GERMAN WORKERS FACE ИСПИАЛ WUnAEn Г WAR ON CONDITIONS Ireland: national struggle an nationalist leaders

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It is quite correct to expose, as you do in your article "Ireland: who are the real criminals" (SP Nov. 27) the hypocrisy of the British government in labelling 'as "criminal" those who resist the brutality of its rule.

It is also proper for an English socialist paper to champion and insist upon the ¡political" character of nationalist resistance to British state and Loyalist violence.

Active sympathy with the victims of national oppression does not however require the subordination of the socialist understanding of that struggle to the nationalist perception of it.

Between hostility to all oppression and all privileges that one group, class or nation De Valera with Arthur Griffi enjoys at the expense of another and outright collapse into nationalism there is a border, a boundary line that at times can be slight and admittedly difficult to see.

It seems to me that in your article there are three distinct areas where you cross that border and consequently despite your very different intentions, end up siding with the bourgeoisie against, the proletariat.

To deal with these in turn. In Northern Ireland amongst moderately i informed people your contention that "wild gunmen" are only • to be found amongst "extremist elements of the Loyalist movement" will produce two responses.

The charitable will dismiss you as a hopeless innocent ith, abroad while the sceptical will dismiss you as a charlatan hawking nationalist wares under a socialist sign board.

In England you may take in some readers with little knowledge of the reality of Northern Ireland but even in their ranks there must be a few with sufficiently good memories to recall that only a few weeks ago your paper carried an article condemning. the cold blooded murder of Robin Shields, Protestant ambulance controller at the Royal Victoria Hospital by the Provisional IRA.

They presumably will dismiss you as an absent-minded muddlehead.

Secondly partition was not a compromise offered by LloydGeorge in December 1921 to end the war of independence against Britain. Nor when the Republicans split over the Treaty to end that war was the quarrel to do with partition.

Nationalists looking back today may think that's what they should have divided over. But the plain fact is it wasn't and Marxists ought to have better things to do with their time than rewrite their history for them.

To approach the problem of partition with the complaint. "that in 1911 nobody had ever heard of a six county Ulster" is alien to Marxism.

The separate development of North-East Ireland throughout the 19th Century made partition a possible but by no means inevitable solution to England's Irish problem.

From 1892 when the Belfast bourgeoisie took control of the Unionist movement from Southern Protestant landowners an organisational instrument was created to effect that possible outcome.

In March 1914 James Connolly wrote articles in the "Irish Worker" and "Forward" warning the Irish workers that nationalist leaders Redmond and Devlin were prepared to have Ulster excluded from the Home Rule Bill.

And when the Home Rule Bill was passed and straightaway its implementation suspended for the duration of the War it did indeed contain a provision that stipulated Ulster was to be treated separately.

After the Easter Rising in 1916 Lloyd-George persuaded Carson to accept Home Rule provided Ulster was excluded. That Ulster would take a six country shape was made likely in June 1916 when under pressure from Craig and Carson the Unionists of Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan reluctantly agreed to waive their rights under the Covenant.

The Ulster Covenant of 1913 binding all unionists under oath to assist each other in resisting Home Rule.

What divided pro and antiTreaty republicans was the wording of the oath. of allegiance to the British Crown and Ireland's status within the British Empire.

And partition? Of 338 printed pages of debate in the Irish Dail (Parliament) over the Treaty a mere nine were devoted to the question of partition and of those nine, six were provided by three deputies from Monaghan!

Secret debates

The publication in 1972after the 50 year rule restricting access to state papers expiredof the secret debates in the Dail during the truce in the fighting with the British in August 1921 is devastating for both romantic nationalists and their gullible Marxist camp followers.

For de Valera the great republican who led the forces that rejected the Treaty and then led the anti-Treatyites in the subsequent Civil War candidly admitted that Republicans had not the power:

"and some of them had not the inclination to use force against Ulster • if the Republic were recognised I for my part would be in favour of giving each county powers to vote itself out of the Republic if it so wished."

Now no one in 1911 -had heard of a four-county Ulster either yet that is clearly what de Valera is contemplating in this speech which it should be said evoked hardly any criticism from his fellow republicans.

If events of the day are examined from the viewpoint of class struggle rather than through the lenses of an ahistorical defence of nine county Ulster then the outcome is not hard to understand and epithets such as "artificial" and "sell out" are revealed to be quite beside the point.

From the Spring of 1920 the war of independence against the British took on an increasingly social character that considerably alarmed the Sinn Fein leadership.

Land seizures by poor peasants began in the West. of Ireland and in May of that year workers at the Knocklong creamery in Limerick (all members of the Transport Union) seized the plant, ran up the red flag and under the slogan of "we make butter not profits" called upon the trade unions to become their buyers. The Co-Op in Belfast did so.

These radical developments acted as a powerful stimulus to the Republican leaders, to eat peace make peace with Britain and cuu u wal In the process of establishing its governmental apparatus and with rural disturbances in the South and West to contend with, Sinn Fein had not the slightest intention of clasping to its bosom a far more dangerous adversary. For the city of Belfast contained the socially most powerful, best organised, class conscious and numerically largest section of the proletariat in all Ireland.

Partition suited Sinn Fein very well-for it set back, as Connolly knew it would, the oncoming unity of the working class.

It suited Sinn Fein precisely because it was Irish labour that represented the only serious challenge to it for political power.

Partition would break the back of such a challenge for many years to come. So Collins and de Valera abandoned the nationalists of North-East Ireland with as little ceremony as Craig and Carson abandoned their fellow unionists of Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal.

The bourgeoisies of Dublin and Belfast grabbed what territory they could and what determined the boundaries of the two states was not hallowed tradition but the limitation on their own power to enforce Antiquarian cartographers, gaelic minstrels and lovers of leprechauns may find all this lamentable, possibly even sordid; but history's chariot has always ridden roughshod over the dreams and fantasies of reactionaries and utopians.

The proper place for Marxists to intervene is from its platform not under its wheels.

Finally, Marxists who reject historical materialism and follow nationalists in reducing all the various stages that Anglo-Irish relations have undergone to a "centuries old national liberation struggle" would no doubt be embarrassed and deeply shocked to discover that Marx opposed Daniel O'Connell's movement to repeal the Act of Union with England.

In the 1840s it seemed to Marx that the growing Chartist movement of the working classes could topple capitalism and create conditions for a free federation of both peoples.

O'Connell for his part worked furiously to extirpate Chartist influence from the ranks of the Dublin artisans, seeing it as a dangerous diversion from the "centuries struggle" with the brutal Saxon.

And when in the 1860s Marx did come to support self-determination, it was not as an obligatory discharge of an ahistorical duty, but based upon an analysis specific conditions prevailing at that time.

The defeat of Chartism and revolutionary working class leadership had been succeeded by piecemeal reformist integration with anti-Irish racism component part of the reformist ideology while the independence struggle against England had acquired a social dimension as aristocrats turned peasants off the land to provide cheap wool and cheap food for England's industrial development.

Emotional talk about "centuries old struggle" is no substitute for an analysis of the forces at work in Ireland today.

Marx's critical method is more likely to provide it than the softer option which you have clearly taken in your article of painting nationalism red and socialism green.

Yours fraternally, Jo Quigley