Post by RedFlag32 on Sept 24, 2007 13:24:47 GMT
Courtesy of Cedarlounge
From Ed Hayes - a guest post about the SWM/SWP
Like any left wing organisation operating in Ireland the SWM/SWP’s analysis of the northern conflict has undergone several changes and twists and turns, though they would probably deny this. A good overview of the original leadership’s views can be found on the archive of International Socialism documents featured on the BICO thread elsewhere on Cedar Lounge. Suffice to say the SWM emerged out of a milieu in the early 1970s when PD, the Young Socialists and several other tendencies were interacting with elements from the Official republican movement and the Provos. The early SWM was strongly ‘workerist’ in orientation and geared mainly towards rank and file trade union activity. However certainly by 1974 they seem to have taken the position that the Provos were in the vanguard of the struggle against British imperialism and therefore were entitled to ‘unconditional but critical’ support from socialists. What this meant in practice however, was often far from clear. Did it mean you thought you unconditionally supported the armed struggle but criticised the politics of the Provos or were critical of particular aspects of that armed struggle, or indeed the whole tactic itself? In my experience most members weren’t entirely sure themselves.
There was some involvement with the early IRSP in 1974-75, of which I really know little except for various myths and legends. Apparently the SWM had a vote on whether or not to join Costello’s new organisation and despite the eagerness of Kieran Allen and others it was stymied by the remaining workerists, led by a shop steward from Ballyfermot, who opposed involvement on the basis that the IRPs weren’t serious enough about trade unionism. In the 1980s as the INLA tore itself apart, again and again, many of us used to thank our lucky stars for that vote! But by the time I became involved, in 1984, the SWM had come out of long involvement in both the Socialist Labour party and the H-Block campaign. In that campaign their position had been to press for industrial action to save the hunger strikers lives, and to oppose calls for Fianna Fail and the Catholic Church to be the focus of lobbying for the H-Block men. In Dublin Corporation, Dublin Bus and Waterford Glass there were stoppages and walk outs organised in part by SWM members. But in real terms they and the rest of the far left were very minor players in a movement that will probably historically be seen as making modern Sinn Fein the force they are today. (Though of course PD and IRSP members were elected to Belfast city council in 1981, mainly because Sinn Fein didn’t stand).
In 1984 the official SWM position was still that socialists had to support those resisting imperialism in the north. This was the Provos, and much as we might not like it they were there because of the failures of the left in 1969-71. Our line was that had a serious revolutionary party existed then, the struggle could have been pushed forward in a different way (of course several revolutionary organisations that considered themselves serious had existed in 1969-71, but that’s another story). We took it for granted that it was Unionist bigotry and British repression that caused the war and that the Provos were an inevitable response to this oppression. Nobody ever really talked about the origins of civil rights and the politics of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and the Officials in any real way. Only Eamonn MCann had been centrally active in that period in the north and he ploughed his own furrow to a certain extent. For some ideas about his thinking you can see the different tone he adopted in the various editions of War and an Irish Town (1974, 1979 and 1993). In the 1974 edition he is highly critical of the Provos, in the 1979 edition he argues that any socialist worth their salt has to back them and that ‘unconditional but critical’ is a cop-out and in 1993 he is very critical of them again. But McCann, while easily the best known public figure in the SWM, was not the mover ans shaker you might expect. Kieran Allen, Kevin Wingfield and Marnie Holoborow were much more central.
So the SWM essentially argued that problem in the north was British imperialism and its creation and backing of a sectarian state. That state offered nothing but discrimination and bigotry and could not be reformed. The violence occurring there was ultimately the fault of the British and we did not morally judge the tactics the IRA used, especially as most of those in society who condemned them supported far greater violence in the Falklands, El Salvador, Vietnam, Palestine etc. After Enniskillen for example the headline in the British Socialist Worker was ‘the bitter fruits of British rule’ and this was our bottom line; if you wanted peace then you should call for a British withdrawal, the IRA were a symptom, not the cause of the problem. It was a get out clause of course and often extremely abstract given the steady drip of killings in the 1980s. The Provo’s formal politics did not in theory matter to us; whether the O Bradaigh/MacStoifain leadership or Adams/McGuinness, the point was that they were taking on imperialism. We reckoned this applied everywhere; South Africa, Nicaragua, Iran, it wasn’t what you called yourself, it was whether or not you objectively opposed imperialism.
