What happened in Ireland? The collapse of republicanism and the rise of reaction John McAnulty's article was produced from notes from a speaking tour in England What happened in Ireland? How is it that the vicious arch-bigot Paisley is suddenly transformed into a smiley elder uncle figure, the new premier of Britain's Irish colony, and filling the TV screens beside him, wearing a vacuous grin, stands Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness, pledged to support and defend the partitionist, sectarian state that he spent most of his adult life trying to tear down with military force. The explanation is a simple and dramatic one. A one-word explanation: defeat. The Irish republicans have been defeated. Defeated so totally, in such a global and overwhelming fashion, that it has reached inside the movement and the minds of its members and turned the programme of republicanism through 180 degrees so that the movement now embraces what it once abjured. This conclusion may seem too stark. Surely the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) involved a long period of negotiation, of give and take. Sinn Fein is now in government, the majority nationalist party in the North, with an increased base in the South? There are by Socialist Democracy in July 2007. relatively high levels of employment and many more Catholics in high profile positions. Surely all these changes amount to reform? Surely, as Sinn Fein claims, the changes amount to a transitional arrangement that bring an Irish democracy closer? Alas no. The defeat of republicanism did not happen all at once. They were offered a form of equality if they supported the state, but the more they conceded the less of a threat they became and the less they were offered. The long years of negotiation involved a chipping away of republican demands and shifting the goalposts until the defeat became a rout and the promise of places in government rested on unconditional surrender. As one wag remarked in one of the frequent 'The unionists are too stupid to know crises, that they have won and the republicans too clever to admit that they have lost.' The republican places in government have a long historical precedent. Nothing is more common than for sections of the vanquished to be co-opted to supervise the peace imposed on them. The republicans have replaced the 20 Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) as the mass party of nationalism in the North, but they have done so by adopting the programme of bourgeois nationalism that they once so firmly opposed and by making the same links to the Catholic Church and Catholic employers that the SDLP once held. There is a larger and more visible Catholic middle class with a protected place in a sectarian education system and more prominent roles in the Civil service and the legal apparatus, but these are the result of earlier British reforms predating the GFA and the discrimination laws do not apply to small firms - the major local element of the economy. Lower unemployment rates are closely linked to a boom in British retail investment and academic analysis shows little change in the ratio of Catholic-Protestant employment or in the structural divisions in the workforce, with Catholics largely absent from parts of the industrial sector and from the state forces. The main change is that the new dispensation includes a place for sectional political rights for Catholics. A weak metaphor might be the US, where the black civil rights movement did not dislodge the racist society but where
a black middle class found new niches, partly with the role of policing the black poor who gained little. So why is it such an absolute defeat? In part this arose from the collapse of the USSR. In the wake of that collapse we saw the gradual collapse of 'national liberation movements' that depended in part on a bipolar world where they could survive if they managed to break free. A whole spectrum of defeats took place, from the South African one, modified by the democratic gain of the universal vote, right over to the horror of Gaza. Ireland fits into this spectrum. To the general global mechanism we must add a determined offensive by Irish capital in collusion with Britain. The Dublin government had long been of the opinion that the national question had to be buried. In the wake of the defeat of the hunger strikes they called a 'New Ireland Forum' to bury it. The final proposals were the basis of the Good Friday Agreement formal repudiation of a united Ireland and endorsement of partition in exchange for communal rights for Catholics within the defeat was the weakness of republicanism itself. A petty-bourgeois revolutionary nationalist movement, the glue that held the disparate class elements together was support for physical force. This was never likely to be able to defeat the British state, and state terror would eventually demoralise the base of the movement. Before the ceasefire the republicans were under nightly attack from loyalist forces supported by the state, Loyalist atrocities - attacks on bars with blood running in rivers into the street - provoked revulsion against all armed action, including republican action. Republican military action led to the Shankill Road bombing and the further isolation of the movement. On the political front the republican movement was never able to mount any consistent challenge to Irish capital and, when the Dublin government moved decisively, found it easier to fall behind them under the banner of nationalist unity than to stage a programmatic break to the left. A colonial settlement Right from the start the settlement was one :hat socialists would have had to