefts and bailouts among the golden circle.

On the other hand the 10-point plan drawn up by ICTU, summing up the aims of strike action, is a call for social solidarity with the crooks who sold us out and a demand that ICTU be allowed on to the committee that will bring in the levy!

Let's read the fine print. ICTU’s ten-point plan calls for:

1. Protecting Jobs & Tackling Unemployment
Workers to be guaranteed 80% of income and retraining - a slogan rendered meaningless in the context of support for slashing the wages of workers rather than guaranteeing them.

2. The Banking System & the Public Interest
The bureaucracy suggest nationalization or recapitalization, ignoring the fact that these are the methods currently used by capital to hand over public funds to the bankers and ignoring the absolute corruption of the public bodies supposed to supervise the banks.

3. Competitiveness.
Cut energy costs - again a suggestion that the government can be persuaded to support the workers when the whole aim is to plunder them.

4. The Pay Agreement
Follow the pay agreement - The bureaucracy give the game away here. They are not asking government and employers to honour the terms of the national pay agreement, but simply to follow 'inability to pay mechanisms' built into all these agreements that always meant that only workers were bound by them. ICTU are signalling their willingness to police the credit crunch on behalf of the bosses.

5. Fairness & Taxation
We have arrived at the core of the bureaucracy's plan - the workers will pay for the crisis - but the capitalists must pay their fair share! This is by far the wordiest section of the document for the simple reason that the whole history of the 'Celtic Tiger' demonstrates the impossibility of getting capital to pay its fair share - in fact the common strategy of the bureaucracy and the government was never to ask the multinationals to pay any significant taxes!

Even if many of the obstacles to taxation were to be overcome, the plain fact is that the majority of capitalist wealth is of course held as capital. Getting the capitalists to pay their fair share (in reality the full bill) would mean expropriation of capital - an idea the bureaucracy will run a mile from!

6. Restoring Consumer Confidence
This is an ‘if only’ section. If only the government and bosses would stick to the pay agreement the workers would have some money and would spend more. If only this all-out attack on the working class wasn't an attack! Yet another plea to the bosses to call back the bureaucracy to their side!

7. The Public Service ‘Pension Levy’
ICTU give absolute assurances that the working class will pay. Again they call on capital to pay its fair share and to allow them back into social partnership and to police the offensive they have already agreed in January's framework document.

8. Pensions
ICTU call for a pension protection fund - having just indicated their acceptance of a totally bogus pension levy and agreed a deal on Waterford glass that guarantees nothing for the workers. It's OK for the government and bosses to rob Peter, but they must promise to save Paul!

9. Employment Rights Legislation
The government that has just torn up the partnership agreement is asked to enforce its clauses - even though exploitation of migrant labour and bureaucratic collaboration by the union leaders has been a consistent feature of the Celtic Tiger.

10. National Recovery Bond
There is a better fairer way. The government shouldn't force us to hand over our money - we should volunteer it ourselves.

Two unstated elements of the ‘better, fairer’ way

The 10-point plan is in reality a 12-point plan. The central, unstated points are:

Social solidarity with the government, bosses and bankers.

The workers must pay for the crisis (as long as there is some tawdry cloak of fairness).

The workers have no choice about activity. They must vote for strike action no matter what way some union ballots are worded. What they must not do is go into the strike as political cannon fodder for the bureaucracy. They must put forward their own plan, diametrically opposed to that of the bureaucracy, denouncing the new superpartnership of social solidarity and making it clear that the working class won’t pay for the crisis.

Even low levels of campaign on this basis would begin to build rank and file structures. Campaigning around the strike call and building local strike committees on this basis would lay the foundation for a national worker’s movement and prevent demoralisation and despair when the union leaderships finally implement the betrayal that they spell out so clearly in a ‘better, fairer way’.

Damning report on Historical Enquiries Team

2008-09-22T15:01:00.003Z

One of the areas where the peace process has most obviously failed has been in the various attempts to tackle the legacy of the "Troubles". A number of mechanisms and institutions, such as the Victims Commission, the Office of the Police Ombudsman and various ongoing public inquiries, have been established in order to deal with unresolved issues. However, none of them have produced any resolutions, only more discord and dispute.

An insight into why this is the case came this week in a leaked report on another of these bodies – the Historical Enquiries Team (HET). The HET is a special police unit which was set in 2005 up by the PSNI chief constable to re-examine murders committed during the Troubles. A report by a University of Ulster academic, who was given unprecedented access to the team for two years, has called now called its independence and effectiveness into question.

The main point of the report by Dr Patricia Lundy is that that the HET has been compromised by the presence of so many former RUC and Special Branch officers in senior positions. This is despite assurances given at the time of the establishment of the HET that it would recruit the majority of detectives from outside Northern Ireland and would limit the involvement of former members of the RUC, particularly Special Branch.

According to Dr Lundy the HET is over reliant on former RUC officers. "It appears that ‘the old guard’ play a key role in the management and access to intelligence and perform a censoring role in respect of disclosure," she writes. "All aspects of intelligence are managed by former RUC and Special Branch officers". At the time of the research, the Intelligence Unit (IU) was staffed by 18 former RUC and Special Branch officers.

In November 2007 the HET had 166 staff, including 67 former RUC officers. Two former RUC Special Branch officers and a former British army soldier hold key senior positions within the HET. It is the view of Dr Lundy’s that such "strategic positioning" of former RUC officers, and particularly those with a Special Branch background, "not only undermines actual but perceived independence".

One PSNI officer who had been seconded to the HET was Detective Chief Inspector Philip Marshall, who was later accused of "deliberate and calculated deception" during the Omagh bomb trial. The British army was found to have regularly failed to pass on the names of former soldiers identified in controversial killings to HET investigators. HET requests to the British army were "invariably returned with a negative trace ", the report said. Only one fifth of senior RUC detectives who originally investigated Troubles-related killings had "positively engaged" with the HET.

While the unit was reported to be investigating more than 1,000 cases during the two-year study, Dr Lundy said the figure actually referred to the number of cases that had ‘gone into the system’. "It is my opinion that a very creative use of language has been employed to describe a process which in the majority of cases is essentially a ‘desktop review’," she writes.
It is also Dr Lundy’s assessment that "political considerations" have impacted HET’s decision-making process. Her report states: "HET are acutely aware of the extreme sensitivity of the cases under review and their likely political ramifications" and that there has been a "reluctance on the part of senior management to make difficult decisions and deliver perceived unpopular findings."

This report is damning of the HET, but the criticisms it makes are applicable to all the other resolution efforts and to the peace process more broadly. The problem is that the past is very much the present, and that any attempt to uncover the truth has the potential to call into question the credentials of those who are holding up the current settlement. This is true for both the unionists and Sinn Fein, but most of all for the British who want to perpetuate the myth that they are above the conflict. They cannot allow efforts to resolve the past to be truly independent and run the risk of producing the "unpopular findings" that would serve to undermine the settlement.

A good example of this came in the same week as the leaked report on the HET, when it was revealed on BBC’s Panorama that Britain’s electronic intelligence agency GCHQ recorded mobile phone exchanges between the Omagh bombers on the day of the attack. This information was neither used to prevent the attack or to aid the investigation into those who carried it out. The victims’ relatives rightly ask why, and reiterate their call for a public inquiry. But the British aren’t going to agree to anything that could expose their complicity in the atrocity. It really shows up the fundamental rottenness of the peace process that its preservation is dependent on the denial of truth and justice.

Searching for Plan B

2008-09-13T11:37:00.003Z

The growing sense of disillusionment over the peace process among the republican grassroots found expression in this week’s Andersonstown News. This took the form of a letter from one B. Maguire. In the opening paragraph he describes himself as a “life long republican” who “voted for the Good Friday Agreement and supported the Sinn Fein strategy”. But now he is “completely disillusioned and angry”.

He goes on make a number of complaints about the settlement, and to pose a series of questions to the Sinn Fein leadership. His primary complaint is over the existence of a DUP veto. He notes that the DUP have used this to block any movement on a sports stadium, the Irish Language Act and the devolution of policing and justice powers. The fact the DUP “can veto anything thing they don’t like” raises for him the obvious question of what republicans can ever get from the power sharing executive.

B Maguire also notes a change in the Sinn Fein rhetoric on the St Andrews Agreement, which has gone from assertions that it included provisions for an Irish Language Act to a claim that an act will be in place at some undefined date in the future because it is somehow inevitable. For him “the leadership have lost their revolutionary politics for the politics of appeasement”. He cites as an example of this Belfast Mayor Tom Hartley’s opposition to the City Council hosting a home coming parade for the RIR on the basis of his personal opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than the role that regiment, and the British army as a whole, have played in Ireland.

B Maguire rounds off by stating that it is obvious to him that “the unionists are not up to power sharing. Stormont has failed. It will not work”. Rather than continue to prop up Stormont he urges Sinn Fein “walk away now and go to the Plan B” (which he believes to be joint sovereignty). His letter concludes with a plea for Gerry Adams to “give us answers”.

While many of the points in this letter are familiar, and have been made by others, it is now significant that they are being echoed by mainstream republicans who had up until recently supported the peace process. The fact that such people are starting to fall away is an indicator of the declining credibility of the Sinn Fein leadership.

The letter from B Maguire prompted a quick response from Sinn Fein, with a reply of sorts from Gerry Adams appearing in the following edition of the Andersonstown News. Much of this was a restatement of the equality provisions within the settlement, though with view examples of them operating. Adams claims that Sinn Fein had an agreement with the British on an Irish Language Act, but that this was now being blocked by the DUP. He concedes that the DUP does indeed have a veto, but that this is countered by Sinn Fein’s own veto, though they “have little need” to use it because of their “positive agenda”.

Adams says that though unionists may not be up for power sharing, Sinn Fein had a responsibility the make the political institutions work. For him “being strategic, planning for the future, keeping our eyes firmly fixed on the prize is the only way forward.” Adams concludes with the claim that the only way to move unionism is to build “a stronger Sinn Fein”.

This reply is completely disingenuous, ignoring the major points of the original letter, and making claims for the settlement that are completely baseless. The fact is that Sinn Fein signed up to a settlement that has a built in unionist veto. While formally nationalists do have a veto, to use it on any substantial issue would bring the whole edifice crashing down. There is no pressure on the DUP to concede anything, certainly not from the British and Irish governments. An assembly were Sinn Fein had a hundred per cent of the nationalist seats would make no difference. If anything it would hasten the collapse of the settlement as no unionist would be prepared to sit under a Sinn Fein first minister. Its stability depends on unionists having the upper hand and nationalists accepting that.

In his letter B Maguire displayed some naivety in his belief in the existence of a Plan B for joint authority. This does not exist - Sinn Fein aren’t going to walk away. Their only strategy is to hang on to their ministerial seats at all costs and hope that things will get better. If there is a Plan B it is the return to majority rule that has been proposed recently by SDLP leader!

SDLP leader calls for end to power sharing

2008-09-10T15:35:00.002Z

The call from the SDLP leader for an end of power sharing arrangements at Stormont is another indication of how far the minimal reforms associated contained the Good Friday Agreement have been eroded. Ten years ago power sharing Government was hailed at the centrepiece of the political settlement. For the twenty-five prior to that the SDLP had championed power sharing as a means of resolving the conflict in the north. Now we have the leader of that party calling for it to be abandoned.

This was the message that Mark Durkan delivered at the British Irish Association conference at New College, Oxford over the weekend. He called for compulsory power-sharing between nationalists and unionists at Stormont to be scrapped, and the rules requiring cross community support for legislation to be removed. For him these mechanisms were the "ugly scaffolding needed during the construction of the new edifice." The assumption is that such mechanisms, which were supposedly designed to protect nationalists from the abuse of power by unionists, are no longer needed in this new era because the peace process has been so successful in promoting reconciliation and stability.

However, any examination of the current political situation exposes such assumption to be baseless. The north is more sectarian and polarised than ever, and the political institutions increasingly unstable. The Executive has not met for months due to disagreements between Sinn Fein and the DUP.

It is this current instability and deadlock, rather than optimistic for the future, that has prompted Durkan’s comments. This is revealed in his appeal for nationalists "to reflect on the dangers of the decision-making protections acting as decision making prevention on more and more important issues". It is recognition that a power sharing government between nationalists and unionists is unworkable. The corollary of this position, and what is being implied by Durkan’s proposed changes to the Agreement, is that nationalist parties give up their right to be in government in order to have a functioning government at all. The fig leaf for this abandonment of power sharing is his call for a 'strong and robust' bill of rights to protect minorities. What this amounts to is an acceptance of a return to unionist majority rule for the sake of stability.

Mark Durkan’s speech is a signal of the desperation of nationalists for the settlement to work no matter how diminished. It is also a reflection of the elitist approach of the SDLP which looks to the law as a counter to sectarianism. But such faith in the law is misplaced. It completely ignores the fact that there was a formal equality before the law under the old Stormont regime that existed alongside rampant discrimination. For unionists the point of being in power is to have the power to discriminate. This is also why the unionists are totally against a Bill of Rights. Sinn Fein strongly attacked Durkan’s comments, but their own strategy, of hanging unto their places in the Executive at all costs, isn’t anymore successful success. Even the minimal gestures in the St Andrew’s Agreement - an Irish Language Act and the devolution of policing and justice powers – are being blocked by the DUP.

Sinn Fein has been reduced to issuing empty threats to bring down the Executive - threats which are immediately withdrawn when challenged. If Sinn Fein wants the Executive to function it will have to subordinate itself the the DUP agenda. Whether nationalists are in of out of the executive unionist will still be ion a dominant position. The comments by Mark Durkan indicate that a section of nationalist population is prepared to accept this as the price of stability. However, is this any different to what existed during the 50 years of the old Stormont regime?

Days Like These No9

2008-09-08T14:42:00.013Z

Who Are The Irish What Do They Want?

By Guest Bolger Gerry Fitzpatrick

We stand at the beginning of a new brutal era as the world’s Empire’s - old and new fight it out for control of the world’s resources. The invasions of Iraq and Georgia show that the pretence about ‘bringing democracy’ to other counties is well and truly over. Iraq and Georgia have the privilege of joining Pakistan, South Korea and Egypt as client regimes no matter how its people’s are ruled. And what are our interests? That’s not just a question for the conservative President of France it is a question for us all and it is not just because a government has again lost a crucial European vote. (It is also a question for a certain young man sitting under a tree in Africa. We all know him and you should keep him in mind as I will return to him later.)

Some time ago our comrade - Dr Terry Eagleton wrote in a rather mournful way about how the new generation of Irish students had appeared to have forgotten Ireland’s own radical history in their headlong dash to be modern. And it worth quoting his words from 1996:

Modernization in Ireland today means a host of precious things: pluralism secularization, flexible notions of sovereignty [but it can also mean] being shame faced and sarcastic about your historical culture...so as to as to leap, suitably streamlined and amnesiac, into the heat of the European order characterized by racism, structural unemployment, urban barbarism, military campaigns against the Third World and abandonment of Irish small farmers and working class to a brutally neo-liberal polity.

(Eagleton, ‘The Ideology of Irish Studies’)

It’s odd then that Revisionists and Tories often joke about how the Irish see themselves as being the most oppressed people in the world and they are probably right about that, for it has consequences and effects that are worthwhile. We aspire to invert imperial chauvinism and that is a struggle in itself which, as we’ve seen - we don’t always succeed, but that did not and should not stop us. Because we share a kinship with those who have been brutally occupied and forced into starvation and emigration.

Let’s return to the youngman sitting under a tree in Africa. He’s there to do the simple and the good – build a school, install a water pump, repair a road, put together a transport link – fight hunger and disease. We shouldn’t romanticise him – he is after all probably there on a gap year and I’m sure he wishes sometimes that he never agreed to travel and work in a place where the great powers cut a swathe to their one interest. But he will stay on - for the rewards will far outweigh the discomfort and the doubts. It is a mission and a duty – political quasi-religious in nature but democratic and just nonetheless. And that is whether we like it or not. Our comrade Dr Eagleton may have despaired of the generation that appeared ready to forget that the cause of Ireland is labour. But our relation to Europe and the world doesn’t end with a government giving taxes to support NGO’s and their faltering programmes. The truth is that countless thousands have gone abroad to labour against hunger, disease and oppression. The cause of Ireland is labour - it is not ‘national’ or practiced by nationalists - it is international. For we stand for and with the starving, the oppressed and against imperial occupation. We have said ‘NO’ twice to those in power who think that an economy works best when regulated in favour of the fantastically rich and which pays farmers not to grow food while the cost of meagre rations is forced skyward. These too are crimes against humanity which we must do all we can to fight and work against.

They haven’t gone away y’know

2008-09-04T21:16:00.005Z

‘Nationalist family’ assemble for one last roundup

The Independent monitoring committee is a creature of the British government. It has no independent investigation structures but simply takes government intelligence and presents it in a way most useful to the government. Its report concluded: "The mechanism which they (the army council) have chosen to bring the armed conflict to a complete end has been the standing down of the structures which engaged in the armed campaign and the conscious decision to allow the army council to fall into disuse. By taking these steps PIRA has completely relinquished the leadership and other structures appropriate to a time of armed conflict."

This is a very carefully worded statement. It does not say that there is no army council or no IRA, but essentially argues that they no longer exist in the context of any threat to British structures and that the IRA have done everything that the DUP can expect that equates to surrender and enough to allow Peter Robinson to sign up to the transfer of policing powers

Gordon Brown made this clear when he declared “It is now time for all the political parties to work together to complete the final stages of the peace process - to complete the devolution of policing and justice” Secretary of state Shaun Woodward argued that “This ground-breaking report by the IMC makes clear that the Army Council is now redundant”. Dermot Aherne, Fianna Fail Justice Minister, said that “I hope that the political parties in the north can now complete the process of devolution by assuming responsibility for policing and justice powers.” Paula Dobrainsky, US special envoy declared; “This report underscores the transformation that has taken place in today's Northern Ireland, and signals that all parties should move forward to create a fully-functioning political environment.”

From a distance it all looks very reassuring. All the components of a ‘Nationalist family’ a virtual body imagined by Gerry Adams, comprising Sinn Fein, Fianna Fail and the SDLP and stretching out to encompass the Bush White house and even the British – all the forces that were to face down unionist reaction and bring modernity to Ireland – they are all together again to defend Sinn Fein and face down the DUP.

As in the days of yore, Sinn Fein has support. But it is worth looking more closely. The support, as in the past, is designed to allow capitulation. The problem with republicanism is that it offered an armed resistance to imperialism. The solution is that they embrace their oppressors. In the process the problem is defined. The problem is not the bigotry of the unionists, nor the British endorsement of unionist reaction. The problem is the IRA. There is not the slightest hint that, if the DUP refuse to play ball, the British will apply sanctions to them. If the republicans have not done enough today then they must do more in the coming days.

A few questions are in order.

Peter Robinson has already said that 95% disbandment is not enough. Surely the simplest solution would be 100% disbandment?

If the maximum humiliation of Sinn Fein is demanded now will that be the end of humiliation or will it be a routine, unending part of administration in the North?

Will the Shinners get all the elements they were supposed to have already as part of the St. Andrews deal or is the reward of disbandment only a limited, truncated version?

With another victory under their belt, will the DUP then turn the other cheek and aim to tone down the drive for sectarian domination?

To ask these questions is to answer them. Nationalists can have a minor and subordinate role in a sectarian society while supporting a government of some of the most reactionary political forces in Europe. Their role will be to endlessly capitulate to sectarian reaction and in the process lend stability to a process fundamentally unstable. The endemic crises and collapses of the peace process are not minor glitches but fundamental flaws in an imperialist settlement doomed to eventual collapse

The mouse that roared

2008-08-28T19:48:00.009Z

The Sinn Fein rebellion that wasn't.

