Ireland: the socialist answer

Ireland:18 Ideological Lies The Left Tells Itself (1986)

Lie no. 1: Ireland is a single unit. Ireland is one island, but plainly not one people. A minority of one million define themselves as different from the rest of the Irish, and as British. They form the compact majority in north-east Ulster - that is, the north-east of the present artificial Six Counties unit. They have been manipulated by British ruling-class politicians playing 'the Orange card', but they have their own identity or subidentity and their own concerns. The existing six-county entity is not, and never could be, a reasonable expression of the democratic rights of the Irish...

Northern Ireland - Crisis and Breakdown, 1968-1985: What Happened, and Why

Introduction From the mid-1960s a sizeable minority of the people of the USA turned against the war their government was waging in Vietnam. They marched, demonstrated and lobbied to force their government to stop the war. This active opposition of a section of their own people was a major factor in making the Indochina war unwinnable for the mighty US government. Since about 1972 opinion polls have more or less consistently shown that half or more than half the people of Britain do not want Britain to continue to rule Northern Ireland, do not want the British troops there, and therefore do...

Our record on Ireland

Socialist Organiser [the publication at the time of the tendency now represented by Workers’ Liberty and Solidarity] traces its attitude on Ireland back to the small group of socialists who produced the journal An Solas/Workers Republic in 1966-7, under the umbrella of the Irish Workers Group. We believed that traditional Republicanism was not and could not be a consistently anti-imperialist force; that it was, by its ideas, goals and methods a petty - bourgeois movement; that its petty-bourgeois nationalism was a barrier to working-class unity, that its 'little Irelandism' cut in the opposite...

Militant -Socialist Party on Ireland

This article deals with the views argued on Ireland in the 1970s and 80s by Militant, forerunner of the Socialist Party and Socialist Appeal. The Militant tendency argues that bread-and-butter trade union unity and a drive to for a Labour Party in Northern Ireland show the way to a socialist united Ireland. Why are they wrong? From a working class point of view the basic problem about the Six County state is that in that state framework, working class unity, developed on a trade union level, has always shattered at any political test. So long as the 'constitutional question' remains at the...

Theses on the Anglo-Irish (Hillborough) Agreement of 1985

1. What is the Anglo-Irish agreement? The Anglo-Irish agreement sets up an inter-governmental conference - backed up by a permanent secretariat stationed in Belfast-between the London and Dublin governments which will jointly run Northern Ireland. The executive power stays exclusively in British hands but the political control of the executive is normally to reside in the intergovernmental conference. The Anglo-Irish agreement is an international treaty registered with the UN, according to which the British government obligates itself to run Northern Ireland in agreement with the 26 County...

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