Lynch landslide

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that Britain will "ultimately" disengage of her own volition.

Such touching faith in British imperialism's benevolent attitude to the Irish people is unlikely to lessen the oppression faced by Catholic workers in the North.

• In fact just one week before the election, Northern Ireland Secretary Roy Mason announced a batch of new "security" measures to be enforced there.

Lynch These include: longer prison sentences for political offences; an increase in RUC numbers to 6,500 plus greater use of the police reserve; an increase in the complement of full UDR members from 1800 to 2,500; and an expansion of SAS activities, which, Mason informs us, are already more widespread than the public realises.

There will be no amelioration of Ireland's economic or political problems as long as the tasks of Ireland's democratic revolution (centrally, the question of unifying the country) remain unfinished. these tasks can only be accomplished in the context of a socialist, working class revolution, for which an all-Ireland revolutionary Trotskyist party is necessary.

Concrete steps must now be taken by socialists in Ireland towards the construction of such a party. The recent election provided an important opportunity for winning workers over to such a perspective.

Cosgrave The Irish Labour Party fought the election on the basis of a joint coalition programme with their senior conservative allies Fine Gael. Socialists should therefore have demanded an end to this bloc as the minimum precondition for voting Labour.

INDEPENDENTS

But in certain areas a number of candidates were standing as Independents, on the basis of opposition to Labour's alignment with Fine Gael. these was Noel Browne who stood in Dubli Artane, and Matt Merrigan, who stood in Dublin Finglas.

Browne had originally been selected as official Labour candidate, but the party's top brass intervened and overruled the local branch. Both candidates also called for the scrapping of the 1977 National Wage Agreement,. but lamely confined their alternative to a return to free collective bargaining.

In Limerick East, Joe Harrington of the Movement for a Socialist Republic (Irish section of the USFI) was standing as a candidate of Bottom Dog, a local trade union paper. Details of his electoral programme were unavailable as we went to press, but it is clear that he was standing in opposition to Labour's record of betrayal.

It would have therefore been permissible for socialists in Ireland to call for critical support for independent anti-coalition candidates such as these.

Full details of the results were not at hand at the time of writing, so we do not know how these candidates fared. But with the fruits of Labour collaboration with Fine Gael now clearly visible, the struggle to ensure that such a coalition is never again repeated must now be taken up at once.

LEAGUE

Public Meeting SPAIN AFTER THE Thursday 30 June at 7.3l Small Hall, Conway Hall Red Lion Square Speaker: Socialist Press Correspondent recently