Why not a united Ireland? Workers' Liberty 3/66

What’s wrong with the Six Counties

There are two distinct peoples in Ireland, who see and define themselves differently and antagonistically, the Catholic “Irish-Irish” Nationalists and the Protestant “British-Irish” Unionists. Ireland, which had been ruled by England since the 12th century, was partitioned in 1920-21 into Six and 26 Counties entities. The border dividing the Six and 26 Counties does not coincide, or even approximate to, the geographical location of the two distinct Irish peoples/ identities. It cuts right through them. There is a large Catholic-Nationalist population in Belfast, but broadly the Protestant...

The Mind of Irish Republicanism

“Ireland occupies a position among the nations of the earth unique... in the possession of what is known as a physical force party — a party, that is to say, whose members are united upon no one point, and agreed upon no single principle, except the use of physical force as the sole means of settling the dispute between the people of this country and the governing power of Great Britain...” James Connolly, Workers’ Republic, July 1899. “He is no Social-Democrat [Marxist] who forgets... that we are obliged for that reason to expound and emphasise general democratic tasks before the whole people...

The mind of Irish socialists

P was a member of the Army Council of the IRA, its supreme authority, and would soon be a founder member of the breakaway “Provisional” IRA. He had been regaling us with an account of the ridiculous stories which the then leaders of the IRA, Republican Stalinists, had given to the Army Council as explanations for their inability to organise the defence of Northern Ireland’s Catholics during recent (August 1969) pogroms, which it had taken the deployment of British troops on the streets of Belfast and Derry to stop. They had lent the organisation’s guns to the “Free Wales Army”! Now to show us...

Why not a United Ireland?

The Six Counties of Northern Ireland will leave the European Union on 29 March if the UK does. Yet a 56%-44% majority in Northern Ireland voted against Brexit. Those who had been brought up Protestant voted 60%-40% for Brexit, those brought up Catholic 85%-15% against. There is a clear democratic majority in both Irelands for the whole island remaining in the EU. Brexit, with the Northern Ireland electorate a political prisoner of the UK, is likely to do serious damage to Northern Ireland and to Ireland as a whole. It will be yet another brutally anti-democratic imposition on Ireland by...

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