The
Provisional IRA was not born out of popular consensus among northern
Catholics for an all-Ireland Gaelic state. On the contrary, it was
the rejection of the demand for jobs and homes and a widening of the
franchise, to put them on a basis of perceived equality with
Protestants within the northern state, that created the conditions
out of which the Provisionals emerged. In other words, had the
Unionist government been able to abolish unemployment and solve the
disastrous housing problem in 1969, the Provisional IRA would never
have emerged. Those people who rejected the IRA in 1956, when the IRA
advocated the old nationalist shibboleths to muster support, only
offered sympathy to the Provisionals after the Unionists had met
their social and economic demands with violence. We
would add that those who propped up the Provisionals were
predominantly located to a few areas of absolute social deprivation.
The
Socialist Standard wrote that analysis back in 1988. We now read
echoes of it in a Guardian report following the callous murder of
Lyra Mckee:
“...Here
[the Creggan housing estate] almost two-thirds of children are born
into poverty. Many grow up angry and alienated – fertile soil for
dissident republicans...“They’ve
no hope. They get sucked into paramilitarism, they get chucked into
crap,” said Sharon McCloske...The number of children removed from
family homes because of neglect in Derry hit a record high point last
year. In a survey, 95% of young people questioned said that they saw
no future in the city...”
The
problems of the working class in Northern Ireland were, and remain,
the problems of the working class of the world and originate in the
class stratification of capitalist society. The New IRA is composed
mainly of young workers unaware of the economic pressures that had
given rise to the struggle. They are fighting for a phantom Ireland. Their
“Ireland” is an abstraction, an “Ireland” opposite of what
they know and live with. The aspiration to have a nation which
belongs to you is in reality a desire to have a society which is
yours — where you can feel a part of because it belongs to you. It
is a reflection of alienated workers who want a place which they can
call their own. Workers are right to seek a community which they can
call their own, but which belongs to humanity and locals alike,
something they can take pride in and no longer feel to be mere
tenants in a country owned by others. But it is not an One-Ireland
but a One-World.
Experience
has shown us that under capitalism peace does not automatically mean
prosperity. But the absence of killing, maiming and intimidation can
bring an improvement to the quality of working class life in Northern
Ireland and, especially, it can help the victims of capitalism to
focus on the real cause of their problems. Behind all the ideologies that underlie all wars and all violence are the
conflicts created among peoples by the divisive interests of
capitalism. It follows that the only real ‘peace dividend’ is to
end capitalism. It is left to a few socialists to rationally explain
the irrationality of a system that imbues its wage slaves with
deliberate disguises to hide the fact that, whether we perceive
ourselves to be Catholic or Protestant. British or Irish, our way of
life is dictated by our class position in society. It is our class
position, and not the colour of the rag at the end of a flag-pole
that inflicts on all of the working class its poverty and
degradation. The problems of workers in the Creggan housing scheme
are the same problems of wage slaves everywhere and they will not be
solved separately from the rest of the working class.
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