Hunger Strikers Stand in - Ec

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The decision by the National H Block Committee to run nine republican prisoners as candidates in the forthcoming Irish election is an important advance in the struggle for political status.

The candidates are the four hunger strik ers, plus four other Long Kesh prisoners and Mairead Farrell from Armagh Gaol who took part in last year's hunger strike.

The candidacies, like that of Bobby Sands, sharply pose before the Irish people the political role of the republican men and women jailed by British imperialism in Long Kesh and Armagh.

But by running for election in the South, they also By Sean Matgamna Maybe Benn refused to establish friendly relations with the Newsline. The precise explanation doesn't matter. Significant is what it shows about the WRP.

This organisation is ready to throw around the most wild and baseless allegations and insinuations against those in the labour movement with whom it disagrees.

Yet when challenged on their own record by Socialist Organiser the WRP leaders resort not to a labour movement inquiry but the bourgeois courts in a libel case designed to bankrupt a rival organisation.

We urge readers to support the SO Defence Fundand to keep a look-out for the next Newsline about-face.

Failure

* Indeed the campaign in their support will be forced to emphasise that the opponents of British imperialism in the North are in no way simply proposing to plunge the population of the six counties into an extended version of Haughey's 26county capitalist government in the South.

They will be campaigning against candidates of Prime Minister Haughey's pseudo nationalist Fianna Fail party -and pointing to the failure of political leaders in the Republic to lend any practical support to the struggle to force a British withdrawal.

Socialist Press of course has major differences of programme and perspective from the republican movement-as indeed do many of the political components of the National H Block Campaign. In particular, the republicans have no perspective to offer the working class for its struggles North or South.

But at a time when the struggle •against British imperialism must be brought to the forefront of politics in Britain and in Ireland, we lend our critical support to the antiH Block candidates in the Irish election, and welcome the decision of leading antill Block campaigners such as Bernadette McAliskey to support their fight.