The Great Irish Famine-The Thomas Davis Lecture Series ed. Cathal Poirteir. Published in asociation with RTE pages, priced £8.99. THIS BOOK is a must for all those who want to understand the history of the Great Irish Famine.
The history of the Famine is one of how the Whig (liberal) government in Britain exploited the potato blight to ruthlessly pursue their own interests. arguing that laissez faire (free market) forces should decide matters.
As the revolutionary nationalist the potato blight, but England sent the ramibc.
The Whigs represented the English industrial capitalist class who emerged onto the political scene in the fifty years before the famine.
The struggle between them and the Tones was no just over the Corn Laws, but about which part of the ruling class would politichily dictate Britain's future.
On the one hand, the Whig industrialists wanted to allow in cheap com from North America and begin the cheap food policy to placate the rising discontent of the working class. On the other the Tories with large Irish estates opposed this, as it undercut their main source of revenuc, subsidised com from Ireland. Whig interests required the instituAs the revolutionary nationalist John Mitchell observed: "God sent the potato blight, but England sent the Famine." tion of a new agricultural system in Ireland. Lord Palmerston, great Irish land. owner and Whig foreign secretary in nomic improvement required a "long continued and systematic ejection of small-holders and cottiers".
Sheep. cattle and dairy produce must now take the place of the Irish peasantry.
However, there were upwards of three million Insh cottiers, small holders and landless lanoarers who could norbe expected to agree casily that history had consigned them to its dustbin. The Whig government's response to the famine was to refuse relief to those who had not given up their land and homes, and laws designed to force the irish peasantry from their land and homes through eviction or starvation. to be distributed free by the Government. so in the worst months of Black '47 Swanton's mill in Skibbereen had between 100 and 200 tons of meal but the starving had no money to buy it Donnelly estimates that mass evictions came close to half a million from 1845 to 1854.
Without the Famine this would have produced civil war. Indeed this was a constant fear of the Governnocit To conclude, this book is a slap in the face for the historical revisionists who peddie the lie of "natural disaster" to exolain the Famine Gerry Downing
Socialist Outlook 96 • February 3, 1996. BRIAN GARDNER reviews BBC 2's new political drama 'Our Friends in the North PETER FLANNERY'S nine-part epic traces a web of graft and corruption as it affects - and in some cases envelops - the lives of four childhood friends from Newcastle.
On the eve of the 1964 general election, Nicky (Christopher Eccleston), Just back from spending his vacation doing voluntary work for che civil rights movement in the States, delays his retum to university in order to campaign for the Labour Party.
Nicky is in love with Mary (Gina McKee) but is eventually supplanted In her affections by Tosker (Mark Strong), a smooth-calking. guitar-playing jack-the-lad who, despite being tone deaf, gets star billing in his mum The fourth character, Geordie (Daniel Craig), wants to form a band with Nicky and Tosker, but this comes to nothing when Nicky's party Geordie's fight with his father causes him to flee Newcastle for a London of Soho porn shops, strip clubs, bent coppers and murderous criminals world that his underworld boss. Benny Barratt (Malcolm McDowell in a typically menacing role) is hell-bent on controlling.
Meanwhile Mary, her university ca. reer never having even begun, is trapped with bables, domestic drudg ery and the lying and womanising Tosker. February Saturday February 3: National Meeting of Socialist Campaign Groups. Saturday February 3: Liverpool Dockers demonstration. Assemble 10.30am, Myrtle Parade, top of Hardman Street, Liverpool. Monday February 5: Trade Union News Discussion Forum on French strikes with -Malcolm McDoweit typicolly menacing Nicky falls in with Austen Donohue (Alun Armstrong) and with John Edwards (Geoffrey Hutchings), they wine, dine and bribe every single councillor and council official they Donohue explains that it is no longer possible to rail against all "the crooks and cowards, because" he says, "nobody's interested" can find to garner contracts for the building company owned by Edwards.
Edwards and Donohue are barely disguised versions of T Dan Smith and John Poulson, who in the sixties gained contracts for Poulson's building firm by bribing councillors and public officials with money, free houses and foreim travel The young idealistic Nicky gets inWhat's Happening tional conference, Coventry.
