Ireland: Republicanism and Revolution

By Alan Woods

The national liberation movement in Ireland stands once more at a crossroads. For thirty years, the Provisional IRA fought an armed struggle to eject British imperialism, without bringing Ireland one step closer to unification. Now, decades after the IRA declared a ceasefire and Sinn Féin politicians took up ministerial portfolios in the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Good Friday Agreement is tattered and failing.

The armed struggle and the constitutional road to a United Ireland have both landed in dead ends. The question is now posed before socialist Republicans: in a period of unprecedented capitalist crisis, when all the old contradictions are bursting violently to the surface – where next?

For more than 200 years, generation after generation of Irish men and women have fought for national liberation from British imperialism under the banner of the Irish Republic. In studying this rich revolutionary heritage, one lesson shines through, bought at an enormous cost of life and suffering: only through the socialist revolution is the attainment of complete national liberation and reunification of Ireland possible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wellred
• Release date: Oct 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005601676

Alan Woods

Alan Woods was born in Swansea, South Wales, in 1944 into a working-class family with strong communist traditions. At the age of 16, he joined the Young Socialists and became a Marxist. He studied Russian at Sussex University and later in Sofia (Bulgaria) and the Moscow State University (MGU). He has a wide experience of the international labour movement and played an active role in building the Marxist tendency in Spain, where he participated in the struggle against the Franco dictatorship. He was later active in Pakistan, Mexico and other countries, including Venezuela, where he developed a close relationship with the late Hugo Chavez, and founded the international campaign, Hands off Venezuela.Alan Woods is the author of many works covering a wide spectrum of issues, including politics, economics, history, philosophy, art, music and science. He is also the political editor of the popular website In Defence of Marxism (marxist.com) and a leading member of the International Marxist Tendency.Highlights of the books he has authored are: Lenin and Trotsky: What they Really Stood For and Reason in Revolt: Marxist Philosophy and Modern Science, both in conjunction with the late Ted Grant; Marxism and the United States; Reformism or Revolution; The Venezuelan Revolution: A Marxist Perspective, The Ideas of Karl Marx and Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution. He also edited and completed Trotsky’s last unfinished work, the biography of Stalin, which had remained incomplete for seventy years.His books have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Urdu, Danish, Portuguese, Russian and Bahasa Indonesian.

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Introduction

By Ben Curry

This book first saw the light of day in 2005. At that time, the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was barely six years old. The Provisional IRA had turned away from the armed struggle, put on suits, and climbed the steps of Stormont as members of the National Assembly. At the time, Stormont was suspended, but within a year Sinn Féin would agree to join the Executive and jointly run the devolved administration with Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

The abrupt turn in the situation led to serious questioning among many Republicans. It was clear that the armed struggle had failed. But Sinn Féin’s turn towards electoral politics offered no clear route towards a united Ireland either. Far from having toppled British rule in the North of Ireland, Sinn Féin politicians were now co-administering it with their former enemies. What then was the purpose of all the sacrifices made over so many years? It was clear to many Republicans that a new departure was necessary.

This book was intended as a contribution to that discussion. In it, Alan Woods predicted that the GFA and its institutions were doomed to failure and collapse; that they were a cruel trap designed to ensnare the desire of the masses for peace and an end to sectarianism.

Back then, such a prediction might have seemed quite distant, but the passage of time has completely confirmed its correctness.

It had once seemed so different. The prolonged boom of capitalism and the apparently inexorable tendency towards European integration gave the appearance of a softening of national contradictions in Ireland and elsewhere. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, capitalism appeared to have overcome its internal contradictions.

The same amount of time has now passed since the first edition of this book saw the light of day, as had then passed since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This book was written towards the end of that period of triumphalism on the part of the strategists of capitalism. Capitalism, we were told back then, had won, and history had ended. But as the Bible explains: pride goeth before the fall.

Cracks were already appearing in the system’s foundations. In the Balkans, war and genocide returned to the European continent in the 1990s. The attacks on 11 September 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the subsequent insurgencies in those countries exposed the extent of the contradictions that imperialism had enmeshed itself in and starkly revealed the fact that US power had reached its limits.

And in 2008, the boom times drew to an end. In the South of Ireland, the Celtic Tiger breathed its last, and Ireland joined the ranks of those nations in Europe whose eye-watering levels of indebtedness threatened to collapse the European Union itself.

