Ireland = Ruling Class Divided

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The ruling class is deeply divided over what strategy to pursue in restoring British domination over the NorthEast of Ireland.

The Conservative Party's research department has just issued a report that sees confidence in the Northern Ireland economy on the brink of collapse.

"The industrial policies of the present government have drained British industry of the funds and confidence necessary for expansion and investment. This is especially damaging in peripheral areas such as Northern Ireland."

The capitalist upswing, that economists have been predicting as a consequence of the Healey-TUC collaboration, will not be strong enough to expand beyond the branches of industry located in England, because, says the report:

'there has been in Britain a collapse of optimism about Northern Ireland which has resulted less in the much overplayed economic withdrawal than in a reduction in the general fund of good will which in the past led to an acceptance of the special case argument.

In plain language what the Conservative Party research department is saying is that profits for Northern Ireland capitalists have in the past been underwritten by subsidies that the British government has gathered, from its taxpaying subjects.

Faced with the undefeated resistence of the nationalist population the Government is less willing and able to continue these hand outs to bankrupt capitalists.

It is the unbroken nationalist resistence that the report has in mind when it urgently concludes that "the problems of Northern Ireland should now be given more special consideration than before."

STAGED This is the background to a number of incidents staged by the British Army in clear defiance of Merlyn Rees' low profile' policy centred on trying to put the law and the police "in command" rather than the military.

Firstly there was the so-called failure' to protect Gerry Fitt from Republican demonstrators. Fitt is the leader of the Social Democratic Labour Party whose electoral support comes entirely from the nationalist population.

Fitt and the SDLP are now deeply involved inimperialist strategy for a restored Stormont. It is that Party's past commitment never to talk to the British while there is a single man behind the wire that makes Gerry Fitt's home in West Belfast an annual target for protests by Republicans at every anniversary of internment.

By leaving him undefended the British Army hoped for an incident; such as his death that would have pressured Rees to abandon his low profile policy.

Secondly there is the general rise in harrassment, especially the searching and wrecking of houses that has been so bad in North Belfast on the Bawnmore estate for instance that even the SDLP have been forced to complain of Army behaviour and indiscriminate shooting by marauding members of the Ulster Defence Regiment.

As the Apprentice Boys' march provocatively passed by the Bogside, Army snatch squads captured six stone-throwing youths, batoned and kicked them along Great William St. into the Strand Rd. where their heads were repeatedly smashed against a brick wall.

The operation was well planned so that it took place at a spot where newsmen and cameramen were well placed to witness the Army's challenge to the Rees policy of containment.

Thirdly the murder by the SAS of twelve year old Majella O'Hare, shot in the back as she walked to church with a group of friends. What at first appeared as the work of a single British Army assassin looks instead to have been a more considered operation. The object was clearly for Majella's murder to have been blamed on the IRA, as was the killing of the three Maguire children in Belfast, crushed to death by an out of control car hijacked by a Provisional IRA volunteer.

ALREADY DEAD

The fact that the driver Daniel Lennon was already dead at the wheel when the car hit the children, the fact that the manner of the British. Army, pursuit, with indiscriminate firing through crowded streets, ensured the slaugater that took place, none of this delected Catholic anger from the Provisionals.

For too long they have known themselves to be held in utmost contempt by a Provisional leadership that has sunk more and more into the sectarian bog of indiscriminate terror.

At tallies to commemorate the fifth anniversary of internment, Sinn Fein speakers had nothing to offer their audience, in the midst of a most profound capitalist crisis, except to regurgitate the stale nationalistic fare of the iniquities of Cromwell and his successors.

The absence of a programme Republican he said that the scenes of Provisional IRA members hijacking and burning cars earlier in the week had reminded him of Nazi Germany.

He said. . that the Republican movement had got away from the people and he added:

"Tell Rees to get off our backs as well. There is no difference between two teenagers manhanding you out of your own car and half a dozen Brits coming to your door in the early hours of the morning.

It was probably to keep the pot of anti-Provisional feeling on the boil that Majella O'Hare was murdered. As Majella started out for Church the Army attempted to provoke an incident at a nearby cemetary where a party were laying flowers on the grave of the victim of a sectarian attack.

It may be they hoped to draw IRA fire and thus attribute their slaying of the young girl to the Provisionals.

Indeed this was the story that they put out at first but one they had to withdraw when not only the local people denied any shots other than that of the Army were fired but even the RUC challenged the Army story.

In challenging Rees policy which they see as too slow to save a section of Ulster capital from collapse, the Army are backed up by Tory spokesmen Airy Neave and Biggs Davidson as well as the Observer and the Daily Telegraph.

This must however bring them into conflict with a centrepiece of Rees' strategy, the slow restoration of credibility of the RUC as an impartial police force free of political influence.

The RUC report on Majella's death will go to the Director of Public Prosecutions. But RUC sources in South Armagh say that on past evidence of cases in which the Army is involved they hold out little hope that a successful prosecution will follow.

by Joe Quigley