Rush into a meeting. Shout loudly "long live the Workers Republic"! Rush into another meeting and explain calmly that you can provide stability in a colonial administration. Now increase the frequency of the meetings. At some point speaking out of both sides of your mouth at once will prove too great a strain and a stammer will develop.

Sinn Fein have been speaking out of both sides of their mouth for over a decade. It is hardly surprising if TD Caoimhghin O'Caolin stumbled and a message for his terminally confused and demoralised members declaring Sinn Fein's willingness to collapse the Stormont assembly leaked into the outside world.

A stunned silence was followed by bursts of hilarity from the SDLP and then contempt, followed by increased pressure to come to heel from the DUP.

In fact what O'Caolin was demanding was far from clear. It was far short of any immediate demand, more a plea for the DUP to give them something and a pathetic threat to go to the British and complain.

The last time that the Shinners pulled this trick was when they threatened not to nominate a deputy first minister and prevent Robinson taking office. They ended up giving way on the issue of a Sinn Fein justice minister.

The mechanism is simple enough. Having signed up to a colonial and sectarian deal, tied by a thousand bribes and implied threats to London and Dublin, Sinn Fein have no choice but to make the deal look good no matter what it throws up. The task of the DUP is to prove to their supporters that they hold the whip hand and have conceded nothing to the Fenians. They can play hard ball in the knowledge that, in a decade of negotiation, the British have never wavered in seeing the unionist base as the guarantee of their presence in Ireland and have never felt it necessary to withdraw support no matter how extreme their demands. We have to remember that the present problem is about concessions to Sinn Fein in the St. Andrews agreement that they are trying desperately to have implemented – some of the sweeteners are on the table for the third time, constantly appearing and disappearing like carrots before a dazed donkey.

Today we have Mary Lou McDonald repudiating the O'Caolin comments and Alex Maskey pleading for "engagement" while Robinson lays down the law, demanding a massive climbdown at the upcoming executive meeting.

The only fatality in the whole process is Sinn Fein's credibility. The sooner that goes and a genuine political opposition forms, the better.

Discord over Omagh anniversary

2008-08-21T15:44:00.005Z

The controversy surrounding the tenth anniversary of the Omagh bombing has highlighted once again the difficultly in dealing politically with such events. While there is a political settlement and a power sharing government there has been no honest examination the past or a resolution the legacy of the Troubles.

The basic fact of the atrocity is that the Real IRA detonated a bomb in Omagh town centre that resulted in the deaths of twenty-nine people. But the various political parties place their own interpretations this event. This has come out more strongly over the years with revelations that the bombing could have been prevented, and that there was no proper investigation. There were also the failed prosecutions in the north and south that revealed police corruption and raised suspicions over the role state agents may have played in the atrocity.

Sinn Fein for its part has tried to completeley dissociate itself from the bombing, using it to draw a line between the activities of the provisionals and the Real IRA. This was in demonstrated in the row over the wording on the Omagh memorial, with the Sinn Fein controlled council insisting that the organisation responsible was not identified. Mentioning the Real IRA would have highlighted the fact that those responsible for the bombing had only recently broken from the provisionals, and that the provisional movement itself had endorsed such tactics. The catch all term "dissident republicans" that was finally used in the memorial is one that allows Sinn Fein to distance itself from the event and also to portray any critics of its strategy as being associated with mass murder.

The British, whatever their role in the Omagh bombing, certainly saw benefits from its political fallout . It served to discredit the republican opposition, solidify support for the the GFA and bind the provisionals into the political process. The threat of a return to the armed campaign by the provisionls, though never credible, was made impossible.

It suits both Sinn Fein and the British to propagate the line that Omagh was an atrocity carried out by dissidents, and that if such atrocities are to be prevented in the future people must support the peace process. This was very much the message of the official remembrance ceremony which gathered together the great and the good. These included the police chiefs and political leaders who have been responsible in denying justice to the victims.

Within this "official" view on the Omagh bombing there is no room for dissent. This meant that those victims relatives who are struggling to find the truth of what happened were effectively excluded from the remembrance events. At least 10 of the victim's families, members of the Omagh Support and Self Help Group, boycotted the official memorial service. Its chairman Michael Gallagher, who lost his son Aiden in the bombing, summed up their feelings on the event: "There are, not a small number of people, but a large number of people who feel very uncomfortable about what happened and they rather we`d all go away and forget about it." Kevin Skelton, vice chair of the group, was particularly scathing of politicians, accusing them of doing "nothing for the families of the Omagh atrocity".

The families reiterated their call for a full cross-border public inquiry into the atrocity. But once again this met with rejection. The strongest opposition to his call came from Taoiseach Brian Cowan - just hours after he had laid a wreath in memory of the victims.

Ten years on from the Omagh bombing the search for the truth of what happened that day remains as elusive as ever. Like many other events from the history of the Troubles it is not really in the past but very much of the present. For the stability of the peace process depends on people not rocking the boat and raising questions over controversial events and the bona fides of its main sponsors. Despite the rhetoric the nature of the political settlement means that justice and reconciliation can never be delivered.

The Workers flag is deepest white -

2008-08-07T22:12:00.003Z

Irish TU bureaucracy ride to war?

‘Possibly the end of social partnership’ intoned Jack O'Connor of SIPTU following the collapse of wage talks with the Irish government and bosses.

‘This isn't a phoney war’, one of his colleagues assured us.

That comment indicates that the bureaucracy are aware of the scepticism that will greet any war cries following decades of social partnership. But is it true? Will the bureaucracy do a U-turn and launch class war against the Irish capitalists?

There are reasons to doubt this.

Social partnership hasn't collapsed. The current social partnership deal, towards 2016, was built over a ten-year time period precisely to avoid embarrassing issues such as pay cuts breaking the umbilical connections between the bureaucracy, bosses and government.

In case we get confused, union leaders immediately rowed back. O’Connor indicated that relations with the social partners remained good and ICTU leader David Beggs indicated that he remained hopeful that social partnership could be preserved and that the failure to agree a deal did not mean the end of social partnership as a project, going on to remark that 'under certain circumstances', the bureaucracy would agree a wage rise below the rate of inflation.

In the good old days the bureaucracy used to keep the fact that they were preparing to sell out a secret. This crowd tell us up front!

The trade union leaders intend to stage a pantomime. The want to move into limited, staged confrontations that they hope will strengthen their hand when they go back to the table in September. Workers can take advantage of the pantomime and aim to win the confrontations, but only to the extent that they organize independently of the bureaucracy rather than following blindly behind them.

Poison Iris

2008-07-29T10:21:00.005Z

The recent anti-gay comments by Iris Robinson (DUP MP, wife of the party leader and first monster, and chair of the Assembly’s health committee) have highlighted for the umpteenth time the thoroughly reactionary nature of politics in the north.

This latest bout of bile was sparked a number of weeks ago when was Robinson appeared on Radio Ulster’s Stephen Nolan Show to comment on a homophobic attack on a man in the Newtownabbey area. Given the DUP’s well-known and long-standing position on homosexuality, and the presenter’s own publicity seeking approach, some sort of controversy was probably inevitable. In this respect Iris certainly delivered. After a halfhearted condemnation of the assault, she lunched into an anti-gay tirade that could only have given comfort to those who carried it out, describing homosexuality as “vile,” “disgusting,” “nauseating” and “an abomination”. She topped this off with an offer to refer homosexuals to the care of a psychiatrist friend who had helped gays to “turn away from what they are engaged in.”

These comments were a media sensation for a few days and drew some mild criticism from gay groups and politicians. But if people thought this was going to blow over they were wrong. Just a few weeks later Robinson was courting more controversy. Taking part in a radio discussion on whether the severe restrictions on abortion in the north should be relaxed, she argued that they should not on the basis that government had “a responsibility to uphold God’s laws”. This conjured up images of a Free Presbyterian version of Iran, with DUP ministers framing legislation in accordance with Ayatollah Paisley’s interpretation of the scriptures.

However, Iris still wasn’t finished. Just last week it was revealed that the First Minister’s wife told a House of Commons committe, during a debate on the assessment and management of sex offenders, that “there can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children”. Maybe this was a little too strong even for the DUP, with Iris forced to back track, first claiming that her comments had been misreported (thy hadn’t) and then issuing a clarification. It turns out that what she meant to say was that homosexuality was only “comparable” to child abuse, and that she was “totally repulsed by both.” Well that’s a big improvement. The fact is that Robinson’s comments are a form of incitement that can lead directly to the type of assault carried out against the young man in Newtownabbey. All this pious baloney about loving the sinner but hating the sin is just a cover for pure hatred and bigotry.

One reaction to the comments by Robinson is to portray them as an outburst from a particularly bitter individual. However, even a glance at the public record shows that such attitudes run right through the DUP. It was party founder and former chuckle brother Ian Paisley who pushed to stop homosexuality being decriminalised in the north with the ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’ campaign. It was Paisley’s wife, the recently ennobled Eileen, who led the campaign in the House of Lords to oppose anti-discrimination legislation. Their son Ian Jnr also got in on the act when, as a junior minister with responsibility for equality, he stated that he was ‘repulsed’ by gay men and lesbians

And there’s more - such as DUP councillor Arthur Templeton, who was found guilty of harassing a gay colleague and ordered to pay £4,000 in damages. There’s Edwin Poots, who as a councillor in Lisburn tried to ban gay and lesbian couples from holding civil partnerships. During his period as sports minister he called the presence of Ulster’s only gay rugby team - the Ulster Titans- a form of “apartheid”. While in 2005 he remarked that homosexuality needed to be “overcome just like alcoholism and drug addiction”.

The views of the DUP on homosexuality, and on equality issues more generally, are consistent. They are, and continue to be, opposed to the very concept of equality, whether that is in relation to religion, race, politics, class, sexuality, gender or anything else. That they are now heading the Government really makes a mockery of claims, from Sinn Fein in particular, that equality is at the heart of the settlement. Indeed, its very stability depends on the DUP demonstrating that this is not the case. In this context Iris Robinson’s comments, rather than a rash outburst, can be seen as a calculated signal to its supporters than they have nothing to fear.

What this recent controversy has also demonstrated the extent to which gay rights activists have accepted the political approach of the peace process. In this schema the most bigoted views are legitimatised and their promoters accommodated. It is notable that there were very few calls for Iris Robinson to resign her position as Assembly health committee chair. In any liberal democratic system she wouldn’t have survived. But in the north she continues. Those who are the subject of her hate speech call not for her resignation but for her to engage in debate. They have even invited her to a Gay Pride event!

Exporting peace

2008-07-10T17:08:00.002Z

The recent mission by Martin McGuinness to Iraq is an indication of the extent to which Sinn Fein has been incorporated into imperialism. Once its implacable enemy they are now the trusted promoters of pro-imperialist settlements for conflicts around the world. The Irish peace process and their own political strategy are held up as models for others to follow.

The underlying assumption is that the peace process represents a resolution of conflict. Yet the reality is that it represents the complete defeat of the republican struggle for self determination. The traditional programme Irish republicanism has been completely turned inside out with Sinn Fein helping to administer British rule in the north. If there is a peace then it is because the British and unionist position is no longer being challenged. Indeed, the British state is now seen as a force for progressive change. In return for their acquiescence Sinn Fein gets a slice of the sectarian pie.

It is the airbrushing of imperialism and the definition of the conflict as one between two communities that makes the Irish peace processes a particularly appealing model for Iraq. This is reflected in the content of the McGuinness mission to Iraq with its emphasis on Sunni-Shia reconciliation. In this framework the occupation of the country by the US and Britain does not feature.

Although nominally independent this mission has the full support of the US and Britain. The Helsinki process (it took this name because first meeting of the group took place in the Finnish capital) has been carefully nurtured for over a year. In addition to Sinn Fein it also involves the ANC. The South Africans are veterans at advising on conflict resolution, having in earlier periods promoted their own settlement as a model for Ireland and Palestine to follow.

The culmination of this process was the meeting that took place in the Al-Rashid hotel within Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone. Attended by the Irish, South Africans and a number of Iraqi factions, this produced an agreement that commits all groups to disband unlawful armed groups, respect the independence of the judiciary, combat corruption and support the constitution. It also says that factions should resolve discord by peaceful and democratic means and uphold equality for all citizens.

On the face of it this would seem to represent be some form of progress, but set against the reality of what is going on in Iraq it is a mockery. There is massive corruption, widespread sectarian violence and intimidation, and systematic abuses by the Iraqi Government. The greatest offence though is that the main cause of the strife that afflicts Iraq – its occupation by US and Britain – is ignored. This is particularly blatant at a time when the US is pressing Iraqis to accept a permanent military presence and open their oil industry to foreign ownership.

Unbelievably, Mac Maharaj of the ANC has described the process as providing Iraqi’s with a “platform to speak to each other without factoring in outside interests”. While Martin McGuinness predicts a groundswell of support that “may lead to a total end of the conflict in that country.” These are deceptions and dangerous ones at that as they can only advance the imperialist agenda for Iraq.

It is a testimony to the degeneration of the ANC and Sinn Fein that they should lend themselves to this. This particularly pertinent for the ANC whose settlement has been exposed by the recent outbreak of xenophobic violence. For its part Sinn Fein seem to be suffering from self deception as they trumpet the achievements of the Irish peace process. Flattered by being given the role of imperialism’s useful idiots they have completely lost any sense of political reality. This is reflected in the ludicrous boast by Martin McGuinness that pictures of himself with Ian Paisley “had a profound impact in Iraq”. Please!

Ding! Ding! Lisbon Treaty round 2 has started already!

2008-06-17T20:50:00.004Z

Well that didn’t take long did it? Hardly had we a chance to pause for breath but Brian Cowan has told EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso that he is going to call another referendum because they didn’t get the result they wanted, although they won’t be so quick to admit it.

We don’t really need to labour the point about how undemocratic this is. No, hold on a minute – yes we do! There will be all sorts of dust kicked up about declarations and protocols attached to the Treaty when it is eventually put to the vote again but they will all mean nothing. How do we know that? Because when the French and Dutch workers told the EU constitution to get stuffed they gave them the Lisbon Treaty instead, with next to no significant difference except that the French and Dutch weren’t allowed to vote again.

It’s also undemocratic because the Irish vote was a vote of EU citizens which, if the EU really was democratic, would count in a Europe-wide vote. In other words it’s not a matter of the Irish being given this or that assurance. Despite the largely nationalistic content of the No campaign this was a European vote against militarism and neoliberal economic policies across Europe. It was a defence mechanism not just for Irish workers but for all European workers.

This means we should say to Sinn Fein and anyone else who wants to negotiate, or rather get Cowan to negotiate, a series of opt outs on our behalf – and what a joke that idea is –that that’s not what we voted for. We voted for all of us to be spared the race to the bottom that the EU has planned in the name of competitiveness.

This means we immediately need to start building a truly internationalist, a really democratic and necessarily socialist opposition.

The No camp has now been told – rhetorically because they would never dream of letting us do it in reality - that we should put forward what we want the EU to do now. Well let's start with determining what this means.

First we now realise, if anyone was ever in any doubt, that the idea that the Irish State was now out of the domination of an empire is nonsense. Ireland is not France as they say. We can get stuffed but this could never be said to one of the major imperialist EU powers. This means we must unite with workers across Europe also opposed to Lisbon because we will not defeat it by ourselves.

It means demanding a really democratic European organisation - a Constituent Assembly to decide how we really want to be governed. This would mean putting together a constitution that embodied not the rights of free markets, of money, but the rights of workers, women, youth and immigrants to real freedom, and control of resources to deliver a Europe dedicated to its people and not profit. But a Europe for thoseat the bottom will have to be built from the bottom - from mobilising workers in Ireland and across Europe.

The fight has only begun. We have been told by our enemies we don’t have an alternative. Socialists need to put forward exactly what it is. No more hiding behind broad campaigns. It’s time to fight for the socialist No, and also a socialist Yes to what we really want.

Internment vote puts DUP in driving seat

2008-06-16T14:40:00.002Z

The passage of the 42 day detention law through the Commons on the votes of the DUP may have caused consternation in Britain, but it can hardly come as a surprise to anyone familiar with their record. The DUP and its counterparts in the UUP have consistently backed the use of repressive laws. Historically, this was epitomised most clearly under the old Stormont regime. Its Special Powers Act allowed for the suspension of fundamental democratic rights and legal principles. This law and the repressive apparatus that enforced it operated freely under the gaze of successive British governments. Of course as it applied only to the north of Ireland few objections were raised. Indeed, there is an anti Irish element to the current outrage, with the Government being accused by its opponents of using "Irish votes" to abolish English civil liberties.

Much of the media speculation has been about the nature of the deal between the DUP and the Brown government. This has covered such things as the money raised from the sale of army bases being retained by the Executive; a further delay in the introduction of water charges and a commentator not to extend abortion laws to the north. The deal appears to be a hodgepodge of patronage and reaction.

However, the details of what was agreed between the DUP and the government are secondary to the fact that there was a deal at all. The critical point is that the Brown government is now dependent on the DUP for its survival. The implications of this were spelt out clearly in the boast by Gregory Campbell that his party "now holds the balance of power at Westminster and we will use it to force the pace".

The DUP’s coup over the detention vote puts into stark relief the attempt by Sinn Fein to win concessions through engineering a mini crisis over the nomination of the new First Minister. This collapsed in ignominy with Sinn Fein agreeing to nominate with only a commitment from the British and the unionists to discuss their concerns. The Gordon Brown-DUP deal shoots a hole in the Sinn Fein belief that the British will put pressure on the DUP to move on issues such as an Irish language act and and the devolution of policing and justice powers. One consequence of the Brown-DUP deal will be the return of a form of internment to the north. As part of the UK, 42 day detention will apply here as well. Weren't we promised that repressive laws were a thing of the past?

DUP Iris Does It Again

2008-06-09T11:23:00.003Z

Days Like These No7

by Guest Blogger Gerry Fitzpatrick

I'll not be commenting on the precise details Mrs R's recent outburst but wish to look at it's political consequences. What the Belfast Agreement and the St Andrew's Agreement was about for the British and Irish governments and Sinn Fein was to present the the DUP as new 'shiney happy people' (as the Irish Times described IPsnr) and every thing in the new DUP/SF future will be fine and if not fine - manageable.

After several incidents involving the DUP bigotry and malpractice SF's condemnations of their partners in government are waring pretty thin, because they are the ones who have vested interest in the fantasy that DUP can be what they want them to be - and not what they are.

The difference between this latest DUP instance of homophobia and previous instances is that the DUP via Iris are now telling us loud and clear 'they will not be silenced' not by anyone and have a right to their views. She has now been reported to the police by various groups - including the Alliance party for her hate speech. That will, if nothing else show us just how strong the DUP and Loyalist bigotry is here, as she is turned into a Loyalist hero -a 'victim' of 'liberal left political correctness' as one of her supporters put it .

The endorsement given by Iris to Dr Miller who is still practices aversion therapy in the province is now official as Mrs Robinsion is not only the chair of the Stormont health committee she also sat on the the special committee on suicide prevention. Now we know her solution for people who have suffered as a result of homophobia 'I know a Dr, who can help you change your sexual orientation...'. The person she offered that advise to had just been beaten and left for dead in Carmoney a few days ago.

Sinn Fein seem to think that they are dealing with a New DUP when they are the same as when they first started - an organisation devoted to reaction pure and simple. And it is Sinn Fein that we all have to thank for putting the DUP and that reaction into government.

Siptu Gets Stuck In

2008-06-06T18:47:00.006Z

The recent painful history of union collaboration with employer attacks on workers’ conditions in Aer Lingus is so blatant that it could almost be forgiven if anyone with the least concern about the issues turned away in embarrassment and disgust.