oppose. It was a colonial settlement, built on the legal oundation of the Government of Ireland ict that established the supremacy of the ivestminster Parliament and involving the "epudiation of articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution. It was a sectarian settlement, establishing parliamentary and legal rights :ependent on membership of one religious e up or the other. It was an undemocratic :e:lement, both in that it was a barrier to = united Ireland and in that the sectarian setup, that now permeates all of civil society, = s far short of the demands of the early •: rights movement for civil and human *'s. For example, the settlement puts = resentatives of the loyalist death squads he policing boards and other quangos :: gives them funds and recognition as #resentatives of Protestant communities, even though Protestant workers repudiate them at the ballot box. The Good Friday Agreement had one other fatal flaw. It was unworkable. As former loyalist cabinet minister Lord Kilcooney remarked, 'Unionists are willing to share power, but not, of course, equal shares'. In a long series of crises the unionists, supported by the British, reworked the Good Friday Agreement until it became the St. Andrews The main difference was that shares were no longer equal. In legislative terms the ministries became subordinate to the executive, making impossible earlier decisions under the GFA assembly such as Martin McGuinness's decision to abolish the 11 plus or Bairbre de Brun's decision to award a new maternity centre to the Royal Hospital. In parallel London and Dublin lent on the Provos, demanding total support for the police while making it clear that no further concessions were to be made and the notorious special branch was to stay. 'The unionists are too stupid to know that they have won and the republicans too clever to admit that they have lost' A flavour of the new situation can be given by the first resolutions to the new assembly. Sinn Fein put a technical proposal that different equality legislation be amalgamated into one act. The purpose was symbolic, claiming title to an agenda of rights. The unionists voted it down on the basis that they opposed all equality legislation. The DUP then proposed the equally symbolic resolution that the assembly affiliate to the Commonwealth Association - proclaiming right away that 'Ulster' is British. The Provos, with hangdog faces, announced that they opposed the resolution but, out of respect for loyalist "culture', they would not vote it down. An unstable settlement Politically the settlement is unstable. The DUP must continuously humiliate the republicans to keep their own base. The republicans must constantly retreat, sometimes arguing that conciliation is respect for loyalist 'culture' while organising protest 21 rallies about the failure to introduce an act giving public status to the Irish language - no one remarks on the fact that they are part of the government failing in this task. Ongoing actions by the loyalist paramilitaries, provocations by the sectarian Orange Order and indications by the British that the RUC will now operate the status quo ante go The Loyalists carry out sectarian killings. The Orange Order's bonfires carry banners celebrating the deaths of Catholic teenagers. It is announced that there will be no further action in the state killing of civil rights lawyer Pat Finucaine or in the role of the RUC in supplying guns for the massacre of Catholic civilians in a bookies shop on the Ormeau Road. There is no reaction because the vast majority of nationalists believe the assertions that these are episodes from the past and that sectarianism will gradually fade away. This belief is unfounded - the institutions of the renewed state are designed to foster sectarianism. Privatisations There is a strong economic dimension to the settlement that is itself unstable. In the Northern economy 60% of the population are employed in the state sector. The rigours of Thatcherism were kept at bay to avoid increasing social tension when there was still a nationalist revolt under way. Now, through a programme called the Review of Public Administration (RPA) all this is to change. A large number of public service jobs are to go and there will be a widespread programme of deregulation, privatisation and public-private partnership: this all meant to attract a peace dividend of transnational capital. We have been waiting ten years without result for this capital to arrive, but all the local parties are committed to the idea, Sinn Fein leading the charge with call for a 12% corporation tax. The greatest strength to the set-up is the fact that there is no opposition. All the parties are in government. However its inherent instability will be greatly increased with the coming economic offensive in what remains a low-wage economy. The role of the British revolutionary left has traditionally been to offer solidarity through the republican movement and to publicise issues of repression. There is now a need to re-theorise the Irish question and to publicise the fact that the current settlement has preserved partition and the nasty little sectarian colony in the north-east of Ireland. It will be some time before there is a mass movement in Ireland, but there are upsurges that would gain greatly from external support and solidarity. The recent nurses strike in the 26 counties, defeated by the union bureaucracy, had the potential to blow apart the social partnership deal between unions and bosses that smothers working- class resistance. For such solidarity to arise quickly there has to be a broad and informed audience. It is that audience that socialists