Ireland

Ninety years since the Easter Rising

April 23 marks the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, in many ways the defining event in modern Irish history. The Rising, its consequences and aftermath shaped the situation Ireland faces today. It offers important lessons for the Irish workers today against both imperialism and indigenous exploitation and reaction. Mike Rowley tells the story. Despite its importance, the events of Easter 1916 have been downplayed in much recent historiography and in Irish politics. To the song’s defiant question: “Who fears to speak of Easter Week? Who flinches at the name?” The answer seems to be, a...

Who killed Denis Donaldson?

By Gerry Bates Denis Donaldson worked as a British spy within the top echelons of Sinn Fein for 20 years. He admitted that at a press conference four months ago. Now he has been shot dead at the remote Donegal cottage where he lived. The shooting of a police spy is never an entirely reprehensible or useless act, even when the spy in question worked against an IRA which was waging a war against Northern Irish Protestants and the British state which had long ceased to make any political sense. If it ever made sense. Who shot Donaldson? Ask the question “who benefits?” and the answer would be...

Ireland

Northern Ireland is in chronic communal conflict. For there to be a democratic solution, a wider framework than Northern Ireland is needed. The only programme which accommodates the rights of both communities without infringing on the rights of either is a federal united Ireland with regional autonomy for the mainly Protestant north-east, linked in a voluntary confederation with Britain. That is a programme on which class-conscious Irish workers, Protestant and Catholic, can be united. And only a united working class can win full democracy and the socialist "levelling-up" which makes it viable...

Lessons of the Irish ferries dispute

By Sacha Ismail The bitter stand off between the workers and management of Irish Ferries last month, in which an occupation of two ships triggered a powerful wave of solidarity action, has been resolved. At the end of November, Irish Ferries unilaterally issued a 'proposal' to sack 543 directly employed seafarers and replace them with agency workers from Eastern Europe working 84 hours a week for £2.40 an hour. The ferries in question, the Isle of Inishmore and the Ulysses were occupied in protest by workers in Pembroke Dock and Holyhead in Wales. At the same time, solidarity strikes grounded...

Workers occupy Irish ferries

Irish Ferries workers are fighting back against the “race to the bottom” as their bosses are trying to mount a major attack on workers’ rights, replacing them with cheap foreign labour. Two of the company’s flagship ferries, the Isle of Inishmore and Ulysses, have been occupied by workers in protest — they remain stranded in Welsh ports — while dock workers refuse to let the MV Normandy leave Dublin. The trigger for the occupation of the ships was Irish Ferries’ attempt to forcibly remove the workers with armed security staff who had boarded the ships dressed as passengers. The Irish...

Adams in the chamber of commerce

by John O’Mahony This “historic” picture of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, cat-that-got-the-cream grin fixed in place, schmoozing with the members of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, tells us what Sinn Fein is now and where its leaders are intent on going. It is a symbolic picture, too. The Irish bourgeoisie was very hostile to the Easter Rising of April 1916. Not only did their leading newspaper, the Irish Independent, urge the British to shoot the wounded Marxist socialist trade union leader, James Connolly, for his part in the Rising (too weak from his wounds to stand up, he was strapped...

Sinead O’Connor or the pseudo left?

The political sage and religious thinker Sinead O’Connor has recently had the grace to describe her pro-Provisional IRA politics of the 1990s, not elegantly but accurately, as “bollocks”. We still await similar, milder, or indeed any, self-criticism from those on the British left who in the same period refused to criticise the Provisional IRA, even when it was shooting Northern Ireland Protestant workers for such “collaborationist” crimes as fixing a lavatory or a broken window in an RUC police station. The IRA’s was, they said, an “anti-imperialist struggle”. Ours was not to reason why - or...

Ireland: Good Friday Made Things Worse

By Thomas Carolan In mid-September, Protestants fought and shot at police — the renamed and reorganised RUC, the Police Service of Northern Ireland — for four successive nights, in the worst Northern Ireland violence for many years. That Protestants are in the main disillusioned with the Good Friday Agreement and its aftermath is not news. The scale and seemingly organised nature of these clashes, and the involvement of the Orange Order in them, is. The findings of a new report by Neil Jarman for the Institute for Conflict Research (March 2005), No Longer a Problem? Sectarian Violence in...

After IRA “dump arms”, what next?

By John O’Mahony The IRA’s Army Council has formally declared the organisation’s military campaign at an end, as from 4pm on 28 July 2005: “The leadership of Oglaigh Na hEireann (the soldiers, or army, of Ireland) has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign… All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms. “All volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and political programmes through exclusively peaceful means. “Volunteers must not engage in any other activities whatsoever.” “They will “engage with the Independent International Commission on...

Socialists and the Good Friday Agreement part 1

The peace agreement drawn up after hours of exhausting talks in Belfast on 10 April holds out the pospect of an end to the 30 years war in Northern Ireland. That should recommend it to socialists even though little else about it does. It certainly isn’t a solution to the conflict. At worst, what it does is institutionalise the sectarian conflict at the heart of Northern Ireland society. At best it provides a new framework within which the leading communal politicians on each side can manage that conflict. It is very clear that the Agreement reached at Easter is only a beginning and the main...

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