SIPTU supported privatisation of the state-owned company on condition that workers conditions were protected. Ever since there have been unremitting attacks on these conditions while those at the top of the company have given themselves extravagant bonuses for having successfully pushed them through. In truth they have received these under false pretences. Those really responsible for their successful implementation are the trade union leaders who first of all sold privatisation and then imposed the attacks on workers when they were initially rejected.

Having made an agreement for pay rises under the latest social partnership umbrella – ‘Towards 2016’ – Aer Lingus management then tore this deal up and refused to pass the pay increases on to their workers. Then they demanded €20m cuts. What was SIPTU’s reaction? When workers rejected the cuts they made them vote again. Just as they did during the Nice Treaty referendum when they supported the government when it too demanded another vote when the first one didn’t go their way.

In this case however the union bureaucracy’s treachery is worse. When they voted for a second time, according to the union’s rules, the workers again rejected the deal. This time their leaders just tore up their own rule book and imposed the new terms and conditions on those sections of the workforce where a majority had been brow-beaten into accepting them in the second ballot. The remaining sections have been left isolated. They will no doubt receive short shrift if they too decide to fight back and ignore, by-pass or circumvent the union rule book, which is so often the bureaucracy’s weapon against its own members.

This whole rotten story has now been repeated with handlers at the aircraft maintenance firm SR Technics, an earlier victim of government and union false promises. Having voted against changes to their terms and conditions SIPTU again imposed another vote and forced another rotten ‘compromise’ on the workers. The nature of this compromise and the union’s sorry record has been made so clear in a SIPTU statement that it hardly requires socialists to comment further.

The SIPTU statement reads: “The handlers are willing to be trained up to undertake the task while awaiting the outcome of the arbitration. I would also like to point out that these men have undertaken additional productivity in the past without any monetary reward. They have had to forego the seven per cent increase due to them under the Sustaining Progress agreement and the last phase of Towards 2016, which was worth another 2.5 per cent, making a cumulative total of ten per cent. This latest change was introduced at the last minute in negotiations which had focused on the craft group of workers and we were given very little time to deal with the issue.”

So SIPTU dealt with it by mugging the workforce.

These are by no means isolated examples of the role of union bureaucracies, but rather fit neatly into a pattern that is so evident that it is overwhelming. Yet still many on the left regard these people as misguided reformists who share the same goal but just differ in ideas or methods. Like brass monkeys they see, hear and speak no evil as they hoist these people onto platforms in whatever single issue campaign is their latest hobby horse – giving them radical credentials so radically false we turn away in embarrassment and disgust.

But that is where we came in.

Man bites dog

2008-05-31T19:15:00.006Z

Irish trade unionism – the home of the young conservative fogey

Aficionados of Irish trade unionism may well have missed a recent gem by Sean Fryers, member of Unite executive and a youth member of the Irish Congress of Irish Congress of Trade Unions. In the Irish News on 28th May he bemoans the plight of local business facing inflation, increased energy costs, a climate change levy and water charges. His members face all these to a much greater extent than their bosses, but Sean chooses to write about the plight of the capitalists.

He worries about all these “as local companies will be unable to increase the pay of the working class people”.

The solution is for the local capitalist administration to lobby the Brown government to obtain a reduction in energy costs “for local employers”.

This is one of these “Man bites dog” stories, where the trade union representative demonstrates on behalf of the bosses, ignores the needs of the workers and gives a green light for a pay freeze before negotiations even begin.

It provoked no comment, but perhaps that’s hardly surprising in a week where the Trade union leadership are involved in yet another partnership sellout, one group of workers were on hunger strike outside ‘Unite’ offices because of alleged union collusion in their sacking and another group had split completely from Unite, alleging that their officers were in collusion with the employers.

Reading Sean Fryers offering, they may well have a point.

Days Like These No6

2008-05-31T14:15:00.002Z

‘When are filmmakers going to make unionism ‘sexy’?’

by Guest Blogger Gerry Fitzpatrick

The above question was the large print headline to a news feature that appeared in the Irish News 27.05.08 prompted by a complaint by the playwright Garry Mitchell ‘It has been said to me’, the playwright told the paper, ‘that Catholics are ‘sexier’, that they’re far more interesting and far more entertaining and that the leads [main actors] are more interesting if they’re Catholic’.

This response was solicited from the playwright as part of the papers reaction to the news that a film Hunger by the black director Alexander McQueen depicting the last days of the hunger striker Bobby Sands, had just won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes film festival. ‘Is the success of Hunger’, the paper asked, ‘evidence that ‘the troubles movie’ had turned the corner?’ In the two articles what followed the answer ‘no’ was given by those opposed to the film.

Now it may well be expecting too much of the a Belfast based newspaper to try and answer their own question by asking the director Alexander McQueen why he would even want to direct a film about Bobby Sands. The article only reported hostile unionist reaction. Publishing comment that ranged from anti-Agreement unionist James Dixon who accused the film of ‘glorifying some of the worst criminals in hell’ to the DUP’s Robin Newton who said that Alexander McQueen didn’t understand the truth about ‘the fanatical nature of terrorists’ – who along with other unionist members of Belfast City Council had opposed the making of the film in Belfast. These were the only people quoted. The balance of the article -if one could call it that - didn’t appear to be an issue.

Some may think it a rather glib point to make but it is important –given the nature of the subject – that it is now considered a cliché to refer to a serious matter as interesting (or not) due to the fact of it being ‘sexy’ or not. The English novelist A.S Byatt made that point rather poignantly over ten years ago when she said that one of most offensive traits of the 1980s was the intrusion of city yuppie jargon into common speech. So it was not uncommon to hear things like mortgages being referred to as ‘sexy’ deals when it had, as she said, ‘got nothing to do with sex’ or sex appeal. The above quoted headline ‘When are filmmakers going to make unionism’ sexy’’ not only does the paper a disservice, it does Gary Mitchell a disservice also. For he was reporting the speech of film industry people, he has never seen it as his job to make unionism or Loyalism sexy and he has had a good deal of success in portraying it as anything but!

Where are They and What Do They Believe In Now? - Part 2 the BBC & The SWP

2008-05-27T15:03:00.009Z

Days like these Part. 5

Guest blogger Gerry Fitzpatrick

First, an update on previous entries: The Labour revolt over the abolition of 10p lower tax band lead by back bencher Frank Field is now at an end, as he announced in the House of Commons. After having secured a pledge that its negative effects will be removed, Mr Field said that his war with the government ‘is now over’ (the Labour Lefts’ mini is now safely back in neutral mode). Unfortunately it will be of little help to the poor as the price of oil, wheat and rice sky rocket. Labour after the May council elections and the Crewe by-election will not be able to remain in power by seeking more advice from the free market Gurus. A parliamentary researcher friend tells me that those government ministers, who have managed to give up the gurus, have given up being Labour politicians as well.

I see that Mr Brendan Barber and the TUC have managed at last to kick their way into the headlines (well into the London Independent at least). He has promised a Summer of Discontent for the government – interesting that the Independent put it like that - weren’t the workers of the Winter of Discontent defeated? The question now is, can Mr Barber become the new Frank Field? Watch this space!

The BBC

Rather than debate the value if this publicly owned institution, an evaluation of its effectiveness in aftermath of the disaster of the Hutton Report would be more in order. For it is clear that the Hutton Report was the largest political defeat for the corporation in its history. It was also the most obvious political white-wash of a government since the Bloody Sunday Widgery Tribunal into the Derry killings in 1972 (Hutton, as is widely known, played a controversial role in condemning the coroner after the bloody Sunday Killings for expressing a view that the victims were unlawfully killed). When his report on the death of the government scientist Dr David Kelly was published, it avoided the question of what may have caused his death - such as the government leaking the scientists’ name to the press - and condemning the BBC for helping the scientist express his views anonymously. However, BBC unions missed their chance when it would have been very easy to get public support for a political strike against Hutton and the Government and to protest against one of the most blatant political whitewashes in recent history.

Since then, post the Hutton report, the BBC has tried to recover some of its political influence. To a certain extent it has regained that influence, mostly as a consequence of the UK public moving to oppose and protest against the New Labour disaster. However, the BBC has also retained the right to run the usual immigrant scare stories – thus maintaining the Corporation dubious sense of ‘balance.’

The SWP

The Socialist Workers Party, or the International Socialists as the organisation was before 1976, have managed to become what they used to campaign against – an organisation devoted to identity politics. If anyone was in any doubt as to the change or what it means for socialist campaigns, they should listen to the SWP mayoral candidate Lindsey German speaking at the last Stop the War Conference. Rather than emphasize the collective action of all groups and the international role of the War and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the anti war leader repeatedly infers that the war is also a Muslim issue. It is only a Muslim issue in so far as the minority of Muslims say that it is. The wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are not a Muslim issue - in the same way the occupation of the North of Ireland is a not catholic (or a protestant) issue.

It is anti-imperialist issue and the socialist aim in any anti-imperialist campaign is the forging of links between all those who oppose the imperial project. As a consequence of the SWP line the involvement of millions was thrown away in the hope that appealing to one group –the Muslim community (no matter how important) would help expand the group’s political influence. That strategy has failed, but the SWP like New Labour and the New Labour leadership, will continue to pile up disaster on disaster - thoroughly convinced that it is everyone else ‘who doesn’t get it’. And that’s one thing the SWP and New Labour are right about.

Bankrolling bigotry – another example

2008-05-13T16:47:00.001Z

Another example of the official promotion of sectarian (one of the key elements of the peace process) came to light this week when it was revealed that public bodies were helping to finance loyalist marching bands.

In response to a freedom of information request, Stormont’s Department of Culture revealed that sixty five bands received funds totally more than £166,100 last year. The Arts Council gave about £102,500 to 24 bands; the Ulster Scots Agency gave £56,000 to 38 bands; and the Big Lottery Fund gave £6,980 to three bands (this was under its Awards for All scheme).

Among the bands receiving support (£4,600 from the Lottery) was the Pride of the Ardoyne. It takes part in the flashpoint parade past the Ardoyne shops every year displaying a banner bearing emblem of the Young Citizen Volunteers – the UVF’s youth wing - and the names of two deceased UVF members. The Mourne Young Defenders Flute Band received £1,800 from the Ulster Scots Agency for musical tuition and a further £1,219 for an ‘Ulster Scots summer school’ run by its members. In 2006 it took part in the Love Ulster parade in Dublin that provoked a riot.

That loyalist bands should be involved in sectarian intimidation is hardly a surprise – this is the very reason for their existence. The most sinister element is that they are being legitimised by the state; their coat trailing antics repackaged as cultural expression.

In justifying this the funding bodies corrupt the very principles they are supposedly there to promote. For example, on its support for loyalist bands, a spokesman of Arts Council claimed that it “monitors the artistic quality of applicants and is aware of its obligations under ‘Good Relations’ and Section 75 legislation.” He also claimed that the Council was “actively encouraging applicants to develop and expand their audiences and to break down barriers in society, in line with the aspirations of the Good Friday Agreement”. A spokeswoman for National Lottery said that it helped “organisations to run projects which will bring people together and increase community activity”. Of course the whole ethos and activity of loyalists stands in direct opposition to breaking down barriers and bringing people together. They are there to fan sectarian sentiment and maintain divisions.

The reason for this apparent contradiction is revealed by the Arts Council spokesperson when he said that it was acting “in line with the aspirations of the Good Friday Agreement”. The official bankrolling of bigotry is an inevitable consequence of the politics that underpin the peace process - that the struggle in the north is not about self determination or imperialism but the competing aspirations of two communities. Once this has been accepted, as it has by Sinn Fein and the SDLP, how can the demands of loyalists, such as the right to march anywhere they please, be denied? Sure isn’t part of their culture?

Where are They And What Do They Believe In Now?

2008-05-06T00:55:00.009Z

Days Like These No4

Guest blogger Gerry Fitzpatrick

‘Policies not Personalities’ is still one of Tony Benn’s most memorable sayings which I would like to suspend for the duration of this and the next few columns. For it is time to take stock and provide a who’s who of the crisis in socialist ideas and ask who is operating in reverse gear?

For although thinks are moving slowly and some change is taking place I want to suggest why it isn’t happening faster.

The Labour Party

First an epiphany – not mine but watching someone have one. This was Frank Field MP on The Daily Politics programme talk about China and the Olympics. British athletes, he said, should not boycott the Beijing Olympics. They should go and protest at the opening ceremony by carrying Tibetan flags. When he was reminded by Andrew Neil that this would not be allowed, he got quite angry and said that it should done anyway and that Britain should encourage as many other countries to follow suit as doing nothing would give the Chinese Communist Party a propaganda triumph, similar to Hitler’s Olympics of 1936.

He is right of course; the international protests against the brutality in Tibet will be a focus for all the radical (anti-Stalinist) forces and may help rekindle the pro-democracy campaigners within the country. This time the Tibetan and pro-democracy campaigners will not receive official support from America or Britain as China now controls most of their debt.

The next I heard of F. Field was on Channel Four protesting at the abolition of the 10 pence tax rate for those on low incomes. He made a contribution as his former self – the Child Poverty Action campaigner and not as the ideological prisoner of neo‑liberal gurus who insisted that Social Security systems should be cut back to help employment and the economy grow.

Either he has been listening to others or has just told himself that he should never have believed Brown on helping ‘children out of poverty’ while his government bails out more failing banks. Say what you like, but if old FF has now a problem with Brown and his policies, how many will also ditch the gurus and oppose those policies? That depends on how badly New Labour losses are in the May elections. Then Mr Field will hold another meeting with his back bench colleagues about Mr Brown’s polices and decide if they will or will not move from a position of neutrality or into first gear. One to watch!

Brendan Barber and The Invisible TUC

How could you know that Brendan Barber is still the General Secretary of the TUC, other than by calling the TUC or wiking it? You wouldn’t know form the British media. I have never seen him interviewed in the way his predecessors were in the 1970s. In fact he and the TUC may just as well not exist. This is actually unfair as he is happy to work behind the scenes. After the hard work he put into betraying the Gateway and BAA unions he has earned the nickname ‘Brendan‑ Johnny‑Go‑Backwards -Barber’

Next Time: The BBC and the SWP

Dr Varney’s prescription for the north – privatisation and wage cuts

2008-05-03T13:25:00.001Z

The British Government’s grim vision for workers in the north took on some more detail this week with the publication of the second part of the Varney report. This report, the first part of which had dealt with taxation, was commissioned by the treasury in response to the pleading of local politicians for some type of economic peace dividend. Of course the expected economic package from Brown wasn’t forthcoming. As compensation Brown’s close advisor David Varney was tasked with drawing up proposals to boost the north’s economy.

Local politicians had all hung their hats on the call for a dramatic cut in corporation tax as the magical formula for economic growth. However, this was never likely to be conceded in the context of broader Treasury policy and was rejected by Varney in his first report. The second report, which sets out a broad economic prescription is therefore probably more significant, reflecting as it does British government thinking on how to reform the north’s economy.

For workers in the north Varney’s report makes grim reading. It is a programme for a complete shift towards neoliberalism. While this process has been ongoing for a number of years, under both devolution and direct rule, Varney’s proposals would mark a dramatic acceleration.

The main elements of Varney Two are privatisation and wage cuts. He calls for the Executive to increase the role of the private in the delivery of key public services while transferring other “non-core services” entirely into private ownership. The public assets he recommends selling off completely include Belfast Port, the NI Vehicle Testing Agency, car parks and the public housing stock. This last proposal is particularly harsh given the chronic housing crisis in the north and the growing waiting list for Housing Executive properties.

Alongside this privatisation programme Varney demands the lowering of wages in the north. His claim is that the marginally better pay and conditions in the public sector are hammering private sector growth. To counter this he proposes the introduction of regionalised pay for public servants, breaking the link with the rest of the UK. He also proposes a regionalised minimum wage and changes to the benefit system. The effect of all this would be to lower wages across the board, and to coerce people off benefits and into low paying jobs.

What Varney proposes would be a nightmare for workers. It would transfer massive wealth from labour to capital, and drive down the living standards of workers both in terms of their pay and conditions and the costs and quality of public services they use. Unsurprisingly Varney Two received a welcome from employers and criticism from trade union. However, the silence from local politicians was notable. While none of the parties endorsed Varney they didn’t reject it either. Their true position was probably summed up most accurately by a spokesperson for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland (ICAI) who when welcoming the proposals noted that “to a very large extent they already reflect the existing aims of the Executive”.

Days Like These No 3. Will You Promise To Keep Paying The Bankers On Demand?

2008-04-29T23:31:00.002Z

Guest blogger Gerry Fitzpatrick

What was it they used to say about trade Unionists and the New Labour Party? - something about there being ‘no more beer and sandwiches’ for them in Downing Street any more. What that phrase meant was that there would be an end to any cosy relationship and assumptions about improving pay and conditions.

Today it has just been announced that the chiefs of the biggest five banks‑mortgage lenders have completed a two day visit to Downing Street. This ended with the Treasury agreeing another £50 billion of public money would be given to those bankers to ‘boost their confidence’. Trade Union leaders have not been heard on the airways on the subject of this new cosy relationship, which involves the exchange of bad debts for government bonds that can be then traded on the open market. Only the venerable Vince - Mr Cable of the Liberal Democrats - was given an audience by BBC to object to this. He pointed out that government have asked for nothing in return - no agreement on future regulation, no guarantees that the behaviour the bankers themselves agreed caused the chaos in the first place - would be moderated.

The problem with the Governments’ and Mr Cable’s approach, as one commentator pointed out, was that it had a built-in flaw. Because, as she explained, the £50 billion of Government subsidy to the banks would not be enough to keep the bankers confident in their own market this year and that the whole operation could carry on indefinitely year on year.

Nationalisation of bank debts has now the only dependable source of private Bank profit as they in effect become government bond dealers. No matter this is still a short term solution that will in turn cause the value of the bonds to fall. Why? Because the government got rid of its assets 20 years ago that could have been used to halt a fall in their value on the open market. Now it has only the tax payer and arms industry left to depend on and their own borrowing.

After the debacle over the abolition of the 10p rate of tax and the fate of the Aljamai Saudi arms deal the government will itself have to borrow yet more money. That money will not be supplied by the central (American) banks. The government, like the other governments of the world, will take their place in the Beijing Dole queue to avail themselves of Communist China’s Social Security Scheme for Capitalist Ruling Classes. China will be happy to wait until land prices in Britain and the world fall by 30% and then they plan to start buying as the Japanese security houses did in the 1970s.

That might be in a year from now but by that time Chinese peasants will already have begun to die from hunger due to the doubling and trebling in the price of rice. Who then can say what will happen to the Chinese government?

Let them eat cake - water bosses party as Executive looks to private equity

2008-04-29T15:45:00.002Z

Given the scandals that have surrounded NI Water, a celebration of the first anniversary of its creation would have hardly seemed appropriate. However, this did not deter the company throwing a £8,000 bash birthday bash at a luxury hotel for its senior managers. This came just days after the utility regulator had lunched an investigation into a blunder that could result in customers paying an extra £20 million a year in water bills.

The shamelessness of NI Water bosses is perhaps matched only by their lack of taste. This was revealed in a leaked draft itinerary for the birthday gathering. It refers to "party bags with sweets" being available on tables, a "birthday tea" at lunchtime with "sandwiches, cakes, jelly and ice cream" and " birthday branding" including banners and balloons. A special birthday cake was scheduled to make an appearance after a morning presentation to managers on NI Water's first year by its chief executive Katharine Bryan. The draft programme said the chief executive would be asked to stay on stage to cut the cake, as the lights dimmed, music played, and birthday imagery appeared on screen. The song snippet earmarked for the start of Bryan's talk was from the U2 hit "Pride". Other songs featured included "Praise You" by Fat Boy Slim, "Little Less Conversation" by Elvis, "Shine" by Take That and the theme tune of The Office. The last is particularly appropriate as the party scene conjures up the discomforting comedy that was the hallmark of that series. Unfortunately this isn’t a satire on reality TV, this is reality. If there is a joke it’s on the public.