However to confuse matters further we did not actually support the use of armed struggle as a tactic. We were big on Trotsky’s ‘Against Individual Terrorism’ and stressed that the IRA could never ultimately defeat imperialism. The IRA might be brave and heroic (‘the finest people in this country’ I remember Kieran Allen stating at one meeting) but guerrilla struggle could not win in modern Ireland; we were not in Angola or Vietnam. A mass workers movement that opposed both states in Ireland, openly fighting for a workers republic was the only force that could really take on imperialism. The Provos would never lead this, because at base they were nationalists and would always search for some form of compromise with imperialism. We judged the armed struggle to be mistaken, not on individual incidents, but because it could not mobilise the popular forces necessary, either north or south, to succeed. Therefore we didn’t regard the Brighton bomb as ‘good’ and Enniskillen as ‘bad’, both were different sides of the same tactic. We didn’t offer the Provos advice on how to fight their war but we defended their right to fight it against those who condemned them, who we usually dismissed as hypocrites. Perhaps surprisingly to those who thought us Provo fellow travellers, the SWM did not believe the north was the be all and end all, especially by 1984. There was not a revolutionary situation in the six counties (though there may have been in 1969-71) and even if all the Catholics there supported the IRA they still could not win. There needed to be a workers movement in the south, which would probably emerge around bread and butter, day to day industrial struggles that would eventually give rise to a struggle that would challenge imperialism. If that movement also challenged the reactionary Catholic aspects of the south then there was even a possibility it might win some northern Protestant support.
The Protestant working class were not a labour aristocracy, ‘colons’ or a settler class but they did have certain marginal privileges that tied them to Unionism, which at base was a reactionary ideology. Therefore while they would have to be won to socialism in the struggle for a workers republic we did not believe that you shied away from condemning Unionism or exposing anti-Catholic bigotry. The UDA and UVF were counter -revolutionary supremacist groups and you could not be a socialist and a unionist. The examples of Jim Larkin and 1907 and the 1932 ODR strike were held up as times when workers had united but it was always stressed that unless sectarianism was challenged then this unity was always likely to collapse. Sectarianism was used by Britain to maintain its rule and it was Protestant sectarianism that was the problem. Looking back there was an amazing willingness to accept the Provo’s assurances that they were not sectarian and Socialist Worker used terms like ‘Brits’ and ‘Free State’ until the late 80s at least. The above is largely from memory but much of it was outlined in a small book by the British SWP’s Irish expert, a very dislikeable Scottish gent called Chris Bambery in Ireland’s Permanent Revolution (1987).
So that was the theory, at least. The reality was of course a bit more confused. The SWM had about one member in Belfast in the mid 80s and a small group in Derry. Most of us were southerners with no real experience of the north. There were some members who took ‘unconditional but critical’ to mean we did support the armed struggle and who cheered when the Provos killed British soldiers or cops. I cheered when they nearly got Thatcher (surely a good bomb?) but usually kept quite when they killed some off duty UDR man or killed civilians by mistake. I wasn’t alone. Some people were distinctly wary of the whole issue while others were actually close to seeing it as the be all and end all. One person I remember argued that at least the armed struggle ‘kept the pot boiling’ and allowed for a certain instability in Irish politics. Also remember at this time Sinn Fein were doing a good job of talking like a national liberation movement. Every AP/RN had stuff on South Africa, Palestine, Nicaragua etc (much more so I think than the Irish People for instance). So a few young SWM members who joined during stuff like the Reagan visit eventually went off and joined Sinn Fein, because they offered them almost constant street politics as opposed to the SWM’s theorising. The ‘unconditional’ support for the Provos could lead to people being amazingly blasé about death and destruction ‘that’s what happens in wars’ etc and there was little empathy with the victims of republican violence in the north. We never understood what the IRA’s campaign was doing in terms of destroying inter-communal relations (such as they were). Yet we thought somewhere down the line workers would still unite. For most of us our first experience of the north was going up to sell papers at the August anti-internment march in Belfast or the Bloody Sunday commemoration demo in Derry. It was grim and a bad time, though we often sold a lot of papers to people at these events.
