Burntollet march: more policies less memories

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The march last week from Toomebridge to Burntollet, organised by Irish left wing groups, should have been supported by every socialist and anti-imperialist militant.

But despite its exposure of the police/army repression in the six counties, the march also showed its weakness in its attempt under new conditions to relive the past, rather than point the way forward.

Ambush

The demonstration was called to commemorat the tenth anniversary o march by about 100 students from Belfast city hall to Derry, which was savagely ambushed by Loyalist thugs and 'B' specials at Burntollet Bridge under the watchful eye of the RUC.

Under the conditions of 1969, with the growing mass mobilisation of the Catholic minority in the struggle for civil rights and against national oppression, this brutal attack helped shatter a period of reactionary political truce' between the O'Neill regime at Stormont and the bourgeois and petty bourgeois "leaders" of the Civil Rights movement.

The anti-imperialist movement grew and provoked splits and crises in the Stormont regime.

But a great deal of water has flowed under the bridge since then.

sate 3,111 Successive Loyalist regimes have run into crisis and collapsed, and direct military rule has been imposed by the British The nationalist population has undergone a tenyear long experience of British army repression and The 1969 ambush the failure of both protest politics and terrorist tactics to dislodge British rule.

The Provisional IRA, emerging as the armed defenders of the Catholic community against Loyalist attacks, has once again attempted to substitute individual, clandestine acts of guerrilla warfare for the necessary mobilisation of the Irish and British working class in the struggle to drive out the occupying army.

These tactics are currently taking the form of a campaign of bombings and shootings, both in the occupied six counties and on the British mainland itself.

Changed conditions There is no "truce" for a new Burntollet march to disrupt. The political conditions in 1979 are entirely changed.

The need is not for heroic token gestures by small numbers of individuals but for a strategy to mobilise the Irish working NOW!

class in the struggle against national oppression and capitalist exploitation through a programme combining democratic and transitional demands.

Newly fused

But this is lost on the newly-fused Irish Pabloite People's Democracy (which now includes the formerly independent USFI grouping 'Movement for a Socialist Republic' but currently stands outside the USFI).

Leaders of People's Democracy were in the forefront of the original Burntollet march-and cherish hopes of history repeating itself.

The anniversary march was therefore called in an attempt to achieve some form of 'unity' with the republican movement, around the formally correct slogans of Political status for republican prisoners' Troops out now, and End repression' Despite these limitations it would have been correct for Irish socialists to give the march critical support.

In the event, the 150strong march was supported only by the Irish left-the IRSP, the Socialist Labour Party, . the Trade Union; Campaign Against Repression, and People's Democracy.

PHOTO: Derek Speirs, IFL