The bosses of NI Water can engage in such smug and contemptuous displays because there is absolutely no pressure on them from the parties in the Executive. This is despite the fact that it is nominally a government-controlled company. While there may be huffing and puffing from some MLAs, NI Water has been given a free hand to do whatever it wants. The minister for Regional Development, Sinn Fein’s Conor Murphy, uses its status as an independent company to evade any responsibility. We therefore have a situation in which all the Executive parties claim to be against privatisation of the water service and extra water charges, while the management of NI Water moves this process on a pace.

While there may appear to be a conflict, the reality is that the Executive and the management of NI Water are actually in tune. Despite the rhetoric the whole thrust of the Executive’s programme is towards privatisation and the extension of the role of private finance within public services. The latest example of this is the agreement negotiated with the comptroller of New York City pension funds to invest around $150 million in the Emerald Infrastructure Development Fund. This fund, which will effectively act as a private equity firm, will finance projects in the north in sectors such as energy, waste management, property, healthcare and ports. Significantly, the water industry was also mentioned as a possible area of investment.

Despite the claim from Martin McGuinness that the fund represents “the ordinary people of the United States investing in the ordinary people of the North", this is certainly not charity or an act of solidarity. It is actually a form of financial speculation. New York city comptroller William Thompson was clear about the purpose of this fund when he declared that was "optimistic about the opportunities for potential strong returns" from the north.

Investment of this type is also a driver of privatisation as whole areas of the public sector are opened up to private capital. This is what is behind the massive expansion of PFI schemes in the north. Under these public assets such as schools and hospitals have been transferred into private ownership and taxpayers forced to pay for their maintenance. This racket has run up hundreds of millions of pounds in public liabilities. Despite the rhetoric about additional investment, private finance actually extracts money from the public purse. And it is workers who bear the cost of the “strong returns” for the likes of Emerald Fund, whether directly through jobs losses and deteriorating working conditions if they are employed in the public sector, or through having to pay charges and higher taxes for public services. No wonder the bosses of NI Water are celebrating!

Dublin Palestine march: Socialists supply the bodies, liberalism supplies the politics

2008-04-21T20:33:00.008Z

An Ireland-Palestine Solidarity Committee (IPSC) march of around 300 people was held in Dublin on Saturday April 12^th. The demonstration was part of a series of IPSC events to commemorate the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine which led to the establishment of the colonial-settler and apartheid state of Israel. It linked the most infamous massacre of 1948 – Deir Yassin where around 120 people were killed, and the ethic cleansing on which Israel is founded established, with the ‘collective punishment’ endured by the people of Gaza today.

It was an issue worthy of protest, but one could only blink at the role of the Dublin left. The socialist movement, along with Palestinian émigrés, made up the whole of the demonstration, hosting a platform largely dominated by forces far to their right. The most glaring example was the keynote speech by David Norris in which he indicated his support for the state of Israel, qualified with a call for more humane treatment of Palestinians. He was followed by bluster from Michael D Higgins of the Labour party and blather from SIPTU bureaucrat Mags O'Brien and Sinn Fein apparatchik Mary Lou McDonald. The only figure who could be definitely identified with socialism was Eamonn McCann.

Socialists have been holding demonstrations throughout the lifetime of the modern working class. They have hosted non-socialist speakers with very distinct ground rules. One – an attempt to broaden the movement by engaging with new forces the speakers bring with them, two – to debate issues and win workers away from liberalism, nationalism and social democracy.

These ground rules no longer apply. The grandees never bring anyone but themselves. Michael D could claim to have brought Labour youth – but they would have come anyway. Norris had no-one to bring. Sinn Fein will keep their own supporters as far away from the left as they can. As for debate – the fact that Norris can support Israel without facing anyone protesting and pointing out that that state can only survive by maintaining ethnic cleansing and apartheid is a sign of the deep demoralisation of the left.

This behaviour is clearly suicidal, Sinn Fein in particular are clearly using the issue of Palestine to re-establish a little of the leftist glitter that tarnished so quickly in the last election. If they succeed they will obliterate the left’s own pretensions to electoral success. How can we explain it?

The answer seemed to be summed up in the platform calls for the EU to suspend the Euro-med agreement that gives Israel special status. This is nothing but another call for the ‘international community’ to act. The EU is clearly with the other imperialist powers in supporting Israel. The job of the socialist movement is to try and convince workers to intervene on the side of Palestine. It appears that the left have given up trying to climb that particular mountain and are willing to allow liberalism to set the agenda.

Bertie Boy bows out

2008-04-09T10:12:00.003Z

While Bertie Ahern may have claimed the announcement of his resignation as Taoiseach was made voluntarily and at a time of his own choosing, there is no doubt that the continuing revelations at the Mahon Tribunal hastened his departure. Up until last week he was showing every indication that he was set to brazen it out, even going on the offensive with his own legal challenges.

What really did for him was the admission from his former secretary that he had given her pounds sterling to exchange and deposit in his bank accounts. This was a charge that he had vehemently denied. But he had now been caught telling a blatant lie. With another appearance at the tribunal looming in May, where he would be questioned about this, he chose to resign.

Of course this was dressed up as being in the interests of the country rather than a desperate attempt to salvage some dignity from a precarious position. Not that Ahern could muster much dignity in his resignation announcement. It was a long whine about how he had been hard done by, the innocent victim of a relentless media campaign. This was a complete distortion. It was not the media that brought him down (in fact he had gotten a relatively easy ride for a long time), but all his lies and dodgy dealings. He was a corrupt politician whose luck had finally run out.

Not that you would have gained this impression from the tributes paid to him. To go by them you would have thought Bertie Ahern was a saint. The biggest claims made for him were as the architect of the peace process and social partnership. Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams said he “brought about the Good Friday Agreement and he deserves our thanks for that." SIPTU General President Jack O'Connor said Ahern's time in office had seen “the most dramatic enhancement of economic prosperity in our entire history”. But it really says more about the state of trade unions and the republicanism movement than Ahern that their representatives should praise the two greatest triumphs of imperialism and capitalism in Ireland.

The claims for Ahern as the architect of these is also dubious. While he may have been around, the figure most associated with social partnership was Charles Haughey. The peace process also predated his period as Fianna Fail leader and Taoiseach. The real drive for this came form the political collapse of the republican movement. The role of Irish Government was to copper fasten this by going along with the British and dropping any gestures (such as articles 2 & 3) towards democracy.

There is also an attempt to present Ahern as a symbol of the “new Ireland”. But this is a myth as well, ignoring the political milieu that created him. He attempted to spin this myth himself in his resignation speech when referring to his admiration for former Fianna Fail leaders. However, his list had one glaring omission - Charles Haughey. This is even more glaring in the case of Bertie Ahern as Haughey was his political mentor. He was part of Haughey’s inner circle and the monumental corruption of that period. It was Ahern who singed the black cheques that aided Haughey’s pilfering of the public purse.

Despite his man of the people image Ahern, like Huaghey and his other predecessors, was only concerned with looking after the interests of the rich in Ireland – from tax amnesties to low taxes on profits and privatisation. He presided over a period when inequality grew massively and billions were transferred from Ireland’s workers to the wealthy. He had done his bit to create a rich man’s paradise and expected to get his due. This is the real story behind Ahern’s “unusual” financial arrangements.

Bertie Ahern claimed that one of the reasons for delaying his resignation to the 6 May was so he could take up his invitation to address a joint sitting of the US Congress. That such an “honour” should be performed by someone leaving office because of corruption may appear unseemly. But what better representative of the Irish political class could there be?

The Levellers and Optimists

2008-04-04T00:45:00.006Z

By guest blogger Gerry Fitzpatrick

The ticker tape that runs across the top of my computer has just informed me that American government and the Federal Bank is in the process of changing the economic system once more. Now we are finally backed to the saner system of a failing bank being able to avail itself of extensive funds on demand. What this will mean I can only paraphrase in the style of a fellow columnist who contributes and occasional column to a UK liberal daily:

“Government Announcement: ‘Capitalism - it is a complex system and every now again the state needs to take your money, and the money from the weak, the poor, the disabled and the sick and give it to very rich people. These very rich people are like you and me – they are people who have failed to keep themselves very rich. We all depend on these people – they have committed no crime (other than acting like criminals). We owe them all a great deal and over the next few years you will see how much we are in their debt. If you are in receipt of tax allowances or pensions however small or Social Security payments how ever large, please donate to this worthwhile cause and give generously.”

I suppose any liberal or liberal comedian columnist could have written that as those who publish such broadsides believe that they are close to making a comeback. It would be glib to call them ‘Keynesians’ as they have only ever existed in theory. No, I’m actually talking about the good citizens at Goldman Sachs, CNN international, Granada Television, The London Independent, The Guardian, The Observer, and Melvin Bragg (Inc). For if there is one thing that unites them all, here and abroad, it is the belief that the state can be a great democratic leveller correcting the errors of the free market with power of regulation – once that is done they argue, society would then be both greater and more equal. Unlike the free marketers who tend to be Right Wing Populists they are Principled Democrats. Everywhere they and their ideas are poised for a comeback. From now on, we will all be reminded of the state Will Hutton is in.

But what if we had an example of a state where these notions had been the official ideology for over thirty years? Commentators used to joke that the state of Northern Ireland was the last bastion of communism in Europe. They were not of course referring to Northern Ireland’s annual security bill or the cost of replacing its slums after sixty years. They were referring to the state and its official ideology of bureaucratic optimism.

This policy was recently on more dramatic display at the launch of the consultative document on Human Rights which produced no agreement on what was a human right and who should be entitled to them. This was at the end of a ten year process of consultation. The cheerleaders of the process such as Sinn Fein and the Communist Party – the local official optimists who say they believe in the power of the state to level – were of course not downhearted.

For they have become like those who they supposedly oppose. Institutionalised liberals all, who believe in the state as a benign force that is supporting and guiding them because, as they say to whoever will listen – the process. It is the only progress that is available to them to believe in. And who could blame them, their needs as believers have been satisfied.

Ta bron orm (I’m sorry) Republican spat ends in tears and forgetfulness

2008-03-28T13:28:00.004Z

The full-barrelled attack by Andersonstown News correspondent “Squinter” on Gerry Adams in the run-up to Easter shows the extreme political fragility of the Sinn Fein political structure. If anything the grovelling front-page apology in the post-Easter edition simply accentuates that fragility and the shock effect of a direct attack on Adams from the ‘Belly of the Beast’ – from the centre of the Sinn Fein propaganda machine. A process that has eaten Ian Paisley and son within ten months could yet devour Adams.

The movement is growing more fragile from a number of directions which appear as sudden shocks or crises. The stability that is left rests on the utter demoralisation of their membership, of a layer who are directly employed or employed as ‘community activists’ and in the utter absence of a convincing political alternative from within republicanism.

The most immediate shock here comes from the winding up of the IRA military structure. The political collapse of republicanism massively increased the layer of demoralised youth inhabiting areas like the Lower Falls. These youth, so deeply demoralised that they have no great concern about their own lives or the lives of those around them, feel they have no reason to be afraid of ex-prisoners or of those with close IRA connections. The IRA still have the capacity to kill these youths, but doing so they put themselves at the mercy of the DUP and the British and increase the likelihood of the expulsion of Sinn Fein from Stormont. Keeping their bums on Stormont seats is nearly the only policy that the Shinners have left. The result is that the Sinn Fein base suddenly find themselves defenceless, without the natural immunity that connection with the IRA conferred and dependent on the RUC/PSNI for defence. Naturally the RUC/PSNI have no deep concern about the protection of Sinn Fein or of working-class communities.

The Squinter article explores that raw nerve and ties it to a growing realisation that in fact Sinn Fein have achieved nothing through their rapprochement with imperialism and unionism. The Andersonstown News represents a small business class, mostly a middle class ‘Sinn Fein Nua’, who have done quite well from the grants that have been targeted at them, but expected it to be followed by major investment that never came. The fact that Sinn Fein have lost out on issues like the Irish language, police devolution and the new sports complex have not gone unnoticed, nor has the weakness and incoherence of their response.

A new and more burning irritation has emerged since the Dromore by-election, the DUP, seriously rattled by the success of Jim Allister and anti-agreement unionism, feel the need to humiliate Sinn Fein and demonstrate unionist triumphalism. This led to the serious backfire of an attempt by Sinn Fein to wrap the green flag around them by commemorating the deaths of IRA volunteers in Gibraltar and at the Funeral after. The DUP responded by forcing Sinn Fein to meet in the equivalent of a broom cupboard – squeezed into their Stormont office. This humiliation is becoming a daily occurrence and Adams threats of retaliation are tired and unconvincing.

Finally there is the outcome of the Southern election. Sinn Fein’s practice was to speak out of both sides of its mouth at once, with vague radical blather for the working class constituencies and hard right wing policies for its business backers. Under the pressure of election Adams tore up the blather and unveiled a party of the far right committed to economic policies dictated by big business – a party with no policies of its own and nowhere to go in a political landscape crowded with far right nationalist parties.

The attack on Adams stops well short of a critique of the St. Andrews agreement. The assumption is that there are nationalist gains to be made but that the Sinn Fein leadership are too incompetent to make them. In fact the Andersonstown News attack was an attack from the right. The paper was well ahead of Sinn Fein in pushing the present deal. Its ‘independent’ stance in the republican apparatus consists precisely of having the freedom to strike out to the right of Sinn Fein and express views that are not yet current in the mainstream. It was this paper that led the drive to establish sporting relations with the police and then to give the police an open platform in the paper. It was this paper that constantly distorted its reporting and slandered it opponents to win support for Adam’s policies and push the police into nationalist areas. These right-wing forces are now impatient. The old relics of the military campaign are an obstacle to a modern, middle-class Catholic party, able to push sectarian privilege and cut deals with the Unionists and British.

But Sinn Fein appears too fragile for this logical development to take place. The only stable base they have is Adams and the former military structure. The fragility was shown up by the initial panicky reaction, where Adams attacked the police and announced yet another multi-agency solution, followed by the counter-attack of the grovelling apology enforced on the Andersonstown News, followed by the Stalinist air-brush that took the squinter column from the paper’s archives and from the journalists own blog. The final outcome is that Sinn Fein are given a direct phone line to the police so that they can rush to the defence of the workers!

The Andersonstown News has got too big for its boots. Its idea that the suits, led by the group's managing director Mairtín Ó Muilleoir, can deliver real gains is simply a pipedream. However the unsayable has been said and no amount of file deletion can put the genie back in the bottle. In fact Squinter may have said too much. In arguing that the police do not protect communities and that the agreement has not generated prosperity and investment he is inviting his readers to draw the conclusion, not that they need a sharper suit at the head of the party, but that its time to reject an agreement that has revived the sectarian hell-hole in the North and met none of the needs of the working people who inhabit it.

Days Like These No. 2

2008-03-14T16:17:00.002Z

I begin with a memo that was recently posted on the financial pages of CNN online. It was a test that it advised readers give their financial advisors. Now some may say that we would have little to learn from such people and you would be right. For it turns out that the previously mentioned test was designed to determine if the financial advisor knew anything at all about finance or was just – as the memo put it simply ‘a salesman’ . The worse case scenario was when the ‘advisor’ refused to answer the questions and replied that ‘figures are the back offices concern’.

Today of course that can’t be the right answer as figures are everybody’s concern – from the price of wheat, petrol and – money. But in these days of so many turning points the financial adviser, who knows nothing about finance, is yet another indicator of the melt down in the economy. After all what one needed before now was to keep the faith that every thing was on the up. Financial advisers then gave no advice they just promoted stock options. Now many will be transferring to the back office to have a look at those same figures not to brush up their knowledge of the market but to avoid the people on the phones worried how much money they will loose as a result of the recent advice they received. Those who replace them will of course have the additional personal skills to be able to impart bad news and sympathise with the client in distress - rather like bereavement councillors.

If there was any shock at the news that the government had finally nationalised the British bank Northern Rock after a death agony of some four months it had all but dissipated by the final act. For we have now moved on form the ‘free market’ (which was neither free or a market) to free money that is costing us all packet (£100billion to be precise). Because as it transpired there simply was no effective way that the regulators (the people we pay to monitor the banks) could establish the truth behind the web of Off Shore companies that was Northern Rock. Not under the current law or management at any rate.

Not that the other Atlantic government is doing any better than it’s British subsidiary which just recently gave a present of $200 billion dollars to the four most sub prim exposed banks. Once that had been done, in the hope of halting the effects of more bank failures in the deadlines - the world wide stock market and the dollar tumbled in any case some 2.5%. The Federal Reserve or ‘the fed’, as it is affectionately known on Wall Street, had made matters worse. What now?

That’s not just a question for government financial advisers but for every one of us.

Posturing or Prophesy?

2008-03-11T20:01:00.005Z

The resignation of Ian Paisley has been widely reported as representing no threat to the power sharing institutions of the St. Andrews Agreement. This is something of a puzzle since Paisley’s resignation is in no small part a result of the Dromore by-election, which saw a substantial minority of unionist voters register their complete opposition to power sharing. It is not much of a surprise therefore that the London ‘Times’ has revealed the British government’s real concern for the future of the power sharing deal.

It stated that ‘The timing of his [Paisley’s] loss is profoundly unfortunate. The new institutions have been reasonably well established but cannot be described as secure. It would have been in the best interests of Northern Ireland if the First Minister could have stayed in place for at least another six months, entrenching the DUP-Sinn Fein accord further in the process, dealing with the controversial transfer of policing and justice to the Province and seeing through the summer marching season.’ The ‘Times’ went on ‘If Mr Robinson starts to find artificial fights with those who should be his partners then this will be reciprocated. And if that occurs, a fragile political bargain that serves the wider interests of Protestants and Catholics alike may be imperilled. Mr Robinson needs to state unequivocally that he intends to make the new arrangements work and that extremists who disagree with him can take their leave of the DUP.’

Peter Robinson however might recall that previous unionist leaders have come a cropper by going along with British demands, and that Paisley didn’t get where he was - to be top of the unionist pile - by compromising with Irish nationalism. The Dromore by-election was simply a reminder of this. The votes for the most blistering opponents of the current deal were of course a minority but Paisley also stated off in a much smaller minority.

No sooner had this warning been issued but Robinson revealed the end game of the DUP, indeed of all unionism, by stating that they aimed to dispense with power sharing altogether and head towards majority rule, i.e. unionist rule – ‘a far more normal democracy‘ he said. This is one hell of a sham fight to pick. The media have stayed true to their servile support for British policy by passing over this statement almost in silence. Certainly the threat to destroy the existing institutions by the putative leader of the biggest party has hardly received the attention it deserves. Nationalism has closed its eyes and hopes it’s all posturing. I think however this might be what SDLP politicians call ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’, thinking themselves ever so smart, but totally forgetting what happened to Sunningdale in the end.

It would also have been better for Sinn Fein if it too pretended that Robinson hadn’t said what he actually did say. Their response has been so weak as to reveal nakedly their limp prostration in front of the DUP. With Paisley having just revealed that the ‘chuckle brothers’ of himself and Martin McGuinness were not getting on quite so famously – he never refereed to McGuinness by name but only as ‘deputy’ and never once shook his hand; Paisley also crowed that he had in fact achieved his long standing election battle cry of "smashing Sinn Fein."

