Youth Lobby for Jobs

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The Labour Party Youn Socialists, guided by the tan 'Marxists' of the 'Militan Group, have called a natiom lobby of Parliament again! unemployment on Noven ber 16.

Almost the only aspect c unemployment mentioned i the campaign literature fc the lobby is youth unemplos ment, despite the fact tha the majority of the curres 1.5 million jobless are adu workers.

Nevertheless, with Come unist Party backing and wit feeling running high again! unemployment it is certai that the lobby will attra: considerable support.

The 'Militant' Group • do its best to ensure ta= those who do attend are ie: within the confines of "pres uring" the Callaghan-Ste coalition government introduce a programme public works.

WSL members and soft orters will be intervening : the lobby to fight for awareness of the need : break the coalition if social policies are to be implete: ted.

And by urging lobiyers: focus on this issue 17 meetings with left' L:::MPs we will right ie ex=:: the abject rerusal 'lefts to fight the toass

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reland CRISIS Part One The irish Republican flag flying over the United camp at Vinegar Hill We enravel tangle religion which These the hallm and sem Howe Britain's : the blue IS2 DONS datted.

must begin to the intricate of nationalism, and class conflict constitutes Irish elements are now lark of most colonial i-colonial situations. er, it was in Ireland, 'First Colony', that print for later colonwas empirically Economics The policy of using religious differences to divide Lad rule was first successfally used in Ireland.

ler religion was not Tat = Izars of maintain• ×a hegemony. It had damental origins in A Protestant minister from as Nons of Ireland noted in •All that is really imporDini in the history lof treland, for the last three centuries is the fighting of the rão rations for the possesreality nothing but a special form of the land war. The oath of supremacy was simply a lever for evicting the owners of the land.

The process was simple. The King demanded spiritual allegiance; refusal was high treason; the punishment of high treason was forfeiture of estates, with death or banishment to the Recusants.

Any other law they might have obeyed and retained their inheritance. This law fixed its iron grapples in the conscience and made obedience impossible without a degree of baseness that rendered life intolerable.

Hence Protestantism was detested, not as a religion so much as an instrument of spoliation'.

Rev. James Godwin 'Land War in Ireland Disqualification In the Cromwellian period, the 1640's, in Ireland the policy of using Catholicism as disqualification for land ownership ₩ 25 taken to helenable extremes planted" from their homes to the most barren and wildest corner of Ireland, the province of Connacht.

Any Catholic who was caught outside this area, which was less than a quarter of the whole country, was sold into slavery or hanged.

Penal Code This expropriation of the Irish Catholics was continued into the 18th Century by the Penal Code passed in 1692. This was a series of laws prohibiting Catholics from acquiring land, from entering Parliament, the professions, (except medicine), or commissions in any of the armed Catholic education was forbidden, as was intermarriage with Protestants.

A son could take control of his father's land by renouncing Catholicism and conforming to the Protestant church.

The pretended zeal to convert Irish Catholics into Protestants was actually a mears of turning irish land "Апу nation that oppresses another forges its own chains.. it is a precondition to the emancipation of the English working class to transform the present forced union (ie. the enslavement of Ireland) into equal and free confederation if possible, into complete separation if need be." (original emphasis)

In this way Marx assessed in 1870 the organic connection between the Irish struggle for national self determination and the fight against the oppression of the working class in England.

Marx makes it clear that the English labour movement should accept this connection not as an abstract principle, but because it holds immediate practical significance for the class struggle in England.

He argues that "Ireland is the only pretext the English Government has for retaining a big standing army which, if need be, as has happened before, can be used against the English workers after having done its military training in Ireland."

Although written almost a hundred years before the outestablished during this period was thus the form which English possession of Ireland took.

The Protestant landlords played the role of an English garrison in Ireland ensuring its continued subjugation.

The divisions in Irish society were thus not ones deriving from religious faith but from property ownership.

Protestant tenant-farmers learnt this to their cost when lespite the Penal Code, many data all land a break of the present struggle in the north of Ireland, these statements point to a key aspect of the Irish crisis for British workers.

On the eve of the major clashes in Britain over wages, jobs and social services, the use of Ireland as a testingground for new means of political control must be a cause for alarm to every British worker.

In recent mass confrontations between workers and the police increasing evidence emerges that the police technigues used have been acquired first in Northern Use of perspex shields in baton charges and the aerial control of demonstrations by helicopter are some of the more obvious imports from the Irish situation.

Pretext

However, Ireland's role as a guinea-pig for new technology is overshadowed by its use as a pretext for the increasing erosion of democratic rights in Britain.

The introduction of the Prevention of Terrorism Act which allows for detention and deportation of Irish people without trial, sets dangerous new legal precedents, threatening the democratic rights of both British and Irish workers.