In the wake of the crisis, the working class was hammered by wave after wave of austerity. In the depths of society an explosive rage has built up. A poll of 22,000 young people, aged eighteen to thirty-four, conducted in 2016 in the South of Ireland found that fifty-four per cent would participate in a large-scale uprising against the government if it took place in the near future. By comparison, when French youth were asked the same question, the results were only a little higher at sixty-one per cent. Two years later this was precisely what we saw in France with the gilet jaunes: an insurrectionary movement of the youth, workers, and poor.

Every pillar of the establishment in Ireland is now facing a crisis of confidence – from the media to the church, the judiciary, the gardaí, to the Civil War parties that have dominated politics in the South for nearly a century. In short, we are witnessing a crisis of the entire regime – a regime established by the bourgeoisie one century ago on the back of its treacherous betrayal of the Irish Revolution.

In his masterpiece, The History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky explained that society does not change its institutions as need arises, the way a mechanic changes his instruments. On the contrary, society actually takes the institutions which hang upon it as given once for all.[1]

It is precisely this fact that makes revolutions inevitable.

The main institutions of capitalist rule in Ireland: the constitution, the two-party system, the position of the Church, and partition and British rule in the North – all are part of a settlement that arose from a betrayed revolution a century ago.

For decades, the two-party system cemented the political domination of the capitalists and landlords in the South of Ireland. Now those two pro-capitalist parties, which formed out of opposing sides in the Civil War, have been forced to govern jointly. They have been permanently exposed as the Tweedledee and Tweedledum of Irish politics.

The Catholic Church, meanwhile, secured the spiritual domination of the ruling class. Whenever the ruling class in Ireland has faced a threat, the Church would whip up hysteria against the influence of atheism, communism, and revolutionary Republicanism. Since partition, under its brutal reign, women, children, and the most vulnerable have suffered an atrocious catalogue of crimes. In a word, the Irish capitalist class – a weak and backward class – has always rested on all that is backward and superstitious in Irish society.

What is remarkable is how little of that backwardness there is to rest upon today. The astonishing collapse of the Catholic Church since this book was first written has spectacularly attested to this fact. In the same-sex marriage and abortion referenda of 2015 and 2018, Ireland’s youthful working class delivered a one-two knockout blow to this once mighty bulwark of reaction.

This is an institution, let us recall, that has helped to undermine every revolutionary movement in the nation’s history. In the past, at each crucial moment, it threw its full weight onto the side of reaction and against the struggle for self-determination. As Alan explains in this book:

It was a Pope who first handed Ireland to the English. It was another Pope who backed William of Orange against the Irish Catholics. The Catholic Church did nothing to protect the Irish language and culture when it was threatened with extinction. It opposed the United Irishmen and the Fenians and it destroyed Parnell. Above all, the Church bitterly opposed every advance of the labour movement in the early days. It denounced and persecuted Republicans, especially socialist Republicans.[2]

Hatred of the Church has become a touchstone of the brewing mood of anger amongst the youth. But this radicalisation is also reflected in a host of other ways: in growing anger against all forms of oppression – against sexism, racism, and homophobia. It is reflected in a hatred of imperialism and sympathy among the youth for oppressed peoples all over the globe. And it is also reflected in growing support for Irish unification and an end to partition.

In the absence of a revolutionary party, this radicalisation has so far been expressed in the electoral rise of Sinn Féin. When this book was first published in 2005, Sinn Féin had one seat in the Dáil. In 2020, it was catapulted to first place in the popular vote, and took thirty-seven seats.

This is a development that has left the ruling class aghast. They are not so afraid of Sinn Féin’s leaders or their policies. The ruling class calculate that they can be domesticated. Frankly, the party stands for quite a modest set of reforms, although from time to time its leaders speak in quite ‘left’ language in the South. No, what the ruling class really fears are the masses that stand behind Sinn Féin.

This is a curious turn of events because, as Alan Woods points out in this book, the origins and history of Sinn Féin are that of a right-wing trend within the Republican tradition. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Provisional movement spelled out that it would serve neither Queen nor Commissar. Marxism, its leaders claimed, was an ideology foreign to Ireland.

Such a claim flies in the face of reality. As Alan Woods explains, Republicanism is a movement which is riven with contradictory tendencies. Yes, there is a right-wing trend within Republicanism. Throughout its history, this tendency always veered towards treachery.