Much ridiculed because the Sinners are now in government, Paisley’s logic is pretty compelling. ‘I did smash them because I took away their main plank. Their main plank was that they would not recognise the British government. They can’t be true republicans when they now accept the right of Britain to govern this country and to take part in that government.’ As the ‘Times’ put it: ‘Bobby Sands and nine other men did not starve themselves to death so that Mr McGuinness could play the lesser role in a Chuckle Brothers routine within the United Kingdom,’ except that is what has happened.

Gerry Adams warned the DUP not to pick ‘sham and phoney fights with Sinn Fein.’ Why? Because this would frighten away foreign investment! The same foreign investment that isn’t coming in the first place. So no mention of what Sinn Fein would actually do to protect its position in government. Instead Adams stated, after having even been prevented from holding a commemoration for a republican volunteer at Stormont, that ‘republicans have been banned and censored and excluded before. Banned as a political party; banned from our city centre; banned from the airways; banned and demonised and vilified, and we came through it all.’

But isn’t all that supposed to belong to the past? Aren’t they now in government? Isn’t that supposed to mean an end to such things? Why are they now banned from certain places – Stormont’s Long Gallery; banned from the airways – unionist prevented cameras from accessing any attempt to film their commemoration anywhere else at Stormont? And what about the constant vilification, not to mention of humiliation, of Sinn Fein by the DUP – who continue to boast that they have ‘smashed’ the republicans?

Anyone who wants to write all this off as simple posturing hasn’t been paying attention over the last forty years. What do they call it? The triumph of wishful thinking over experience?

UDA make over – from the Grim Reaper to King Billy

2008-03-10T11:19:00.001Z

Taken on face value, reports that a notorious UDA mural in south Belfast was to be removed, may have been welcomed. However, when the story is examined further we find yet another example of the legitimisation of sectarianism and loyalism. It turns out that the “Grim Reaper” mural in the Village area of Donegal Rd is to be replaced by a portrait King William of Orange (hardly a step forward). Moreover, we find that this only came about as a result of negotiations with the UDA!

The most significant aspect of this story is that the negotiations with the UDA were being conducted out by two statutory bodies - Greater Village Regeneration Trust (GVRT) and the Arts Council. Paula Bradshaw of the GVRT was quite open about the nature of these talks. She said that the UDA had only agreed to the replacement of the mural when the Arts Council offered an inducement of £18,000. Of course the UDA’s agreement was not unconditional. According the Paula Bradshaw it came "with the proviso that they decided what would be the replacement”. Despite this the GVRT and the Arts Council “went along with their wishes”.

The Council's Chief Executive, Roisín McDonough, claimed that the replacement of the mural was a “huge first step in a very positive transformation process.” She further claimed that its replacement by King William was “not an act of triumphalism" as “King William is not offensive to people in this area.” Rather it was a “part of their legitimate Orange cultural heritage.” The unstated yet obvious corollary is that people who don’t belong to this “heritage” have no place in that area.

This episode exemplifies the thoroughly reactionary nature the peace process. We have official state sanction being given sectarian intimidation and the organisations that are responsible for it. Money is thrown at loyalists to erect murals that have no other purpose than to mark out territory and warn off nationalists from moving there or even passing through. Indeed, it’s not just nationalists. In recent years the Village area has seen numerous attacks on racial minorities and migrants. To define a whole area as part of an “Orange cultural heritage”, as Roisín McDonough does, can only legitimise sectarianism and racism. In this she is articulating the assumptions that underpin the peace process as a whole.

Paisley Won the War

2008-03-06T16:35:00.002Z

The following article has been sent to us by US socialist Matt Siegfried. He is a regular contributor to the SD website.

After 45 years as Northern Ireland’s leading demagogue the 82 year old sectarian preacher Reverend Doctor Ian Paisley has exited the political stage. He has resigned, as of May, his position as Stormont’s First Minister as well as Leader of his Democratic Unionist Party. He is Reverend of the Free Presbyterian Church, which can only be described as a shrill caricature of fundamentalist hokum and evangelical brimstone. He will hold on to his honorary Doctorate in Divinity bestowed upon him by the racist Bob Jones University.

Since his rival David Trimble and the Ulster Unionists along with the Good Friday Agreement fell, in large part, to his opposition, Paisley reconstructed the GFA with the pliant agreement of Sinn Fein into an even more sectarian and unionist agreement. Through the provisions of the October, 2006 Saint Andrew’s Agreement Ian Paisley became First Minister in a devolved Stormont regime. The structures of this regime are premised on a sectarian division. To create positions to fill it has more ministers, more members and more expenses than any other political entity its size. This large bureaucracy is perfect for handing out positions and sweetening pots. The Welsh and Scottish Assemblies have much more self rule than the one that sits in Ireland. Northern Ireland’s union with Britain is guaranteed by the Agreement and the Assembly itself carries a dual Unionist/British veto. It’s always potentially only a phone call away from collapsing if the Fenians ever get out of line.

Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness has taken the job of Ian Paisley’s Deputy. Together they have become known as the “Chuckle Brothers” as they knee slap with George Bush and cut the opening ribbon to tacky shopping developments in Belfast. McGuinness’s lack of dignity not withstanding, the former IRA Commander sits as a Minister of the British Crown. This erstwhile revolutionary who once was at war with the very idea of a Stormont administers its rule. Sinn Fein still have the shamelessness to claim to be socialists as they partner with Ian Paisley, who believes the world is four thousand years old, the pope is the anti-Christ and who once led a “Save Ulster from Sodomy” campaign. The DUP is the most right-wing party in power in Western Europe and Sinn Fein “chuckle” as they administer the rule of a thoroughly capitalist British state with them.

Ireland of today, North and South, is vastly different than it was even ten years ago. The war the IRA waged against British rule is clearly over. Southern Ireland’s integration into the European Union has seen it grow economically. This once economic basket case now has one of the highest standards of living in Europe. Immigration trends have reversed and instead of Ireland being a point of departure it for the New World or Australia it has become a place of arrival for hundreds of thousands of workers from the newly EU countries of the east like Poland and Lithuania.

But Ireland remains partitioned and Northern Ireland remains firmly British. Northern Ireland cannot help but be based on sectarianism because partition, British rule, requires it. What has been achieved in the North is a rebalancing of sectarian privilege not its destruction. Sinn Fein has readily accepted this formula which necessitated their abandonment of all but the title of Irish Republicanism. But the problem with basing solutions on sectarian privilege is that it requires consensus and in the Stormont context that means a reactionary neo-liberal policy with no opposition.

It is also the nature of sectarian division to be unequal, otherwise there is no justification for the division. The unionist will always have the veto and the British state to back them up on whatever question should arise. The use of that veto to scuttle the attempt at an Irish Language act late last year proves the point. If even the Irish language isn’t to be recognized how can Irish speakers? Sectarian benefits are doled out with precision. EU funds in particular are apportioned out to any number of projects defined by community or intercommunity, which can amount to the same thing since it is also premised on sectarian division. More than a few former guerillas now man these well funded community centers. Foreign investment and economic growth have not led to a single integrated school in Ireland or a single one of the “Peace Walls” to come down.

As I watched BBC Northern Ireland’s Spotlight on Tuesday as the substance of Paisley resignation began to seep in I was struck at the tone of the Unionists about Paisley’s legacy. Nigel Dodds of Paisley’s DUP and potential successor as party leader made it perfectly clear that from his perspective what was to celebrate about Paisley’s life was Paisley’s commitment to the Union and Unionist dominance within that Union. Far from a surrender to Sinn Fein, Dodds said, Paisley and the DUP had got them to not only drop their opposition to British rule but to be junior partners in its administration thus tying them politically to the fate of the union. Ironically, this is the same critique that many Republicans who disagree with the strategy Adams and McGuinness would invoke. His tone was one of bigoted triumphalism over the defeated nationalists. They would never see a united Ireland he said, and their leaders had even agreed to it.

There is nothing to celebrate in the life or politics of Ian Paisley. He has represented the worst kinds of divisions wrought by imperialism on Ireland. And no attempt to stand on the St. Andrews Agreement as history’s vindication will work. The agreement institutionalized a state that is a labyrinth of sectarianism and meaningless dispensations. It closes hospitals, cuts funding to education and pursues all of the devastating policies of neo-liberalism. Paisley’s gift to Ireland was almost 50 years of fighting for Protestant supremacy and Unionist rejection. That he became First Minister in his old age of a state with his former enemies that enshrined supremacy and rejection is no sign of change.

Though the war is over and I can’t imagine the circumstances that could reignite it, the state in the North is unstable. The pressures from within one side or the other could break down the consensus required to the balancing act. Due in large part to Sinn Fein’s malleability the balancing act may continue to work for a time. No balancing act lasts forever.

Unlike another Ian in another British colony Paisley wouldn’t go down like Rhodesia’s Ian Smith. Whatever clouds he may leave under and whatever may befall his party and their government one thing is clear after thirty-five years of strife; Ian Paisley won the war.

Matt Siegfried

Days Like These No. 1

2008-03-06T16:15:00.004Z

A regular contributor, Gerry Fitzpatrick, has asked Socialist Democracy for space for a regular opinion piece entitled “Days like these”. Below we carry the first in the series.

The great Austrian satirist Karl Kraus at the height of WW1 was sitting at his desk trying to write one afternoon. He eventually began - ‘For those of you who want, or expect some thoughtful prose from me I’m afraid that these days, I just compare headlines’, he then went on to reproduce some of those headlines. One was a war report of recent casualities – the numbers of dead and how they had died, the numbers of injured, and how they had been maimed. The other was of a banquet held in Vienna – who was there, who the host was and what they all had eaten. Beginning a regular column for this site I recall that story from Kraus’s time.

For we have reached the height and perhaps the end of the war that our politicians have been fighting against all things social. It manifests itself in many ways from our headlining days. The Northern Rock story could only choose itself here of course (I shall return to the Rock and the fissure it sits in in future columns). But it is the details of another recent story, one that indicated the faltering nature of our revamped imperium, that I must turn to first. It too began with a headline. ‘Harry the Fighting Prince’ it read. The media had ‘discovered’ that his majesty was not out of harms way, but at the front - on active service in Afghanistan. It wasn’t unexpected that the ‘human interest’ approach of the BBC and ITN would be displaced by the majestic tabloid celebrations.

But the celebrations were short lived, as the next headline informed us ‘Prince Harry To Be Brought Home’. The reason, we learn, is that he would, as a result of this very same media attention ‘become a target’. Apart from the fact that you could be forgiven for thinking that there was something of a co-incidence between the celebrations and Prince Harry’s withdrawal; I’m very sure it did absolutely nothing for the morale of those left behind. If only they could go home just as easily.

At the moment the only way that can happen for the ordinary soldier before their end of tour of duty is when they are killed and their bodies are repatriated. Early on in this war when that happened, it too made headlines. Watching the BBC news on satellite, as most British commanders in field can do nowadays, they could if they chose to, plot the decline of the reporting of those fatalities – form headlines to foot notes. Even if they didn’t care to notice the men in the ranks certainly did. And I’m sure they feel about it in much the same way that we did here when a similar decline happened in the reporting and investigating of avoidable and needless death. Some may remember those news programmes well, were the decline in value placed on life here almost became a catchphrase:

“A man was found shot dead in Northern Ireland last night police say they are investigating a possible motive. - And now: cricket.”

Gerry Fitzpatrick

Sinn Fein Ard Fheis – Paisley Must Stay

2008-03-05T07:07:00.001Z

There was a great deal of speculation and concern surrounding the future of the party leader at this year’s Sinn Fein Ard Fheis. However, the party in question wasn’t Sinn Fein, and leader wasn’t Gerry Adams. It was Ian Paisley’s future as leader of the DUP that was the cause for concern.

In his address to delegates Gerry Adams warned that DUP hardliners were threatening the future of the power sharing agreement by pushing out Ian Paisley. He told them that it was "a sad commentary on the state of unionism that some were seeking to force a situation where 'Paisley must go'". Despite this threat Adams assured his party that the “process will prevail”. He said that “outstanding maters” such as the passing of an Irish language act and transfer of poling and justice powers would be secured. For him there was “no doubt whatsoever about that”.

However, the fretting over Paisley, demonstrates that clearly there is a doubt. The fact that the DUP has already rejected any progress on these “outstanding matters” also casts major doubt. With this background Sinn Fein’s assertions appear to be no more than wishful thinking. There was a tone of desperation in the claim by Martin McGuinness that they had been told by an unnamed senior member of the DUP that his “party would stand by the St Andrews Agreement." This was immediately rubbished by the DUP. Ian Paisley asserted once again that policing and justice powers would only be devolved when there was confidence within unionism.

Sinn Fein is now in the position of being reliant on the political heath of Ian Paisley to deliver what meagre concessions are on offer in the St Andrews settlement. Such weakness makes the claim by Gerry Adams that "we are closer to bringing about Irish re-unification than at any time in our past" even more pathetic. The announcement of a plan to establish a task force "to drive forward the roadmap to Irish unity" is just laughable.

Alongside this parody of republicanism, the Sinn Fein leadership also took the opportunity to abandon the last vestiges of social democracy within its programme. Gerry Adams declared that: ‘‘we need to generate wealth. We need to be competitive. That is the reality. Sinn Fein is not anti-business. Sinn Fein is pro-business. Neither are we a high tax party. We are a fair tax party.” The party leadership demonstrated their pro-business credentials by putting through a motion that abandoned Sinn Fein’s mildly redistribute tax policies. This was really formalising something that had already happened, as Sinn Fein had abandoned its tax policy in the first week of campaigning in last year’s Dail election.

This motion did provoke some opposition from Dublin members, but the leadership easily smothered this. The dissenting delegates were upbraided. In one particularly crass intervention a delegate from Newry told his comrades to “just wise up”. He reminded them that “the purpose of a political party is to achieve political office”, pointing to the north as an example of where Sinn Fein “are able to do things for the marginalised.” Maybe he had in mind the classroom assistant who had a pay cut imposed on them by Caitriona Ruane, or the households who will be receiving water bills from Conor Murphy’s department! While the sentiments of this delegate may have been expressed in a crude manner, they are probably an accurate reflection of the thinking within Sinn Fein.

The Sinn Fein Ard Fheis was yet another demonstration of the degree of decay within the provisional movement. It should dispel any notion that anything progressive can emerge from it.

Added:
Coming just two days on from its Ard Fhies, the announcement that Ian Paisley is to resign as DUP leader and First Minster, dramatically exposes the weakness of Sinn Fein’s position and also of the assumptions that underpin the St Andrews Agreement. Its basic premise – that Ian Paisley could win unionists to a power sharing agreement – has fallen through. His removal, while not fatal, will inevitably have a destabilising affect on the settlement.

More on the significance of Paisley’s resignation will follow soon.

Households facing higher water charges after “miscalculation”

2008-02-27T16:51:00.002Z

A supposed “miscalculation” by NI Water could lead to a 15 per cent or £20 million increase in the domestic water bill this year; resulting in an extra £30 being added to the average household bill.

NI Water claimed that it had overestimated the amount of revenue it would raise from commercial customers. It also pointed to a number of high profile industrial closures, such as the Seagate factory in Limavady, as an additional reason for the shortfall. As a result it had carry out an internal ‘re-balancing' exercise that shifted the burden of liability for water and sewage costs onto householders.

The arguments and figures used by NI Water are very dubious. There is no evidence of a decline in commercial customers so great as to produce a £20 million annual deficit. This is just a smokescreen for shifting the costs of water and sewage from business onto householders. It fits in with the general thrust of Government towards provision of public services - of transferring resources from labour to capital, from one class of people to another. Generally, the main mechanism for this has been privatisation and the introduction of user charges. In the specific case of water it has been the creation of NI Water and the introduction of a separate water charge.

All this was contained in the water reform proposals put forward by the British Government and inherited by the Executive. It was never clear what contribution commercial customers were going to make. Now we know it is going to be less than they paid under the Water Service; and that householders are going to have to pick up the bill.

This revelation also blows a hole in the recommendations of the Independent Review Panel, which were based on the old estimates from NI Water. The Executive hoped that adopting its proposals of delaying charges for a year, reducing slightly the amount people would be charged and extending relief would dampen down any opposition and buy them some time on the issue. This is despite the fact that all the Panel’s proposals were based on the unlikely premise that NI Water could make 40 per cent cost savings. The latest revelation from the company makes delivery on even these meagre concessions impossible.

Between a rock, a hard place and a Stonyford

2008-02-25T21:55:00.004Z

Yet more evidence of the fragility of the St. Andrews agreement and its inability to provide a solution to the endemic sectarianism of the Northern statelet was provided by the departure of a Catholic family from Stoneyford, just outside Belfast.

The family were the latest victims of a long campaign of ethnic cleansing organised by local loyalists – a campaign so blatant that the organiser is a minor celeb, known by name to the press, political activists and many members of the public across the North. The latest campaign culminated in a death threat against the young son in the family and a threat that their home would be bombed.

The reactions of local politicians reflected their role in the sectarian set-up. Jeffrey Donaldson, confronted with this coercion, washed his hands of it. Apparently the family had had the cheek to suggest that DUP supporters were involved in the intimidation.

The local RUC/PSNI expressed regret. Despite the threats extending over many years in a small village, with the leading perpetrator publicly known, they had been unable to obtain any leads.

Perhaps the most pathetic response was from the local Sinn Fein representative, Paul Butler. Pleading with the police to ‘do their job’ he might have been any nationalist politician from the original Stormont parliament or from the generations before that.

But it is not enough to observe these events. It is necessary to understand them and to do that you have to observe the context. The context of the various interviews that took place was the background of a new build housing development bedecked with Union flags and loyalist regalia. It was pretty evident that these were warnings to Catholics not to settle here.

No-one asked who had erected the flags. No-one suggested that the symbols of sectarian hate be taken down. Despite all the rhetoric the new society, the new police force, are not disposed to repress loyalist bigotry or protect the victims.

For all that the PSNI are not exactly the RUC. The RUC would have advised the Catholics to go. It was a single RUC station that, along with the local loyalists, emptied Rathcoole of its large Catholic population in the ‘70s – an episode of ethnic cleansing that, for the size of population, ranks with major historic episodes in Europe.

In the new society everyone has some sectarian rights (not equal ones of course). Sectarian intimidation is simply someone expressing their culture and the task of the police is conflict resolution. So it is not surprising that, when a Catholic priest took down a flag nailed outside his church, he was advised to return it. When a father complained that his dead son’s name had been raised on an Orange bonfire as a sectarian taunt, he was advised to see community relations. It is hardly surprising that the police in Stoneyford organised a meeting between the Catholic victims and the chief loyalist intimidator. Perhaps the answer in another grant for loyalist groups or the Orange order – maybe funnelled through the Irish government or the president?

The situation in the North is kept stable by the willingness of Sinn Fein to accept anything that is thrown at them and by a tremendous complacency on the part of their constituency. It is not a stability that can last forever. When it wears off the Provo supporters will want to know why Sinn Fein, through the policing boards, are party to a system that placates loyalist thugs and turns a blind eye to sectarian intimidation.

DUP dumps Paisley Jnr – can daddy be far behind?

2008-02-20T16:48:00.003Z

The first ministerial casualty of the power-sharing executive came this week with the resignation of Ian Paisley Jnr. His departure from the post of junior minister in the Office of the First Minister came on the back of yet more revelations about his financial dealings.

The latest one revolved around the rental of a DUP constituency office in Ballymena. A response to a freedom of information request disclosed that Ian Paisley Jnr and his father are each receiving £28,600 per year for the Church Street office. This combined total of £57,200 for one property is almost three times higher than the next highest MLA claim. It was further revealed that the mortgage for this property had been initially secured by developer and DUP member Seymour Sweeney. For a period he was the sole director of the company (Sacron) that purchased it. That company was subsequently transferred to Ian Paisley’s Jnr’s father-in-law.

