SOCIALIST Outlook supports the republicans' demand for British withdrawal and self determination.
Only the irish working class can lead the fight for self-determination. This struggle needs to lead not to me cre con oraunite coise Ireland but to a workers' republic.
Loyalist workers have no interest in unity with a sectarian 26-county state They will not be won over by a programme of national unity and independence.
Secondly we believe the Republicans have been the leading force fighting British imperialism in Ireland.
If successful the struggle could only lead to the break up of the British state. This would be a huge step forward for the workers movement. It does not matter that Britain is no longer number imperialist power. Defeat and dismemberment of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland would be of world-wide significance.
Socialism in Britain requires that the British working class breaks from reactionary chauvinism and supports Irish self determination against its own ruling class.
The reason for the present failure of the republican movement lies in its almost wholehearted embrace of reformist policies. Once it became clear that military force Charles Haughey: old-time petty-bourgeois Catholic nationatism personified SINCE at least the time of Gladstone the British ruling class has had a strong desire to disentangle the "Irish Ouestion" from British politics. Since the mid-nineteenth century Ireland has been a continuing source of deep division and even sometimes outright warfare among the bourgeoisie.
One of the most serious examples of this was the Curragh Mutiny in 1912 when the army rebelled rather than move against Unionist gun runners.
The question of the union has always had the capacity to be a catalyst for splits in the British bourgeoisie. This has been demonstrated again only recently with significant numbers of right-wing Tory MP's stating that defence of the union is a rewould not drive the British out, Sinn Fein threw in its lot with the Southern ruling class in a pan-nationalist Tront This failure should not however Unworkable signing matter.
It is likely that the Irish question will remain close to the centre of the fight for the future of the Tory Party.
The 192l dartition treaty was an attempt at a neo-colonial settlement. In the South this was relatively successful.
Its failure in the North was mainly due to the fact that power was left in the hands of those who had previously been the instruments of imperialist oppression— the unioniste The main founding block of the sectarian state of Ulster was discrimination. Ihe Unionists ensured their own survival by perpetuating divisions in the working class alone religious lines and creating a powerful cross-class alliance based on the OrH-BLOCK 100 Creen Supporters of the Fourth International have played a leading role in the stuggles to build a Brish movement against the occupation of Ireland blind us to the fact that working class nationalists, North and South, support Sinn Fein because they see this as a way of advancing their class Interes. ange Order.
The perceived threat from the South was used to cement this popular front. But after 1926, when the creation of Fianna Fail brought forth a new constitutional republicanism, that threat was nothing more than fantasy.
The neo-colonial solution also failed in the North because of the area's economic dependence on the empire and the close political integration, expressed in a titie only recently abolished - "The Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland".
At the same time this very geo-political and economic closeness became an obstacle to the kind of state terrorism required to defeat the IRA. The British bourgeoisie were unable to mount military operations on the same scale as those against so-called insurgents in Aden, Kenya and Malaya.
In the post-war period, as the British Empire disintegrated, the ruling class were generally able to impose solutions, even if that meant sacrificing the interests of some of their own.
In the case of Ireland this has never been possible. Major cannot do it now without dividing the Tory Party from top to bottom.
The irony is that leaving aside the general world view of the British Conservative Party, a bourgeois solution to the Irish problem is now more than ever in sight. Unionism is fragmenting and important sections of capital, North and South, while not necessarily favouring radical constitutional solutions, at least favour economic ones.
Ireland's economy is one of the fastest growing in the European Union and Irish capital senses the rapid investment opportunities which will arise following a political and economic settlement DUN'T LET Opposition to discrimination in jobs and housing is at the root of their demands. But these reforms cannot be achieved within the context of a future Northern statelet. Nor can they be achieved within a framework or direct rule trom London, a situation which has been in place since 1y 4 when stormont was abolished.
Large numbers of the nationalist working class nave come to see cnal reform requires dismantling the remains of the six-county statelet. This is why they voted in their tens or thous estor sinn rein. the only party which up until now has consistently raised this demand.
But even in a unified state which ended discrimination, the national. ist working class would still come up against local and multinational capital.
They would still face the problems of unemployment, emigra. tion, low wages and sweatshop conditions.
This would immediately put them into conflict with a Republican politics which has no answer to such problems. It would also force them to recognise that the Protestant working class are their allies in this struggle against capital.
Independence and self-determination are therefore cast in completely different light. The demand for reform leads to the demand to end partition, which in turn leads to the question of the character of a new 32-county state.
The dynamic is towards revolutionary politics. The only organisation capable of leading such a struggle would be a revolutionary socialist party.