But there has always been another tendency too: a left wing, represented by Larkin, Mellows, Costello, and above all, by the colossal figure of James Connolly, the great revolutionary Marxist and martyr. In applying the Marxist method to Irish conditions, Connolly showed that, far from being some ‘foreign’ ideology, the method of Marxism is an essential tool for shedding light on Irish history, and on the task of revolutionaries in Ireland.

In the last analysis, the two tendencies within Republicanism reflect class contradictions in Irish society. Those contradictions have not gone away. If anything, they are sharper and more irreconcilable than ever. And Sinn Féin presently embodies that contradiction. It has been elevated in the South on the hopes of workers and youth, and a swelling wave of class anger. Yet its leadership possesses a petty-bourgeois outlook, while the party’s very success has drawn defections from Fianna Fáil, and the attention of every manner of political careerist.

How can these two tendencies be reconciled? They cannot. In the long run, they will inevitably tear Sinn Féin apart.

The North

There is another reason that the rise of Sinn Féin in the South has caused a great deal of anxiety within ruling class circles: the implications that this has for developments in the North.

The North is in a deep crisis and is becoming increasingly unbalanced. Whilst the South experienced a sustained boom in the 1990s, in the North this boom amounted to very little. Frankly, the connection with Britain has acted as a giant ball and chain, both politically and economically.

With the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, the ruling classes of Ireland and Britain arrogantly thought that the ghosts of the past had been put to sleep in the North. In fact, it was they who had fallen asleep. With the IRA gone, and the violence over, politicians in Dublin and London praised themselves to the heavens for having brought peace to this corner of the world.

They then turned off the lights, and went back to ignoring the North. In the years that have followed, all their promises of peace, prosperity, and an end to sectarianism have soured. As Alan Woods explained back in 2005, the GFA was doomed to an inevitable, unhappy ending:

In reality, the Good Friday Agreement and the institutions that have flowed from it are a sham and a deception. They represent a cruel trap with which to ensnare the desire of the majority of the population for peace. As such, despite it understandably gaining a majority in the referendum, the Marxists and many socialist Republicans opposed it and told the truth, no matter how unpalatable, to the working class of Ireland and Britain.[3]

The capitalists continued to dismantle industry. The predicted inrush of investment failed to seriously materialise. As in Britain, the North of Ireland has suffered from a deep productivity crisis. A 2019 report calculated that what the average worker in a G7 country produces in three days takes a UK worker four days, and a worker in the North of Ireland five days to produce.[4]

For the majority of workers – both Catholic and Protestant – conditions in the North have stagnated or deteriorated. The promised ‘peace dividend’ failed to materialise. The Northern economy has continued to decline. Forty-five per cent of households have no savings. The NHS has fallen into shocking disrepair. Even before the coronavirus pandemic ran a wrecking ball through the healthcare system, routine operations had waiting lists that lasted years.

But as long as the boom continued and the border wasn’t an issue thanks to common British and Irish membership of the EU, the GFA could more or less tick along. But since the 2008 economic crisis, and the Brexit vote of 2016, both of these props have been rudely kicked from under the GFA and the institutions.

With the DUP and Sinn Féin (not to mention the smaller Stormont parties) having spent a decade carrying out austerity cuts together, the devolved Assembly has come to resemble little more than a trough in which well-heeled careerists have buried their snouts. The Renewable Heating Initiative scandal confirmed this spectacularly when it was shown that big business, with the connivance of civil servants and politicians, had fleeced the people of the North of Ireland to the tune of £500 million. It was precisely increasing anger at this rotten setup that forced Sinn Féin to pull the plug and collapse the power-sharing executive in 2017.

Finally, the ruling classes of Britain and Ireland were forced to sit up and pay attention, alarmed at the situation which had developed right under their noses.

When Sinn Féin collapsed the Assembly, their actions enjoyed a certain popularity, and naturally so. After all, for a growing layer of workers and youth – Catholic and Protestant – the status quo stinks to high heaven and deserves only to be overthrown. But Sinn Féin didn’t have a clue where to go next and, if truth be told, had done everything in their power to avoid collapsing the Executive in the first place.

Once they had abandoned the armed struggle and entered Stormont under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, Sinn Féin not only signalled their de facto acceptance of British rule, they also accepted that they would co-administer this rule by agreement with the parties of unionism. In a time of capitalist crisis, that meant co-administering attacks upon the working class.