Through the rental of this office, the Paisley’s were effectively giving a thousand pounds a week (claimed as expenses) to one of their relatives. Paisley Jnr stated that the money was being used by his father-in-law's company to repay the mortgage. However, given the extremely high rent being charged, it wouldn’t take long to pay off a mortgage. In a relatively short time period his father in law would own the property - any money accrued after that would be pure profit.

Another example of Paisley Jnr’s milking of the public purse came just last week with the revelation that he was receiving a salary as his father’s parliamentary researcher in addition to his MLA and ministerial salaries. He was taking three salaries for what is essentially one job.

However, these were just the latest in a series of controversies that surrounded Paisley Jnr during his tenure as a minister. Others included his St Andrews list that appeared to link the restoration of devolution to progress on a number of pet projects in his north Antrim constituency. There was the lobbying for a privately owned visitors’ centre at the Giants Causeway, and the attempt to influence a government department over the sale of public land. The developer and DUP member Seymour Sweeney was an interested party in both schemes. What is common to all of these is the accruement of benefits for the Paisley’s, their relatives and their supporters, at the expense of the public.

However, Ian Paisley Jnr’s dodgy dealings do not in themselves account for his resignation. He had given every indication that he would brazen it out. It was assumed that being the son the DUP leader and First Minister would protect him. There was no opposition from other parties to his continued presence in Government. This prompted SDLP deputy leader Alasdair McDonnell to ask: "Why was it always left to journalists to dig out the truth under the Freedom of Information Act?" Of course he did not offer an answer. This would have exposed the bankruptcy, not only of his party, but of the whole set up at Stormont.

What really did for Paisley Jnr was the opposition of senior members of his own party. This came to a head over the weekend at a meeting of six of its MPs to discuss the Dromore by-election defeat. They told Paisley to resign or face a party disciplinary hearing. Against this background Paisley’s resignation can be seen as the most immediate ramification of the DUP’s debacle. However, his probity was not the major factor in Dromore by-election. It was opposition to power sharing and the strong showing of Jim Allister’s TUV that damaged the DUP. The dumping of Paisley Jnr therefore has a political significance well beyond the immediate claims of improbity made against him. The whole basis of the St Andrews settlement is now in question.

He was offered up as a sacrifice to assuage that section of the DUP’s supporters who are now in revolt against its participation in the power sharing executive. The problem for the DUP is that opposition from this quarter is unlikely to be diminished by such gestures. Paisley Jnr’s resignation was immediately dismissed by Jim Allister. He said that it would “not be enough to redeem the DUP with the unionist electorate.” For him the “fundamental problem” was the “policy of having IRA/Sinn Fein at the heart of government.” He warned that unless this policy was reversed the DUP’s decline would continue.

The departure of Ian Paisley Jnr is undoubtedly a blow to his father. It diminishes his political authority and increases his vulnerability. All the criticisms attached to his son can be just as easily be attached to him. Paisley and his chuckle brothers’ routine is now the primary the focus of unionist opposition to power sharing.

Ten months ago Ian Paisley was considered to be at the zenith of his political career. He had triumphed over his unionist rivals, forced the disbandment of the IRA, and was sitting at the head of settlement that was very favourable to unionists. He was master of the political landscape. Now he looks to be on the way out – forced from the post of party leader and First Minister by a growing revolt among his own supporters.

This turn of events punctures the assumption which has underpinned the St Andrews (and the Good Friday Agreement before that) – that if a settlement had the endorsement of Paisley (or Trimble in the case of the latter) then unionists would accept it. The reality is that there remains a solid core of unionists who will not accept any form of power sharing no matter how favourable. They will not be appeased by the departures of the Paisleys or new faces at the top of the party.

By-election result sends warning to DUP

2008-02-18T10:25:00.004Z

The defeat in a council by-election in Dromore has sent a stark warning to the DUP over power-sharing with Sinn Fein. Its first electoral test since the restoration of devolution, in a district considered a good barometer of unionist opinion, proved to be a disaster.

The by-election had been sparked by the resignation of a UUP councillor. In such circumstances an alternative UUP member could have been co-opted to serve the remainder of the term. But the DUP insisted on a by-election. Obviously, the party was confident of pickling up another seat. The contest would also enable the DUP to advance its broader objective of consolidating its leading position within unionism by eating further into the support of the UUP, and smothering the challenge of the Anti-St Andrews Agreement unionists grouped around Jim Allister’s Tradition Unionist Voice (TUV).

On the face of it the DUP was well placed to achieve both these objectives. It already held four out of five seats in that ward and in the last council election in 2005 had won over fifty percent of the vote. A repeat of that performance would have seen it romp home. In the event the DUP came a poor second behind the UUP.

Its support slumped from around 50 per cent of the total poll in 2005 to about 28 per cent. Though the UUP won the seat it did not increase its share of the vote. The decisive factor in this election was the performance of the TUV. It took almost 20 percent of the first preference votes cast over all, and nearly 28 per cent of the total unionist vote. Finishing third, its transfers went to the UUP and ended up eliminating the DUP. The fact that most of its transfers went to the UUP demonstrates the degree to which its supporters wanted to punish the DUP.

The Dromore by- election witnessed the DUP being deserted by a significant chunk of its supporters. Given the TUV’s unambiguous position on the St Andrew’s Agreement, this is clearly a vote against power sharing. It reveals that a solid block within unionism is still opposed to power sharing with under any circumstances, even under a settlement as favourable to unionism as St Andrews.

The DUP had been able to accommodate them through the last Assembly election when it did not firmly commit itself to going into government with Sinn Fein. The poor showing of the anti-St Andrews candidates also strengthened the mainstream belief the rejectionist element had been marginalized, and that most had fallen in behind Paisley. However, this assumption has come under strain recently. The first indication was Paisley being deposed as moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church, and the growing speculation over his role as First Minister and DUP leader. Now with the Dromore by-election result we have firm evidence of a revolt among the party’s supporters. If such a result was repeated elsewhere, and remember Dromore was considered to be a relatively moderate area, the DUP could be in serious trouble. The TUV has the potential to do to the DUP what it did to the Ulster Unionists.

There were two reactions from the DUP to the Dromore result. One was to be dismissive. For example, Ian Paisley described it as a "flash in the pan." The other was one of concern. DUP Executive Minister Edwin Poots conceded that there was “an underlying level of discontent.” The local MP Jeffrey Donaldson said: "there is a protest vote there that we cannot ignore. We have got to recognise that message." They both promised that the DUP would listen to its supporters.

While one bad election result won’t precipitate a crisis within DUP it does create restlessness within the party, and will encourage those who have been biting their tongue over the settlement to speak out. Indeed, Jim Allister in the wake to the Dromre by-election, made an explicit appeal to this layer, asking them to “ponder whether by their presence and acquiescence they are not propping up the very thing which concerns them.”

The DUP leadership for its part will try to assuage its wavering supporters by cutting out the “Chuckle Brothers” routines and toughening its stance towards Sinn Fein. However, it will be difficult for the DUP to pick with a fight party that won’t defend itself and continues to capitulate on every issue (such as the Irish language) that it once claimed to hold dear. It also won’t assuage those unionists who are offended by the very presence of nationalists in Government. The only other option for the DUP is to bring the whole settlement crashing down. Any more electoral shocks, such as a victory for Jim Allister in next year’s European elections, may leave them with little alternative.

The St Andrews settlement is not about to collapse, but after Dromore by-election it is looking unsteadier. Jim Allister could rightly crow that it was “a very unhappy St Valentine's Day for the Chuckle Brothers."

DUP rejects transfer of policing powers

2008-02-14T18:36:00.003Z

The DUP’s rejection of the transfer of policing and justice powers to the Assembly has exposed yet again the vacuous claims of Sinn Fein for the St Andrews Agreement. We were told that St Andrews laid down a firm timetable for the devolution of these powers by May 2008. However, when Gordon Brown and Bertie Ahern recently made an appeal for movement on this issue, it provoked a fierce rejection from the DUP.

Senior members of the party lined up to denounce the proposal. Peter Robinson insisted the DUP had never signed up to a target for the transfer of policing and justice powers. He said that such a move would only happen when there was “the necessary support within the community”. Nigel Dodds said the issue was "not on the agenda". These views were echoed by DUP leader and First Minister Ian Paisley. He said that he had “absolutely no intention of bringing such a proposal to the Assembly as the necessary conditions do not exist." He didn’t detail the conditions, but mentioned the disbandment of the “IRA/Sinn Fein army council” and also the need for financial support from the British Treasury. However, the fundamental condition he laid down was the need for confidence within the unionist community.

The essential message from the DUP was that if unionists were uneasy at the prospect of nationalists having any role (no matter how minor) in administering the police and judiciary in the north it won’t happen. This is basically a reasserting of the unionist veto, albeit dressed up in the language of consensus. Paisley also denied that his party had agreed this at St Andrews. He said that it was “not our idea and we never agreed to it."

Not that the DUP leader has to worry about pressure from the British or Irish governments. Their appeal on the transfer of powers was extremely week. They merely said they believed “the time is right” for such a move, and that they stood “ready to help the political parties”. No hint of coercion or pressure here. Indeed, after the negative response from the DUP, they drew back from their timid proposal. A spokesman for the Irish Government acknowledged that the deadline was not likely to be met and “would accept that there may be some slippage.”

Sinn Fein were left floundering by all this. Gerry Adams made the astonishing claim, particularly in the light of the statements from their leadership, that the “DUP has agreed with the broad principles of all of these matters”. For him it was “only a matter of timing”, although he wasn’t prepared to set a time frame; presumably this is down the DUP. Sinn Fein’s policing spokesperson Alex Maskey said the party was “working very much with a mind that the transfer of policing and justice will happen by the May time-frame, and that is an agreement.”

The contrast of such statements to reality is stark. It could be described as a state of denial. But Sinn Fein can do little else, as to recognise the reality of the situation would be to admit complete failure. We are witnessing the same process we had with the Belfast Agreement. Sinn Fein in the role of the faithful defenders of a settlement they insist is being implemented, while the unionists, with the endorsement of the British and Irish Governments, pick it apart and bring it down. This is happening even more quickly with the St Andrews Agreement as it was pretty threadbare to begin with. The few gestures towards nationalists, such as the Irish Language Act and the devolution of justice and policing powers, have been junked already.

Bank rolling bigotry

2008-02-06T18:11:00.000Z

A major feature of the peace process has been the legitimisation of sectarianism. One of the main beneficiaries of this process has been the Orange Order. Its sectarian agitation has been rewarded with lavish patronage from the state. This has ranged the from public funding for parades – money to promote the 12th July as some kind of family fun day – to the appointment of its members to various public bodies. Two Portadown members involved in the Drumcree protest were even put on the Parades Commission.

Another example of the mollycoddling of the Orange Order came this week with the announcement from the Irish government that the Order was to receive almost 250,000 euros in funding. This will go to a company, Cadelmo Ltd, set up to support an initiative in the border counties to promote and organise the Orange institution in the south. Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs minister Eamon O'Cuiv said he was “delighted to be in a position to provide funding".

Despite its claim that Protestants in the south were a persecuted minority who had to “keep their heads down” in order to survive, the Orange Order was happy to pocket this money. And this is just the tip of a large financial ice berg. A £10million centre commemorating the Battle of the Boyne, is due to open in three months. This centre, which is located at the site of the battle near Drogheda, will encompass a museum and an interpretive centre on the theme of the “Williamite revolution”. The Irish Government has also said it is committed to helping fund a “Williamite Trail” to run from Carrickfergus to the Boyne.

All this is part of the process of sanitising the Orange Order and portraying it as just another aspect of Irish culture. Yet even a cursory glance at the history of the Order would reveal it be a thoroughly reactionary organisation that has been, and continues to be, instrumental in denying democratic rights to the Irish people.

By coincidence, a small example of the true character of the Order was on show the very same day as the funding announcement was made when several hundred of its members picketed Banbridge Council. This was in response to the removal of a number of overtly political and militaristic symbols from public display at the Council’s headquarters. The items included a painting of an RAF vehicle checkpoint, entitled 'Freeze all Movement', an oil painting of an Orange lodge, and plaques presented by the RUC Male Voice Choir, the Royal British Legion, the Ulster Defence Regiment, the Ulster Special Constabulary, the Royal Irish Rangers, the Royal Irish Rifles, the Royal Irish Fusiliers, the Hampshire Constabulary and the Royal Air Force Irish Guards.

These items have not been removed altogether, but merely moved to another room.
Yet even this meagre gesture towards not offending nationalists is too much for the Orange Order. Its Grand Secretary Drew Nelson, who led the protest, described the shifting of the items as a "determined effort to wipe the face of Britishness from the council and its property". The fact that they picked the building in such numbers can only be seen as act of intimidation to reverse the Council’s policy on symbols. And all this over a few plaques! How much more agitated would they be if there were any moves towards real equality.

Not that the Orange Order has any fears of being challenged. Certainly not by Sinn Fein. The reaction of Gerry Adams was to offer to meet Orange leaders to discuss their concerns. But if you accept Orangeism as a legitimate cultural expression what other reaction can there be?

Irish ferries – the bitter fruits of partnership

2008-02-02T12:07:00.001Z

The fruits of social partnership were on display one again this week with the revelation that workers on Irish Ferries vessels on the Ireland/France routes were being paid just €4 an hour. This came out amongst all the razzmatazz surrounding the unveiling of the new €50 million ferry that is to service these routes.

In addition to low pay, the workers, who are mostly from the newer EU member states, are forced to endure the most oppressive conditions. On the two Irish Ferries ships operating the Ireland/Britain routes workers do twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. Any spare time they have is spent on the alternative vessel to the one they are employed on. They are actively discouraged from leaving the ships; any workers who do come ashore can be disciplined or even sacked. Also, the workers are no longer directly employed by Irish Ferries but supplied by an agency located in Cypress!

Despite these hardships they are still relatively well off compared with workers on the French routes. They are at least still receiving the Irish minimum wage of €8.65 an hour. However, come December they will no longer be entitled to this, and are expected to be put onto the lower rate.

The situation this group of workers find themselves in is iniquitous. But it is a situation that Irish trade unions have a great deal of responsibility in bringing about. For it follows directly from the deal that ICTU brokered with Irish Ferries in 2006 which saw more than 500 made redundant as part of an outsourcing and cost reduction exercise. At the time ICTU brought over 100,000 people out onto the streets of towns and cities across the country to protest at the blatant injustice of what Irish Ferries were attempting to do. One of the main slogans of these demonstrations was "no slave ships in Irish waters".

However, almost immediately after this impressible mobilisation, the trade unions made an agreement that gave Irish Ferries all they wanted. Their ships were re-registered in a foreign country and the any rights that the workers may have enjoyed under Irish law were removed. The only consolation was the workers on the Ireland/Britain routes would receive the Irish minimum wage for a two-year period. This agreement is due to run out at the end of 2008.

Unbelievably, some groups on the left hailed this as a victory. They fell in behind the bureaucrats because they were seen to be mobilising workers. However, the purpose of the mobilisation was not to fight back, but to demonstrate the ability of the leadership to marshal the working class and to show the Government and employers the benefits of keeping social partnership in place. If the union leaders could show their worth in facilitating the ongoing neo-liberal offensive they could keep their place at the table. So following hard on the hard on the heals of the Irish Ferries deal we had the ten year partnership agreement. Meanwhile, workers both indigenous and immigrant, both onshore and off shore, continue to suffer.

Ironically, the new vessel in the Irish Ferries fleet has been named the Oscar Wilde; another ship is called the Jonathan Swift. These two great Irish writers, much of whose energies were taken up in denouncing abuses of their day, would have no doubt found the conditions that prevail within the vessels that bear their names a subject worthy of their attention. If only today’s left possessed a fraction of their insight.

Lisbon Treaty: How green was my party?

2008-01-26T22:37:00.000Z

On Saturday 19^th Green Party members voted in favour of supporting the Lisbon Treaty in the forthcoming referendum, but fell just short of the required two thirds majority.

This was taken to means that the party itself will not take a position, but that individual members will be free to support whichever side they wish.

195, or 63%, of the 318 delegates voted to support the Treaty, while 117 (27%) were opposed.

What the vote actually means is that the Greens will enthusiastically support Lisbon, which stand in contradiction to all their declarations in defence of the environment, while a few ‘left’ figures will trumpet their opposition, thus helping to hold the shrinking radical base with the party and thus defend the Greens and, by extension, the coalition government that is pushing Lisbon through.

A leading opponent of the change in policy, former MEP Patricia McKenna, said she was 'over the moon', as she had feared the party leadership would secure the two thirds majority. As things now stand she will be perfectly comfortable in the new reactionary party and happy to support it.

So far so standard – fake radical party moves right. What role should socialists play? In the past that would have been straightforward. We would have wanted to break workers from the Greens and we would have lent hard on the leftists, urging them to put up or shut up. In a party supporting outright reaction their place was outside the party.

How likely is that? To ask is to answer. Patricia will be gracing the platform of the endless variety of micro campaigns opposing Lisbon, all fronting for one small left group or another. While they cut each others throat to prove their role as the true opponents of European capital they will, through Patricia, be one step away from the Green party and the capitalist reactionaries pushing through the Lisbon treaty!

DUP advisor denounces “Popery”

2008-01-24T16:20:00.001Z

Anyone that helps dispel the myths surrounding the settlement in the north is undoubtedly performing a useful service. If they manage to puncture the smug and self satisfied public consensus that prevails in the south then they deserve a double commendation.

So step forward and receive your accolade - Wallace Thompson. Never heard of him? Well never had anyone else before his barnstorming appearance on the Joe Duffy radio phone in show. Listeners were treated some of that good “old time religion” that many had believed was on the wane in the era of peace. But here was Wallace to demonstrate that there was some life in the old tunes yet.

He had been invited onto the show as a spokesperson for the Evangelical Protestant Society. They had stirred some controversy by denouncing the Church of Ireland for selling rosary beads in the shop attached to St Patrick’s Cathedral. Thompson claimed that it was wrong for a Protestant church “to be selling things that are Roman Catholic.” So much for ecumenism! Warming to his theme Thompson went on to castigate listeners for adhering to a corrupt and idolatrous creed that demanded the turning of Protestant partners in mixed marriages. To top his performance off he denounced that People as “the anti-Christ” and said that he would be doing everything in his power to prevent a papal visit to the north.

These opinions and the people that hold them are often dismissed as marginal – bigoted no doubt, but fortunately with little influence. However, when we look at the background of Mr Thompson we actually find that the contrary is true. As a former career civil servant who is currently employed as a special adviser to the DUP minister Nigel Dodds, he is very close to the centre of power in the north. Such posts are among the most prized items of political patronage that Stormont has to offer. For Mr Thompson to occupy such a position he would have to share a broad political perspective with the DUP leadership. What he obviously doesn’t share with them are some diplomatic skills. That people such as Thompson occupy positions at the heart of the Executive is more evidence of its thoroughly reactionary character.

Also cutting against the perceived wisdom were unionists in Limavady. As a means of creating a more neutral environment in council buildings, nationalists made the modest suggestion that some militarist and royalist symbols be removal. In response unionist councillors, one of who had literally wrapped himself in the Union Jack, whipped up a lynch mob which invaded the chamber and forced the abandonment of the council’s monthly meeting. This harassment was endorsed by the local MP – the DUP’s Gregory Campbell.

The ideology surrounding the settlement, propagated by Sinn Fein in particular, holds that things are changing. But the episodes above suggest otherwise. They demonstrate that sectarianism, rather than diminished, is actually being entrenched and legitimised. They also show the severe limitations on any prospect of progressive change. If unionists can get so agitated over things such as rosaries and a Charles and Diana mug, how must more resistant would they be towards anything that pointed towards real equality!