In any fight by workers in latter could extract higher rents from Catholic tenants.

Many Protestant families who had been in Ireland since the Plantation were forced to emigrate again, this time to America.

And it was from across the Atlantic that the first stimulus for change in Ireland came in the late 18th Century.

Limitations

The American Revolution in 1776 struck the first blow of the colonies for selfEngendered as it was by the restrictions on trade imposed by the English government, this revolution struck a chord in Irish industrial circles which were themselves suffering under British legal limitations on trade.

Trish export of cattle to England, profitable in the 17th Century, had been banned.

The woollen trade with England was choked by an import-tax, while trade with countries other than England was prohibited.

Every Irish industry, with the exception of the Ulster linen industry was crippled by these legal restrictions.

Therefore the example of America raised great copes 17 reland sad at de me time edne Britain in defence of living standards or jobs therefore, the question of the continued British war in Ireland cannot be ignored.

The demand for Irish national self-determination is thus a vital demand not simply for Irish workers, but also for the British working class.

Acceptance Yet the events of the past nine years have produced from the British Labour movement in general not support for the Irish struggle, but an acceptance of, and sometimes even misguided backing for the British government's policy of armed occupation in the Northern six counties of Ireland.

There are a number of reasons for the lack of any widespread solidarity on the "Irish" Question" (which many ways is really the "British Question"), the primary one being confusion over the issues behind the strife in Northern Ireland.

However, the haze of smoke which obscures the political realities of Northern Ireland arises less from the rioting, shooting and bombing than from the fiction of large headlines splashed across Fleet Street's newscopy.

The British press, particuThe British Government in an attempt to remove the most obvious grievances passed a Catholic Relief Act (1778) which restored to Catholics certain rights of land ownership.

Under pressure from the volunteers, a body led by Henry Grattan, a Dublin barrister and M.P., the restrictions on trade with England were abandoned in 1779.

Grattan's • plan was to remove the semi-feudal trappings of Irish economic life and establish a system on the English model.

Thus all his demands for legislative independence for the Irish • Parliament were qualified by an insistence on the maintenance the English connection.

The contradiction in his conception lay in the fact that to 'democratise' the Irish Parliamentary and economic sister meant removing the 139-120% clique Dublin Castle: yet this clique was the essentia: mitar: and political guarantee of the maintenance of the connection with Englanc Compromise Grant

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larly since 1969, has performed the role of consciously mystitying the social and political issues which underlie the present conflict.

Instead of reporting this background information, they have chosen to portray events as an archaic 'historic" feud between Protestants and Catholics who cannot forget past rivalries.

This interpretation • lends substance to their picture of the British Army as an independent philanthropic 'peacekeeping force' which is there to keep the 'two sides' apart rather than its actual role of strong-arm guarantee of conA giant the much vaunted'Grattan's Parliament'.

This gave the Irish Parliament formal legislative independence, while in reality the English government continued to rule by means of corruption in Parliament and control of the armed forces and administration in Ireland.

One of the most clear-sighted contemporary critics of the deal was Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Protestant barrister.

Tone wrote that this 'Revolution' was one 'Which, while at a stroke it doubled the value of every borough-monger in the kingdom, left three fourths of our countrymen slaves as it found them, and the Government of Ireland in the base and wicked contemptible hands, who had spent their lives degrading and plundering her...

An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland 1791 By his unqualified assertion of Ireland's: right to self determination, Tone avoided the contradiction of Gratton's position (one which is still prevalent among would be 'reformers' of the North of Ireland tinued British rule.

The distortions of the Press are compounded by the role of the Labour and Trade Union leadership in the continued subjection of Ireland.

Their abject class collaboration over other issues becomes out and out partnership with British capitalism on the Irish situation.

'Bi-partisan'

Their "bi-partisan' policy has meant that Labour and Conservative Governments have both presided over internment, torture, murder and the intimidation of the Repeal meeting at Tara, 1843 Ireland, he stated, meant ending British rule.

Inspired by the French Revolution of 1789, which had a powerful impact on Ireland Tone founded the United Irishmen in 1791, initially • among Presbyterians and Dissenters in Ulster as a radical reform society.

Their three principles were:

1. Democracy 2. National Sovereignty 3. Union of all the people to achieve the other aims The development of U.I. into a revolutionary society occured through their links with the Catholic Committee.

Conceded

Tone managed in 1793 through this alliance to force the British government to concede the vote, ot to the Catholic middlelass alone, as the latter had wished, but also to 30,000 Catholic peasant 40-shilling freeholders.

