Ireland

Provos, Protestants, and working-class politics - an imaginary dialogue: session five

Contents Introduction (2007) Session one: The issues stated Session two: a foothold for imperialism? Session three: Ireland, "permanent revolution", and imperialism Session four: Two Nations? Session five:a Provo socialist revolution? Session six: A discussion with Donal R, part 2 Appendix: a way to workers' unity? Session 5: The “Advanced Theory of Permanent Revolution”: A Provo Socialist Revolution? Jackie: Wait a minute. Let me answer the door. One other person is expected for this last session. (Jackie goes to the door and returns followed by a tall bearded man in a long overcoat looking...

Provos, Protestants, and working-class politics - a dialogue: session four

Contents Introduction (2007) Session one: The issues stated Session two: a foothold for imperialism? Session three: Ireland, "permanent revolution", and imperialism Session four: Two Nations? Session five:a Provo socialist revolution? Session six: A discussion with Donal R, part 2 Appendix: a way to workers' unity? Session four: Two Nations? Tony: All this talk about me having a fetish of armed struggle! But you haven't dealt with my real point: autonomy is a reformist solution, it's a programme for a settlement imposed from above by imperialism. Mick: The person who would opt for reform or a...

Provos, Protestants, and working-class politics - a dialogue: session three

Contents Introduction (2007) Session one: The issues stated Session two: a foothold for imperialism? Session three: Ireland, "permanent revolution", and imperialism Session four: Two Nations? Session five:a Provo socialist revolution? Session six: A discussion with Donal R, part 2 Appendix: a way to workers' unity? Session three: Ireland, Permanent revolution and Imperialism Anne-Marie: The problem with you people is that you reject Permanent Revolution for Ireland. You don't understand the centrality of the National Question for Ireland. You think that the bourgeois democratic revolution is...

Provos, Protestants, and working-class politics - a dialogue: session two

Contents Introduction (2007) Session one: The issues stated Session two: a foothold for imperialism? Session three: Ireland, "permanent revolution", and imperialism Session four: Two Nations? Session five:a Provo socialist revolution? Session six: A discussion with Donal R, part 2 Appendix: a way to workers' unity? Session two: Does autonomy mean "a foothold for imperialism"? Tony: Let me try to state my position. The Protestants do have a right to be here. They have a right to be equal citizens. But they do not have a right to retain their sectarian privileges over the Catholics, to retain...

Provos, Protestants, and working-class politics - a dialogue: session one

Contents Introduction (2007) Session one: The issues stated Session two: a foothold for imperialism? Session three: Ireland, "permanent revolution", and imperialism Session four: Two Nations? Session five:a Provo socialist revolution? Session six: A discussion with Donal R, part 2 Appendix: a way to workers' unity? Session One: The issues stated and explained. The participants introduced The scene is Belfast in July 1983, on a Saturday, about 10am. A 'Troops Out' delegation has been in Belfast, where it has talked to Republicans on the Falls Road, been to look close up at soldiers on patrol...

A discussion on Ireland with Tony Benn

The following discussion between Tony Benn and Mark Osborn and Sean Matgamna appeared in Socialist Organiser , 10 September 1994. Tony Benn was the most important left Labour Parliamentarian of the last three decades of the 20th century. He was a member of the Labour Cabinet which put the troops on the streets of Northern Ireland in 1969. He was also a member of the Labour Government, which, in the late 1970s, withdrew the de facto status of political prisoner from jailed Republicans and Loyalists in Northern Ireland. That act triggered the conflict in the jails during which Republican...

Provos, Protestants, and working-class politics — Introduction (February 2007)

Contents Introduction (2007) Session one: The issues stated Session two: a foothold for imperialism? Session three: Ireland, "permanent revolution", and imperialism Session four: Two Nations? Session five:a Provo socialist revolution? Session six: A discussion with Donal R, part 2 Appendix: a way to workers' unity? The decision of the recent Sinn Fein Ard Fheis to recognise and urge support for the Police Service of Northern Ireland removed the last fundamental distinction between the Adams-McGuinness movement and the other constitutional nationalists, the Social Democratic and Labour Party...

The end of the road for the Provos

"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 agree upon no single principle, except upon the use of physical force - [A party that] exalts into a principle that which the revolutionists of other countries have looked upon as a weapon - men as the only means of attaining it." — James Connolly, 1899 The special Sinn Fein Ard Fheis in Dublin, on January 27, 2007 decided, in principle, to recognise the reorganised Royal Ulster...

Provos, Protestants, and Working-Class Revolutionary Socialism - A Dialogue

(Whole dialogue as a single posting) The scene is Belfast in July 1983, on a Saturday, about 10 am. A 'Troops Out' delegation has been in Belfast, where it has talked to Republicans on the Falls Road, been to look close up at soldiers on patrol, examined plastic bullets and photos of their victims, and talked to Catholics in Andersonstown. Two men and a woman have detached themselves from the delegation and crossed the short distance from the Catholic Falls Road through part of the city centre to where the Shankhill begins. Nervously, they make their way up the Protestant Shankhill Road, which...

“The wind that shakes the barley”

Among the stories of the Anglo-Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and the Irish Civil War (1922-3) which I grew up listening to my mother tell was the story of the shooting of the last three of 77 Republican prisoners of war killed by the Free State government, in the last days of the civil war, in our town, Ennis. One of the three was her cousin. She would tell us of the sound of the early morning volleys of the firing squads ringing out from the military barracks on the edge of the small town, and the single shots in the head from the officer commanding the firing squad, the “coup de grace”...

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