Paisley’s little list

2008-01-18T16:26:00.000Z

Given the thoroughly corrupt character of the political settlement in the north the exposure of the sordid dealings that accompanied its inception at the St Andrews talks should not come as a surprise. Some of these have now been revealed in a ministerial letter released under the Freedom of Information Act.

This letter was a response by one of direct rule ministers at the time to a “shopping list” of demands from the DUP’s Ian Paisley Jnr. The demands raised by Paisley were pure pork barrel politics - all related to commercial activities with his own north Antrim constituency. They included planning approval for a "resort spa" including "200 homes"; a request for "private sector land to be included in development" of the new visitors centre at the Giant's Causeway; and a suggestion that a judicial review of lands in Ballee be dropped. The letter concluded with an assurance that Tony Blair’s government would "try to respond positively" to the requests, that the letter itself should be regarded as a “statement of intent". The clear inference of such correspondence is that the restoration of devolution would be eased by a favourable response.

Ian Paisley Jnr claimed that that these dealings were on the “margins” of the talks and that he was merely taking the opportunity to raise issues pertinent to his constituents. However, when his “shopping list” is examined it is clear that its items relate to one constituent in particular. Two of the projects listed are linked to the millionaire developer and DUP member Seymour Sweeney.

The judicial review of the sale of land in Ballee related to a dispute between the Department of Social Development over how much landowners would have to pay for the return of land that had been vested in the 1970s. The legal action taken by landowners, which was subsequently the subject of a review, was backed by Sweeney. At the time Paisley was lobbying for the review to be halted Sweeney and his associates were offering just £9m for the land. The court battle was eventually settled in June 2007 when a £50m price was agreed. For a party that supposedly supports law and order (with Paisley Jnr as its justice spokesperson) the DUP was very relaxed about such an overtly political intervention in the judicial process.

The case of the Causeway visitors centre is better known, with the attempts by the DUP to scupper the long standing commitment to a publicly owned centre in favour of a private development owned by Sweeney. The subsequent decisions by DUP ministers on the Causeway are consistent with the demands made by the Paisleys’ in their lobbying of British ministers. What these cases have in common is that despite the rhetoric about benefitting the constituency, all the benefit accrues to Sweeney. In both cases the public loses out.

Despite the allegations of sleaze and corruption building up around the DUP, Paisley’s Jnr in particular, there is very little criticism from other parties. Obscure backbnmcnhers are allowed to make minor criticisms. But without backing from the party leadership their opposition is merely tokenistic. When asked to comment on the Paisley shopping list, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams made some pious statement about his party not being interested in side deals but the common good. This is nonsense. Sinn Fein have made numerous side deals with the British. Most of these have either collapsed, such as the On the Run legislation, or been reneged upon, as in a case of the devolution of policing and justice powers. The difference with the DUP’s side deals is that are actually delivered upon. Four of the six demands on Paisley’s wish list have been granted!

Given the lack of real opposition, scandals such this are unlikely to destabilise the settlement. However, they do serve a useful purpose as they erode the illusions that workers may have in the Assembly. Such a process is as essential element of building a new opposition movement.

PSNI presses ahead with introduction of taser weapons

2008-01-15T15:53:00.001Z

The weakness of claims that the police in the north are being made accountable and subjected to scrutiny has been exposed by the announcement from the PSNI that it is to press ahead with the introduction of taser weapons. Within the next few weeks a small number of officers will begin training in their use when twelve of the guns are to be issued to specialist response teams. These particular weapons will be capable of delivering a 50,000-volt shock to a subject.

The dangers of such weapons are well documented. People can be in serious risk of injury, or in some cases death, when tasers are used. Figures show that more than 270 people have died after being shot by a taser in the US and Canada since 2001. Recent examples of the use of tasers have been the killing of a distressed Polish man at Vancouver airport and the ejection of an audience member from a political meting in Florida.

These incidents, which were captured on camera, provoked widespread condemnation. However, such incidents have not given pause for thought to the PSNI. Of course they assure the public that tasers won’t be used as they are in north America; that only a small number of officers will carry them; and that they will only be used as a last resort. These are the familiar arguments that accompany the introduction of any new piece of weaponry by the police. Experience shows however that over time the use of the weapon becomes routine and is often the first response. Just look at the example of CS spray.

The danger of tasers has been the main focus of the commentary over their introduction. But what is of greater significance is that they have been introduced in defiance of the Policing Board. The body, which is supposed to hold the police to account, voted 11 to five in favour of a motion calling for no deployment until an impact assessment was completed. In addition, the Equality Commission, the Human Rights Commission and the Police Ombudsman all cautioned against the introduction of tasers. Therefore, all the institutions created by Good Friday Agreement, which are supposed to act as guarantors of accountability and human rights, were ignored. In the face of the determination of police to acquire a new weapon their protestations counted for nothing. Moreover, the ultimate guarantors of the whole peace process, the Irish government and (most importantly) the British government, did nothing to intervene.

This episode while relatively minor does illuminate a broader truth about the nature of the political settlement. Despite the claims for devolution and power sharing, real power still remains with the British state. Nationalists may sit on the Policing Board but they cannot hold the police to account; they be in government but can’t make a decision without the approval of unionists. These two elements come together in the proposal to devolve justice and policing powers to the Assembly. This was part of the deal between Sinn Fein and the British to pave the way for the restoration of power sharing, but because the DUP are opposed it will not happen.

Sinn Fein are reduced to making muted protests. They cannot make it an issue of contention as that would reveal their own bankruptcy and risk bringing the whole edifice of the settlement crashing down. Determined to hold onto their ministerial positions they are forced to swallow whatever humiliations and disappointments the British and the unionists serve up.

The eyes - watch the eyes. Bureaucracy sell out again

2008-01-14T01:21:00.000Z

On 3^rd January SIPTU shop stewards agreed to a €20 million cost-cutting programme being sought by Aer Lingus management. Aer Lingus Branch Organiser Teresa Brannick said: "We are committed to the process, which has already identified some €10 million in savings in the areas where SIPTU has members."

Yet in October, when Aer Lingus management demanded the cuts and imposed a freeze on pay increases agreed under the ‘Towards 2016’ partnership deal,” SIPTU National Industrial Secretary Michael Halpenny had said:

“Aer Lingus has sunk to a new low … management has reneged on both local and national agreements between the Social Partners under T2016. Further, it is in breach of commitments entered into prior to privatisation ... Our members are not going to succumb to this kind of blackmail…they are entitled to respect as workers and not have to endure these attempts by management to bully them into submission.”

So how did we get from this sort of forthright opposition to the January collapse? The case is a textbook in bureaucratic manoeuvring – talk tough, threaten action, keep on the move and never left the left hand know what the right is doing.

So the first step was to ‘consult with other unions’ and promise members that industrial action ‘was not ruled out’. Aer Lingus were so overcome that they issued sacking notice to temporary staff and called for contract changes and wage cuts for those remaining.

In response the union balloted for strike action. “The justification for this relentless attack on the living standards of workers on, or near the average industrial wage, is that Aer Lingus rates are ‘not competitive’ in aviation sector terms. The methodology on which this claim is made has never been disclosed …” In other words the attack could be justified if the airline could prove it needed to be more competitive!

By this time the National Implementation Board (NIB) – SIPTU and ICTU officials in partnership with bosses and government – were stepping in to resolve the dispute and by mid-November had issued a report that called for the suspension of strike action wothout any guarantees from management and organised an independent report into Aer Lingus claims of financial misery. In time the report concluded that yes – if Aer Lingus could cut costs then it would make more profits.

That was enough for SIPTU. They agreed to ‘suspend’ strike action. "We expect the airline to involve itself in the process in good faith. Our objective in this process is to ensure an alternative solution can be explored which does not involve reducing our members’ pay and conditions of employment," said SIPTU National Industrial Secretary, Michael Halpenny. In other words – we will help organise the cuts!

Despite constant threats by the airline the unions could not be forced into opposition. What we got was militant bluster and practical collaboration. The union threatened action, writing to Congress seeking an all-out picket, while continuing with the process established by the National Implementation board to seek alternative ways of achieving the company’s objectives.

The success of this strategy does not lie in the mesmeric powers of the bureaucracy or the inability of workers to understand the process of betrayal. It rests securely on decades of betrayal that have demoralised union militants. Unwilling to enter battles where they will be isolated and stabbed in the back by their own leaders, they look for what appears the least worst option. In this case they were promised they could keep their current pay rates – as long as they agreed speedup and redundancy to the tune of 4000 euro per worker to pay for the company’s self-sacrifice!

It’s a pattern that has been repeated across public service, with the latest benchmarking report offering pay increases of 0%, an effective pay cut. There will be no cut in demands for speedup and job cuts. The hypnotic powers of the bureaucracy will in future be tested to the limit.

'A new low in Irish life'

2008-01-07T14:38:00.000Z

Over the weekend Bertie Ahern and Fianna Fail launched another attack on the Mahon Tribunal investigating the alleged receipt by him of large sums of money from property developer Owen O’Callaghan. This comes after the latest revelations that Ahern won’t have a tax-clearance certificate to give to the Standards in Public Office Commission next month; although the toothless nature of this anti-corruption measure is exposed by the fact that he only needs a statement acknowledging that ‘issues need to be resolved.’ It follows revelations that he is under investigation by the Revenue Commissioners. He stands accused by the opposition of ‘misleading’ the public and the Dail over previous explanations of his tax position. ‘Misleading’ means lying to you and me.

The majority of Irish people no longer believe Ahern’s ever increasingly bizarre explanations for the sums of money he received from close friends, and which act as an alibi for the allegations of corrupt receipt of money over planning matters. These are ‘close friends’ who he sometimes can’t remember and one of whom has denied ever being a friend, claiming he gave the money more or less under duress as a donation to the Fianna Fail Party. He supposedly received this money because he was hard up though he managed to have tens of thousands in savings at the time and was paid a fortune in everyone else’s terms as a politician. He held it in a safe in his constituency headquarters because he didn’t have a bank account all while he was Minister of Finance of the Irish State. As one wag put it – he was in charge of our taxes while he took out a loan when interest rates were very high at the same time as he had cash spare which he let it sit without earning interest!!

For years Ahern has acted the cowardly Lion in ‘The Wizard of Oz’, declaring his desire to get to the Tribunal as quickly as possible to put things right while out of sight doing everything he could to avoid having to face it.

Now Ahern has attacked the Tribunal for allowing leaks of his tax affairs marking, he says, a ‘new low in Irish life’, a statement so outrageously over the top and self interested that it will surely not pass without comment. He is now complaining he will not get the ‘same fair hearing’ as others and grumbled that ‘it’s highly unfair’ and ‘unjust.’

Of course if this is what it is the Tribunal should be halted and there is no doubt Ahern and Fianna Fail could do it (The Greens wouldn’t stand for it? Don’t make me laugh!) Ahern yesterday said the Tribunal was not ‘beyond question or reproach’ and was not a ‘sacred cow.’ The question is will they try?

Today’s ‘Irish Times’ has a debate about whether the Tribunals are good value for money. The ‘yes’ columnist points to the increased revenue taken by the tax authorities following the banking scandals. The ‘no’ answer points to the scandalous legal costs, with some senior counsel receiving €2,500 per day!, and points out that the political culture hasn’t changed. In support of this it could reasonably be pointed out that Ahern has just won the general election while a new controversy raged about his finances.

The point however isn’t how much the Tribunals cost. The point is that they have been created in order to protect the corrupt body politic in the South by seeming to involve action, but action which is so slow and open to challenge, so lacking in the capacity to reveal the truth or invoke punitive penalties on the guilty, and yes so expensive, that it will drag on until the verdicts no longer really matter. The public will have become wearier of the Tribunals than of the hidden corruption they are supposed to reveal.

Socialists should oppose the latest attempts by Fianna Fail to soften up the electorate for restrictions on the Tribunals but they should not support them either. When faced with the corrupt the first and elementary step is to make sure you stay clean yourself. The fact that the trade unions have been and still are partners with this crowd of crooks is the most scandalous fact of all, and it doesn’t take a Tribunal lasting ten years to see this. A Tribunal won't do anything about it either.

A slip of the tongue – No Irish need apply on Aer Lingus Belfast route.

2008-01-02T01:29:00.000Z

On December 13th Aer Lingus decided that their standard greeting of: “Go Mbeannai Dia Daoibh, ta failte romhaibhar bord na heitilte seo,” would not be used on Belfast routes “to avoid causing offence”. Belfast becomes the only city on the globe where the greeting is not deployed. This seemingly minor shift, this exception, along with the earlier disputes about the new Belfast route, tells us a lot about the current role of the Irish bourgeois.

It is when one asks why this decision was taken that one begins to gain an insight into the strange world of post St Andrews, post-settlement Ireland. What we are observing is what the CIA call “blowback” – the strange and unintended consequences of an initial decision. In this case the blowback is the astounding (only in the sense of its speed) growth of 26 county nationalism. The Irish bourgeoisie believe that the national question has been settled by the excision of the 6 north-eastern counties and are unable to disguise their relief and luxuriate in their ability to express freely their real faith in a shrunken and parochial dependency they now call Ireland. They are only matched in that belief by their social partners in the Trade Union bureaucracy who long ago went from being an obstacle to the unity of Irish workers to being facilitators of that division. Their idea of opposing Aer Lingus was to firstly support the privatisation that gave them free rein and then to oppose the new conditions in Belfast by supporting Ryanair!

It is hardly surprising that Aer Lingus, for so long the flagship of Irish attempts to construct an independent capitalist economy and now the flagship of capitulation to globalisation, deregulation and privatisation, should be to the fore in this new definition of nationalism, first declaring Belfast to be a foreign city, then forcing lower conditions of service on staff based in the North and, on the day of the ‘No Irish’ announcement, hailing the Belfast routes as the first step to establish the company as a major player on the international market!

The darker dimension to this new nationalism becomes evident when one asks why an Irish greeting would be offensive. No-one would be offended by a French phrase on Air France or a German phrase on Lufthansa. The offence in this case would be to loyalism because, from the loyalist viewpoint, the present settlement is not based on any form of equality, but on the assertion of loyalist supremacy and the denial that expressions of Irish culture have any legitimacy within the Northern colony. What the representatives of the Irish bourgeoisie are saying with this decision is that they have no problem with the anti-Irish bigots. The bigots don’t even have to complain. The Irish bourgeois have bought the whole heap – not just partition or the British occupation, but the demands of bigotry and discrimination within the statelet.

This is bad news for Sinn Fein. Not only is there no Irish Language Act to protect language rights in the North – something they had already accepted in the St. Andrews deal. Now there is unlikely to even be the compensation that they expected to gain in the form of a language commissioner. In the longer run it is very bad news for the nationalist working class, when the bigots realise the limited constraints there are on their bigotry they will go to town in an attempt to turn back the clock to the days of fullblown Orange supremacy.

But of course the Sinn Fein leadership knew all this long ago. 10 years ago, at the start of the current process, they led a language movement in Queens University and Irish signs were erected in the Students union. The signs were removed following unionist protest and a deal negotiated where bigger grants were given to the language movement. When we realise that the signs were bi-lingual we can see the depths of unionist bigotry and the early signs that equality was not on the agenda – only a hand-out in compensation.

Even the handouts are drying up now.

From Islamophobia to Islam

2007-12-18T01:04:00.000Z

Using concepts of Islamophobia as grounds for alliance with religious fundamentalists is not the sole prerogative of the SWP. In Denmark the red-green alliance, which once boasted that it was doing so well that it might well put forward a socialist platform in the next elections, decided that the way to show solidarity was to stand a Muslim candidate in the November elections. They decided on no half measures and selected as a candidate Asmaa Abdol-Hamid, a young Muslim woman who wears the hijab and avoids contact with people of the male persuasion to the extent of refusing to shake hands with them. The Danish press had a field day, expressing dissatisfaction with her answers to questions on the death penalty and religious fundamentalism.

It is true that Denmark has a history of racist provocation against Muslims and it is the duty of socialists to oppose that provocation, but how it leads an organisation claiming a link with socialism to stand a religious zealot as their candidate is a little hard to follow.

The supporters of the Red-Green alliance found it hard to follow also. In fact they didn’t follow it to the extent that the alliances’ vote was cut from 3.4 % to 2.17 % of the vote, the worst result for the alliance since it entered parliament in 1994. In case the RGA was in any doubt about cause and effect, the opinion polls went through the floor as soon as they announced their candidate. Any remaining doubt was removed when former voters left the polling booth declaring that they no longer supported the group on the basis of Asmaa’s candidacy.

To rub salt in the wounds, the left reformist Socialist Peoples Party (SPP) more than doubled its votes from 6 % to 13 % on the back of worker’s radicalisation based on big mobilisations defending the welfare system.

We are far from seeing a revolutionary movement in Denmark. Neither the Red-Green alliance nor the SSP come close. But certain things are clear-cut. Socialists should oppose imperialist wars. They should defend Muslims from racist prosecution, but a socialist programme is aimed at the working class, rather than some confused liberal alliance with religious fundamentalism.

Mind you, Denmark isn’t the only part of the globe where leftists have given up on the workers and embraced alliances with quite reactionary forces. These miniature Denmarks are likely to go the same way as the Red-Green alliance.

Stormont leaders pay homage to Bush

2007-12-12T16:01:00.000Z

As an exercise in sycophancy and cretinism the visit by Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness to the US plumbs new depths (even by Irish standards). They resembled a pair of wide eyed first century provincial peasants who suddenly find themselves in Imperial Rome. Given the relationship between the US and Ireland, this is a very appropriate analogy.

The ostensible purpose of the trip was to drum up support for an investment conference that is to take place in Belfast early next year. This mission was therefore very much in line with the current economy strategy of the Executive which identifies foreign capital (particularly US) as the main engine of development. As a means of attracting US companies to the north the Executive is busy diverting funds from the health and housing budgets to create incentives (publically funded handouts) for them to locate here. All this is summed up in the breezy phrase “Northern Ireland is open for business”; a phrase regularly repeated by various minsters.

This is the essential message that Paisley and McGuiness brought to the New York Stock Exchange as they addressed an audience of company chief executives at its Wall St headquarters. Paisley tried to ingratiate himself by describing himself as “a businessman of God.” However, he was soon turning his attention to more worldly matters in a meeting with billionaire property developer Donald Trump about locating a golf course on the Antrim coast. This came on the back of Aberdeenshire Council rejecting a similar proposal for the west coast of Scotland. Trump’s plans to rip up a stretch of the coastline to create a Disneyland style had provoked understandable hostility from locals. However, no such objections crossed the mind of Paisley, he was all for it. Such enthusiasm should not be surprising given his associations with north coast property developers. Maybe he envisaged Trump linking up with Seymour Sweeney to create a course that incorporated the Giants Causeway! More likely Trump was playing him for a patsy to put pressure on the Scottish Executive to overturn the local planning decision and approve his proposal.

That Trump’s golf course was the main talking point of the visit to New York demonstrates the lack of substance to the mission. They won no firm investment commitments from any US companies’ only promises to attend a conference. Yet the conference itself is actually a cover for the lack of investment that has taken place. For the promised economic peace dividend, which envisaged billions of dollars of investment flowing into the north, has not materialised. There has actually been a flow of capital out of the north, with foreign owned companies such as Seagate moving to even lower cost economies. With the US economy now on the edge of a recession the prospect of major investment is even more remote.