The entry of the Catholic masses into politics threatened the positions of the gentlemen of the Catholic Committee, which dissolved itself at the behest of the Government. nationalist minority in the North of Ireland.

This has conveniently kept the issue beyond the pale of the political activity of the two main parties.

This complicity does not only apply to the right wing the Labour leadership.

Tribunite "left' M.P. Stanley Orme accepted the position of second-in-command to Merlyn Rees as executor of the armed oppression of the people of Northern Ireland.

The failure of the majority of 'Left' M.P.s to oppose this common policy with the Tories has helped render the forces he described as 'that numerous and respectable section of society-the men of no property.

"Defenders'

In Ireland this meant mainly the Catholic peasantry. Links were therefore attempted with the 'Defenders' an agrarian secret society formed in Ulster by Catholic tenants to protect themselves from the Protestant vigilante gangs know as the Peep-ODay' Boys.

These thugs resented the influx into Ulster of Catholic farmers, who were used to paying higher rents and therefore constituted threat to their economic posite Peep-O-Day' gangs constituted new material for the foundation of the Orange Society in 1795.

Cause

With the outbreak of war between England and France in 1793, there were hopes among the U.I. that revolutionary France would assist theit revolutionary British Labour movement spectators on a life-and-death struggle which is integral to their own political future.

It is vital therefore that an independent initiative is begun in the British Labour movement, and the starting point for this is the clarification of the basic issues in the Irish conflict.

This series of articles is intended to begin this process.

Such a clarification necessitates a survey of the historical background to the present conflicts.

Wolfe. Tone nearly realised in 1796, when a French fleet with Tone on board arrived off the coast at Bantry Bay.

However bad weather prevented the French army from landing and the fleet returned to France, where Tone immediately began attempting to mobilise another expedition.

While the sight of this fleet off the coast greatly encouraged the U.I., it also alarmed the government.

Vicious

It heralded one of the most vicious chapters of British rule in Ireland.

Since the U.I. was best organised in Ulster, a force was sent there under General Lake to put down "sedition'.

An Indemnity Act and an Insurrection • Act were passed, the former to sanction any illegal act committed in the preservation of the "peace'.

This gave unlimited licence to Orange Society and Peep-O-Day Boy gangs to ravage and plunder the holdings of Catholic tenants.

These gangs were later armed and put into uniform Specials.

The Insurrection Act made it a capital offence to administer an illegal oath, such as that of the U.I.

After 1797 had been spent waiting in vain for French support and eariy 1798 had seen the arrest of the entire leadership of the U.I.,, Lord Edward Fitzgerald called together a new directorate and decided on May 23 as the time for the rising.

However, before the appointed night, all the members of the new directorate fell into British hands. Fitzgerald was delivered by the treachery of Magan, a wealthy Catholic barrister.

Uprisings

Without the co-ordination of National Leadership, the rising became an uncoordinated series of local uprisings. Although in certain areas-such as Wicklow and Wexfordthese scored considerable successes against the Yeomanry and militia, they were destined to collapse one by one.

Tone landed with a French expedition on August 7 but was quickly nd sentenced to hang He He arrested, tried only escaped the rope by cutting his own throat in prison.

The defeat of the rising and the extent of the bloody repression by the army before and afterwards left the Irish masses in a state of shock for over two decades.

The Act of Union which was passed in 1800, was thus merely a new arrangement with a tiny minority of the population.

This change in the form of English rule was necessitated by the English government's fear of Ireland constantly being its 'Achilles" Heel! in its imperialist rivalry with France.

Market

It was designed to remove the danger of the recurrence of an invasion like that of 1798.

Economically it suited English business interests by guaranteeing it as a source of cheap food and labour, This Act which was passed in the Irish Parliament only through bribery, threats to the Protestant Ascendancy, and promises of Emancipation (ie. entry into Parliament) to the Catholic middle classes, was the concrete denial of the existence of an independent Irish nation.

3115 Grattan The history of Ireland since 1800 has been the constant reappearance of this nation despite this legal conjuring trick.

The form of rule of the one nation over the other may have changed, but the core of it, the pernicious land system, continued uchanged.

Plots of land were let and sub-let many times over, with a middle-man taking his share on each sub-division.

The competition for a livelihood on the land had been greatly increased by the numerous bankruptcies in Irish industry caused by the union with Britain.

This removed the moderate protective duties on British goods which had secured a small home market for Irish industry.

From these linked economic consequences of the union emerged the two strands of resistance Ic British rule.

1. The Agrarian secret societies of the peasantry.

2. The liberal-national movement of the Catholic middle classes.

The Agrarian societies had been widespread in the 18th Century in the form of Whiteboys, Rockboys. Defenders and others.

However with the defeat of the 1798 rising. the liberalnationalist movement 1005