If Sinn Féin is capable of administering such attacks, what political principles can be said to separate the party from its ‘on-again, off-again’ partners in government? Only the party’s nationalism. James Connolly had some choice words for such ‘nationalists’:

Ireland without her people is nothing to me, and the man who is bubbling over with love and enthusiasm for ‘Ireland’ and can yet pass unmoved through our streets and witness all the wrong and the suffering, the shame and the degradation wrought upon the people of Ireland, aye, wrought by Irishmen upon Irishmen and women, without burning to end it, is, in my opinion, a fraud and a liar in his heart, no matter how he loves that combination of chemical elements which he is pleased to call ‘Ireland’.[5]

The whole peace process has been a story of Sinn Féin’s journey from one concession to the next at the behest of an establishment which regards it, and Republicanism in general, with a full measure of contempt. From Smash Stormont, they have become Stormont ministers. Whilst agreeing to decommission IRA weapons, to this day the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), and other loyalist paramilitaries operate with impunity. They recognised the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), yet the latter continues to harass Republicans. Its leaders deliver speeches paying tribute to the British monarch. In the South, they have accepted jury-less trials that were once used against IRA volunteers. And they have implemented every policy dictated by the British capitalist class, from PFI to austerity.

To cover their bare backsides, the party leaders have tried to claim that the armed struggle wasn’t so much about achieving a united Ireland as it was about achieving ‘equality’.

Leaving objections about what the armed struggle was really about to one side: where is this much-vaunted equality today? In Derry, where the movement for civil rights began in earnest in 1968, and was extinguished in blood by the British Army massacre of 30 January 1972, today forty-seven per cent of adults are ‘economically inactive’.

Progress towards democratic equality has also stalled. The Irish language is far from having achieved equal status. The laws governing marriage equality and reproductive rights in the North of Ireland are more backward today than in any other region on these islands. The right of self-determination is non-existent – the power to call a border poll rests exclusively with the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. And none of this is to speak of the mockery of democracy that is the Stormont Assembly itself.

Constitutional Nationalism

Whilst little progress has been made either in terms of material or democratic equality in the North of Ireland, that is not to say that things have stood still. In fact, enormous tectonic changes have been ongoing beneath the surface of a dysfunctional political settlement. These changes have aroused enormous expectations about the possibility of Irish unification in the coming years.

On the one hand, the North has seen significant demographic changes, with Catholics now representing a majority at all levels of education and in employment. Further to this, the rottenness of Stormont and Westminster alike, and above all the decline of living standards and crumbling services, have radicalised increasing numbers of workers and youth. A growing, advanced layer sees partition and the ongoing connection with British capitalism at the root of their ills.

At the same time, unionism is in a deep crisis. The stranglehold of unionism in the past was based on the fact that the Protestant bosses, assisted by organisations like the Orange Order, were able to grant the kind of concessions to Protestant workers that created a false, cross-class community of interests. However, under the pressure to boost profits, and with the decline of manufacturing, the bosses have snatched away many of these crumbs. This decline, masked by the Second World War and the post-war boom, became particularly evident following the crisis of the 1970s. It has continued down to the present.

Today, this long-running crisis has reached a tipping point. The once-dominant unionist parties are in crisis. A brooding resentment has developed in working-class Protestant communities. Meanwhile, a significant layer of Protestant youth have completely turned their backs on the parties that claim to speak on their behalf.

All of these symptoms show the potential that exists to build a revolutionary movement along class lines in the North, and indeed across Ireland, in the tradition of Connolly and Larkin. But this is not the orientation of Sinn Féin.

As a result of capitalism’s crisis, it is not just the working class that is being radicalised. Whilst conditions generally stagnated for the majority in the North since the GFA, for a thin layer, conditions improved. Aided in part by EU disbursements, some nationalists were able to raise themselves up into the middle class. Moving out to the leafy suburbs, for a time, these ladies and gentlemen lost all interest in the idea of Irish unification.

But Brexit and the crisis racking Britain threatens to undo all their advances. Meanwhile, the loosening of the Catholic Church’s grip makes unification more palatable to liberally-minded, middle-class nationalists.

This layer is now radicalising in favour of Irish unification. It is towards such ‘moderate nationalist’ middle-class layers that Sinn Féin’s