Having paid homage at the seat of economic power Paisley and McGuinness rounded off their trip with a visit to Washington DC- the seat of political power. Here they were granted an audience with Emperor (President) Bush. They also managed to fit in a photo opportunity with Hillary Clinton; no doubt designed to boost her flagging presidential campaign. Paisley and McGuinness were at their most obsequious when meeting Bush, laughing at his lame jokes and praising him to the heavens. Paisley thanked the President and said that he looked “forward to good dealings between our little country and yours”. Not to be outdone in the crawling stakes McGuinness said he was “delighted and overjoyed” to meet Bush and expressed his “deepest thanks and appreciation to you and your administration”. They should have just prostrated themselves on the floor before Bush.

This was a truly sick making performance from the pair. In fawning over Bush they were lending credibility to a political leader loathed by people all over the world, including in the US itself, for waging war, destroying civil rights, whipping up racism and attacking the poor. They even offered support for the war in Iraq with Paisley mentioning that Royal Irish Regiment soldiers were stationed there, and McGuinness agreeing to take part in further talks with Iraqi leaders to sell the US plan for the pacification of the country. For his part Bush got to wash his hands in the cleansing waters of the Irish peace process.

It should come as no surprise that Ian Paisley should engage in kow towing to Bush. After all Paisley is a pro-imperialist, right wing bigot; he and Bush are political bedfellows. The most severe condemnation must be reserved for Martin McGuinness and Sinn Fein who are still claiming to be of “the left” and “anti-imperialist”. How empty such rhetoric appears when set against the images of McGuinness with Bush and the neo-liberal polices being pursued by the Stormont Executive. The more they get integrated into the settlement the more right wing Sinn Fein become. That this settlement now has the endorsement of Bush is surely a clear indicator of its rottenness.

Unions combine with employers to halt strike

2007-12-05T14:37:00.000Z

The Nipsa classroom assistants’ strike suffered a major blow when the other unions, Unison and the GMB, voted to accept the latest offer made by the education and library. This decision came at a meeting of the negotiating council involving unions and employers at which the offered was formally tabled and voted upon. With Unison and the GMB for, Nipsa against and the T&GWU abstaining a technical majority of the classroom assistants have voted to accept the offer. The employers will now contact each classroom assistant individually to ask them whether they want to accept the offer.

In the wake of the vote Nipsa announced that it was suspending its latest round of strike action (a two day strike each week). It claimed that its final strike day was in protest at the manner in which the offer had been accepted. Throughout the dispute employers had demanded that Nipsa ballot its members on the latest offer. In the days prior to the meeting of the negotiating council Nipsa had agreed ballot its members. This is after arguing against such a move on the basis that its members had already clearly rejected the offer. To concede to this demand was a major retreat which only emboldened the employers to press ahead with imposing it. It smacked of a desperate attempt to forestall the inevitable stitch up.

Yet in some ways this outcome helped the leadership of Nipsa. It enabled them to end the strike and absolve themselves of responsibility for the debacle. They could claim that they, like their members, were the victims of the other unions’ treachery. This does contain an element of truth. At the start of the dispute all the unions had a formal agreement to defend current pay and conditions of classroom assistants’. But following the slightly improved offer, the GMB, Unison and the T&GWU, immediately broke ranks. They made misleading public statements about the nature of the offer and denounced Nipsa for taking strike action. There are also suspicions that ballot they conducted on the offer were manipulated, with some members not being consulted and others who were not classroom assistants being balloted. It is doubtful whether the unions who voted for the offer actually do represent the majority of classroom assistants. In working hand in glove with employers to put down the strike they have played a thoroughly reactionary role.

However, divisions and treachery while important factors, do not in themselves account for the defeat of the strike. Nipsa leaders, while appearing to be the most militant, operated within the framework of respecting the sovereignty of the other union leaders. No attempt was made to challenge classroom assistants from other unions to support the strike. Nipsa leaders failed to support the claims by some its members that the Unison and GMB ballots on the offer were rigged. Most fatally Nipsa, along with the other unions, totally supported the Executive and Assembly. They perpetuated the myth that Stormont could deliver a just settlement, despite the fact that every party, Sinn Fein in particular, denounced the classroom assistants and did their upmost to bring the strike to an end.

The defeat of classroom assistants strike sends an ominous warning. Despite having a clearly just case; despite having public support; and despite their own determination (17 says on strike in total), they went down to defeat. This strike has demonstrated starkly that the working class in north is in no state to defend itself against the intensifying attack on its living standards.

Support your local Sheriff!

2007-12-03T00:27:00.001Z

At the bottom of the Glen Road in West Belfast a large sign has been erected reading “No bail for Killers”. At one level this represents a call for vengeance from a local family against young thugs accused of the murder of a local shopkeeper, and in many parts of Britain and Ireland would be totally unremarkable.

At another level it is a totally astounding statement, representing an astonishing collapse of political consciousness by the republican base in the area and more generally across the North. This is a community that for three decades organised and fought against a whole series of repressive laws, that saw the judicial and state apparatus as the enemies of freedom, that suffered internment, torture and random killings by the state forces and their paramilitary supporters. Now this community not only looks unthinkingly to the state and judiciary to protect it, it calls for the state to have more repressive powers and for the rights of defendants to be restricted.

There is of course a third level that helps explain the others and that rests in the cynical manipulation of Sinn Fein. The sign was not written by the bereaved family or by the community at large. It was written by those responsible for most of the signs and proclamations in the area – the local Sinn Fein cumann.

The Provos, having cynically justified their support for the police on the ludicrous claim that they would “put manners” on them, have no choice but to justify their turn by offering unconditional support to the state and to become the party of law and order, bringing forward the police and repression as the solution to the social ills arising from the failures of their own struggle and the social decay they left behind. Their shift to the right is best illustrated by their proxy paper, the “Andersonstown News”. Following weeks of centre-page interviews with the local RUC/PSNI, the paper picked on a hapless local hood, gave him front page status and demanded that the police “do something” about him, crowed victory when the cops came up with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) and then urged their readers to inform if their target was seen outside in curfew time. One reader obliged and the hood ended up behind bars. No-one complained that the ASBO system is a way of jailing people without having to prove that they have broken the law.

Any examination of a standard capitalist society will tell you very quickly that the police, still less the RUC/PSNI, are very definitely not there to protect the working class. The reason they continue to attract support is that shoring them up and demanding that workers kow-tow to them is one of the primary duties of capitalist politicians and the institutions of the state. The Sinners are doing their job – supporting the local sheriff, Its up to socialists to demonstrate the futility of their reactionary politics.

Rud eile.

Just when you thought the Andersonstown News couldn’t get any worse, their columns fill with reactionary denunciations of striking classroom assistants. Did I mention the role of the capitalist media in the protection of property rights and the suppression of the workers?

Executive budget starts to bite

2007-11-28T15:55:00.000Z

As the practical implications of the Executive’s first budget begin to filter through its neo-liberal and anti-working class character becomes ever clearer. For example, last week the Social Development Minister Margaret Ritchie told her Assembly scrutiny committee the draft budget allocated to her department was completely inadequate and not sufficient to tackle homelessness or the number of people in housing stress. She revealed that the Housing Executive maintenance and upgrade budget could be slashed by fifty per cent.

Another organisation, also within the Department for Social Development, whose budget is facing cuts, is National Energy Action (NEA). It has responsibility for tackling fuel poverty. This is a particularly pressing issue in the north which has the highest level of fuel poverty in the UK. There are 154,000 households classed as fuel-poor, and each year more than 2,000 people die because of the cold. Fuel poverty also has a disproportionate impact on the elderly with over 50 per cent of cold homes occupied by older people. It is a problem which is escalating. The results from the 2006 House Condition Survey, which are out soon, are expected to say that this figure has risen to above 210,000 households. That means that 36 per cent of all households in Northern Ireland are experiencing fuel poverty - a jump of 5 percent from 2001. NEA’s director Pat Austin has described the decision to halve its budget as a "dangerous" and "draconian". The clear implication is that suffering will increase and people more people will die.

Another area to feel the squeeze has been health. Spending on the health service in the north is already the lowest in the UK, and the allocation of funds in the budget means it will fall even further behind. This is despite the fact that the population is in poorer state of health and demands on services are greater. Budget restraints mean that the Department’s new mental health strategy cannot be launched, and that the new women and children's hospital, promised for Belfast since 2000, will be further delayed.

Some of the proposals in the Executive’s budget wouldn’t seem out of place in Swift’s Modest Proposal (maybe the finance minister is hoping that more elderly people dying of cold will ease pressure on health service!). Unfortunately, Peter Robinson is no Jonathon Swift. His proposals aren’t biting satire designed to expose injustice, but his vision of how society in north should develop.

What is at the heart of this vision is inequality. So alongside the parsimonious approach to addressing health and housing needs, we have the business class being encouraged to milk the public purse for all its worth. Recent examples of this include the revelation that the fees paid to by Government departments to consultancy firms have gone up from £13m per year to just over £40m. NI Water alone has spent than £16m on consultancy fees since April.

Often the people awarding these contracts are directly linked to the companies that benefit. In one case, the Strategic Investment Board (SIB), which is overseeing the roll out of PFIs in the north, paid the company of one of its own board members more than £2m in fees for his and a colleague's services. By happy coincidence (for him) James Stewart is the chief executive of Partnerships UK plc (PUK), a company which provides public and private sector commercial expertise for public private partnerships.

These examples of the soaking of the poor and the featherbedding of the wealthy are scandalous. But they are not apparitions or mistakes. Rather, they are a direct and deliberate result of the policy, which all the parties have signed up to, of shifting the north’s economy in a neo-liberal direction. They exemplify what glib phrases such as “rebalancing the economy” or “growing the private sector” (which flow feely from the mouths of minsters) actually mean in practice. And this is just the start!

What the ****'s an ethos?

2007-11-27T20:46:00.000Z

The sectarianism that is so much a part of Irish society now and then proves embarrassing. The most recent example is the reaction of Protestant schools in the South who have objected to a provision in the latest social partnership deal. This allows for the Department of Education to fill vacancies in schools from a list of teachers displaced by the closure of other schools. The department looks at the vacancy and then matches the teacher from the list who most closely tallies with the vacant post. One of the bodies representing Protestant controlled schools has objected to this and is going to take its case to court to challenge the process, claiming it was never consulted and never agreed to it, although another body representing these schools was part of the process.

Their complaint is that the process stops them from selecting teacher candidates that will foster and protect their ‘ethos.’ In other words they want to retain their prerogative to select teachers on sectarian grounds. Either the teacher will have to be a Protestant or they will have to accept that Protestantism will be the distinctive character of the school. They must accept this, no matter what their own religious views are, or indeed whether they have any religious views at all. Just what this ‘ethos’ adds to a child’s education in maths, English, geography, and physics etc. is never spelt out, except that it is usually claimed that some moral content will be given to their education through this ‘ethos’.

This moral content seems to differ little between the churches although they all of course think that others are in error or are heresies. No one is under any illusion but that the real purpose of church control is to inculcate a particular religious dogma into the impressionable brains of young children. They are however far too calculating to admit this, or to go about asserting their own claims to moral superiority too loudly. The distinctive morality at play is therefore hypocrisy.

A couple of years ago the Catholic Church in the North was also making public warnings about its intent to defend the ‘ethos’ of its schools, how this taught the children a distinctive and morally right way of living. A week later a report revealed the record number of very young women who had become pregnant or were single parents coming from the very areas dominated by Catholic schools.

The same reactionaries who defend sectarian schooling are also the most vocal condemning the pereceived widespread delinquent and anti-social behaviour of young people. But of course sectarian schooling has nothing to do with sectarianism and these schools have nothing to do with young people’s behaviour, and organisations exposed as perpetrators of institutionalised child abuse are just the right ones to be entrusted with children’s care and education.

Eamonn McCann, the zeitgeist and the RIRA

2007-11-22T22:26:00.000Z

In the Belfast telegraph of November 22^nd http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/opinion/article3164196.ece ) Eamonn McCann wrote a piece ‘How five deaths in 1957 are still echoing today’. The article has caused some comment, interpreted as McCann supporting or defending republicanism. The comments miss the point. McCann is doing what the SWP does best – sensing the zeitgeist. In the process he is yet again moving sharply to the right.

The central argument contrasts Adams support for the 1957 Edentubber martyrs with his condemnation of real IRA attacks on the RUC/PSNI today. For McCann, Derry today is no different from Edentubber in the past. The problem is republicanism, he concludes, quoting Adams hypocritical attack on the RIRA: "These groups have no strategy, no programmes, no popular support and no real capacity - militarily or otherwise. They have chosen random acts of intimidation and isolated acts of individual violence which are politically ineffective and result only in pain and suffering for the individuals targeted and their families. The overall effect is retrograde at every level and in every sense."

But what is the context? Is there a current debate about strategy among republicans or a debate in the socialist movement where the important thing is to put forward a socialist critique of militarism? No there is not. What there is, is an attempt by the remaining republicans to relaunch their military campaign, countered by hysterical demands for their repression, led by Dublin, Sinn Fein and the northern Catholic bourgeoisie, with the Derry journal labelling the RIRA fascist.

Socialists oppose the militarist tactics of the RIRA, but we believe that republicans and socialists should oppose a settlement that is sectarian and undemocratic. We should oppose Sinn Fein’s lick-spittle hypocrisy, the calls for repression by the nationalist reactionaries and the attempts to advance further a police offensive in nationalist areas.

Although Eamonn knows all this, like all economist socialists he falls behind the popular mood. The fact that the next day he finds himself protesting when the RUC/PSNI refuse medical treatment to a republican whose arm they have broken in three places just shows the confusion that this position can get you into, a confusion magnified by McCann’s place in court as a defendant in the Raytheon 9 case – McCann’s own milder version of the direct action he decries in RIRA

The current imperialist settlement is no longer up than it is decaying from its own corruption. It so bad that even a movement as politically bankrupt as republican militarism can begin to revive. In no small measure this is due to the reluctance of the left to lead any principled opposition to the reactionary Stormont regime. Once Eamonn would have told us that that imperialism was responsible for the endemic violence in Ireland – no more.

Sinn Fein strike breakers

2007-11-20T16:00:00.000Z

The idea that Sinn Fein represents some kind of progressive political force becomes ever more ridiculous with each passing day of devolution and power sharing. Even by its own low standards the party’s call for classroom assistants to abandon their strike plumbs new depths.

Classroom assistants have resumed industrial action after weeks of fruitless talks with the employers at the Labour Relations. These talks had come on the back of an all about strike by classroom assistants belonging to the Nipsa union in response to a proposal from the Education Boards to reduce their pay and conditions. This supposedly represented a settlement of a twelve-year dispute over job evaluation.

Throughout this current phase dispute the Sinn Fein education minister Caitriona Rune has consistently backed the Boards and done everything in her power to put down the strikers. This started almost immediately from when she took office and endorsed a financial package from the Boards to settle the long running dispute. This “settlement” was based on funding any pay arrears due to classroom assistants by reducing their current and future pay and conditions. The essentials of this offer remain on the table toady despite claims by the minister that it has been “vastly improved”. Despite it being overwhelmingly rejected Ruane wants to press ahead and impose it. The negotiations that have taken place have really been a facade as there is nothing more on offer. Their purpose is to demobilise the strikers and give the impression that the minister is doing something to resolve the despite.

However, with the resumption of strike action, these populist gestures have given way to outright hostility. The minister and the Boards have went on the offensive, misleading the public about what’s on offer and making scurrilous claims that the strikers are exploiting disabled children. Ruane has even gone so far has to write to every Nipsa classroom assistants urging them to abandon their strike. This is unashamed attempt at strike breaking.

A defence offered for such behaviour is that the Sinn Fein minister is bound into the Executive. Such arguments implicitly recognises the reactionary nature of the Executive. But the anti-strike posture of Sinn Fein is not confined to those with ministerial responsibility. The west Belfast MLA Paul Butler has also been vocal in his denunciations of the strike, claiming that “industrial action by classroom assistants will achieve anything accept to create more hardship for children.” This is particularly ironic, as he had joined a picket line only a few weeks earlier during the previous strike. He didn’t explain the reason for his U-turn.

However, independent thinking is not something Sinn Finn MLAs are noted for. Ruane and Butler are just ciphers for the leadership. They are part of a government that has already laid out its plans for an assault on public services and the working class; and are determined to stay in that government no matter what. By putting down strikers Sinn Fein can demonstrate its credentials as a party of government and its fitness for the battles to come.

When classroom assistants held a demonstration outside Sinn Fein offices west Belfast, Paul Butler was indignant that they held placards comparing Catriona Ruane with Margaret Thatcher. But given Sinn Fein’s current right wing trajectory it is one that is apt.

Lord Mayor of Belfast supports racist march

2007-11-17T11:50:00.000Z

In any other city in the UK the prospect of a racist march through an area with a significant ethnic minority population would have provoked widespread condemnation. But not in Belfast. Here the Lord Mayor, whose role is supposedly to offer civic leadership, actually voices support for it.

This was the response of the UUP’s Jim Rodgers to the Parades Commission determination that a loyalist march against the north’s sole MLA from an ethnic minority background (the Alliance Party’s Anna Lo) could not proceed along Donegall Pass. The origins of the march lie in a complaint the MLA made on behalf of a constituent who was held up by a band parade on her way to work at the Ulster Hospital. Anna Lo was provided with the name and address of the parade organiser by the PSNI and sent him a letter outlining her constituent’s concerns. In response, George Spence of the Pride of the Raven FB issued a press release to the local media condemning her and announcing that loyalists planned to stage a protest march through the city centre and part of south Belfast. The route of the march was to include the Donegall Pass area in which a significant number of the city’s Chinese population live and work.

The organisers denied there was any connection between Anna Lo being Chinese and their march taking this route. A claim that many bandsmen enjoyed a Chinese meal was offered as evidence of their anti-racist credentials. However, an examination of the facts demonstrates clearly the racist motivation of the march. There is no link between Doneagll Pass and the incident that provoked the initial complaint. That happened in east Belfast; also the name and address of the parade organiser were provided by police at Strandtown PSNI station in east Belfast. The organisers also claimed that they thought Anna Lo had her office in Donegall Pass. But this is wrong. The Chinese Welfare Association, for which Lo had worked before being elected, had an office there in the past but moved a number of years ago. That the organisers should think of targeting such an organisation is more evidence of their racist intent. The only reason to route a march through Donegall Pass is to intimidate the Chinese population who live and work there. They were going to pay the price for Anna Lo daring to question a loyalist display of sectarian supremacy.

Of course the racists themselves recognised this straight away. That is why the march won the fulsome endorsement of the BNP; an endorsement the organisers did not reject. The unionists also recognise this. However, they frame their prejudices in terms of community rights. While they do not overtly endorse racism, they defend loyalists “right” to march and to intimidate anyone who dares challenge them. Jim Rodgers could therefore ring his hands over the “big disappointment” of the Parades Commission decision and assure everyone that the organisers of the parade were “very respectable” and not “trying to cause offence”. He even offered some friendly advice to the organisers, urging them to move the parade to after Christmas so as not to disrupt the business of city centre traders. Obviously, the Lord Mayor is more concerned with the profits of high street stores than the victims of racist intimidation.

While this episode is sickening it is not unique. Over the last number of years loyalists have regularly engaged in acts of racist violence and intimidation, always accompanied by justifications from unionists. However, because of the imperatives of the peace process which demand that every prejudice be accepted as some form legitimate community expression, racism goes largely unchallenged.

Welcome

2007-11-10T13:41:00.000Z

Welcome to the Socialist Democracy blog. It will offer commentary from a socialist perspective on Irish society and politics. The articles on this blog will be shorter than those on our website and will be updated on a more regular basis. However, like our website, the articles posted will reflect the viewpoint of our organisation. We hope than our readers will take advantage of the interactive features of the blog format and post their own comments on what appears.