Saturday February 17: Manchester Campaign Against the Immigration and Asylum Bill, Ipm, Pakistani Community Centre, Stockport Road, Longsight.
19-23 February: Student week of action against Immigration and volved because he is impatient for change. At odds with his father, a former larrow marcher who now says that it "doesn't matter who wins elec. tions, nothing changes", he is impressed with Donohue's determination to rebuild the North and provide decent housing for ordinary people.
He is soon disillusioned. After working with Donohue on the 1966 election campaign he becomes in. creasingly aware that Labour promises are meaningless and that providing decent housing is not about quality of life but about fastbucks for the Tory capitalists.
Donohue explains that the election was fought on television and that it is no longer possible to stand on a soapbox and rail against all "the crooks and cowards, because" he says, "nobody's interested. People can't see how the big issues connect with their lives any more."
Flannery's drama shows that when "socialist politicians get into bed with enterprise capitalists to renerate proboth disastrous, and morally corrupt. ing of the individuals involved.
It is not yet clear where he is taking us.
At the Labour club Nicky encounters a newspaper-selling anarchist whose publication calks of Wilson's betrayal of the working class. It remains to be seen whether the series will argue that capitalism can only be overthrown through a revolutionary socialist programme and that this can be made to work Nevertheless, it is extremely watchable and bold. Flannery had quite a struggle to get it made and it is good to see some real political drama back on television. Asylum Bill. Saturday February 24: National demonstration against Immigration and Asylum Bill. Assemble 11 am Embankment, London. March March 23: Welfare State Nerwork Conference. UP AGAINST mass unemployment, rampant employers with savage anti-union laws, and a war on ain faces a real crisis - an avoidable crisis created by the historic failure of its official leadership. ship, based on class struggle and revolutionary socialism. by its need to maximise profits at the expense of the workers, has had determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal Tory high command one at a time. any pretence of being a socialist alternative. Every retreat encouraged the offensive against jobs, wages, conditions and union rights. conditions within capitalism. environment, peace and democracy, can never be achleved under capitalism.
Nor, as we argued long before the collapse of Stalinism, could these demands ever be achleved under the bureaucratically de. formed workers states and degenerated USSR, whose regimes survived only by repressing the working class. dies of state marxism, nor on the tame, toothless version of 'marx. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. Illusions of peaceful legislative change. topple the corrupt and reactionary rule of capital and establish its own class rule. sloners, of the black communities, of lesbians and gay men, of stu. dents, of youth - and of those fighting imperialism in Ireland and worldwide. 40 countries. mass revolutionary party can be built simply by proclaiming our. selves to be one. This degenerates into sectarian posturing and abIn struggle, must be taken into the unions, the Labour Party and every campaign and struggle in which workers and the oppressed fight for their rights. work together for common objectives while remaining free to de. bate differences.
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Name .. hard-won public services, the working class in BritSocialist Outlook exists to build a new type of working class leader.
The capitalist class, driven by Its own crisis, and politically united The Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions, and to fragment and weaken the resistance, allowing them to pick off isolated sections In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the defeatist politics of 'new realism", effectively total surrender, while ditching New realism is the latest form of reformism, seeking only improved We reject reformism, not because we are against reforms, but because we know that full employment, decent living standards, a clean We are a marxist current, based not on the brutish totalitarian paroIsm' beloved by armchair academics, but the revolutionary tradition of Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or We fight to mobilise and unleash the power of the working class to We struggle against fragmentation by building solldarity, to unite the various struggles of workers, the unemployed, of women, of penSocialist Outlook is above all an internationalist current, in solidarIty with the Trotskyist Fourth International, which organises in over Unlike some other groups on the British left, we do not believe a stention from struggles in the labour movement, playing into right Nor do we believe that the demands of women, black people, lesbi. ans and gays or the national demands of people in Scotland, Ireland and Wales should be left to await revolution. The oppressed must organise themselves and fight now for their demands, which are a part But propaganda alone, however good, will not bring socialism. The fight for policies which can mobilise and politically educate workers To strengthen this fight we press for united front campaigns on key issues such as racism and fascism - in which various left currents can If you agree with what you see in Socilist Outook, and want to join with us in the struggle for socialism, readers' groups meet in cities Get organised! Contact us now!
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