The SWM spent a lot of time arguing that the southern labour movement had to take on board the north and oppose repression there and that was the line that we carried into anti-extradition campaigns etc. Within these campaigns the SWM argued for orientation on the unions and opposing looking to Fianna Fail’s ‘grass roots.’ Kieran Allen had written an important article arguing that the south was not a neo-colony of Britain but an independent capitalist state and the southern bourgeoisie had no objective interest in opposing partition. Fianna Fail was not in any way republican or potentially progressive. This is what usually marked us out in republican led campaigns; they’d be over the moon that Councillor Richard Greene, Nora Comisky or Willie O’Dea (yes!) had spoken out against extradition, which was supposed to presage some mass conversion by Fianna Fail to ‘Brits out’ when one of us would stand up and say it was all a front and that Fianna Fail wanted to crush the Provos as much as Thatcher did. Instead we should lobby the trades council to get their banner on the next anti-extradition demo….the grand theory was of course that because we were too small to have a real influence, participation in these campaigns offered an opportunity to connect with the ‘ones and twos’ who were possibly looking for a socialist alternative to republicanism. Significantly we did not consider ourselves socialist republicans, or any kind of republican; we used that term as interchangeable with nationalism. Culturally rebel songs were frowned on and SWM socials would usually feature fairly standard American and British labour songs (‘which side are you on’ etc). Some people did sing rebel songs of course but it was discouraged. Similarly nobody spoke Irish and there was absolutely no interest in it. There were no practicing Catholics as far as I can remember, which of course was a reflection of how marginal we were! Anti-clericalism was a given.
There was really very little knowledge of Loyalism, the Protestant working class, the SDLP or day to day life in the north but we could of course explain most of the above with a few slogans. Like so much on the far left you were defined by your competitors or opponents. Compared to People’s Democracy and the League for a Workers Republic we actually sounded quite critical of the Provos. Both those groups orientated almost completely on the republican movement and still thought the north was where it was at (though I only saw Paddy Healy of the LWR once and they may have been almost gone by 1984). PD criticised the SWM as ‘economists’ and didn’t like us very much. After the hunger strikes a section of PD had actually joined Sinn Fein in order to push it further leftwards. Ann Speed, a fella called Meehan (who had a brother who stayed in PD) and some others were supposed to be entryists of some sort. I’ll leave others to judge whether they changed Sinn Fein or the Provos changed them. The funny thing was that even though the ex-PD had only been in the Provos a wet weekend, they acted like they were veterans of the Curragh in the 1940s and were really smug and arrogant towards the far left. In contrast the actual Provos were usually not hostile. Some of them were a bit bemused by the array of literature they would be offered outside an Ard Fheis, while others smiled cynically, but very rarely would someone tell you to ‘fuck off.’ Mostly they would stop and talk and generally act civilly. I later realised why so many of the ones whose faces I knew were friendly but reserved and rarely offered strong opinions on anything. Loads of them were in the IRA and several were later caught on robberies or on various missions in Britain. It seems to me that being a young SF member in the south in the 1980s was still only sort of an apprenticeship for the ‘army.’ So the SWM were a fairly harmless diversion to them and unless we were going to actually really annoy them there was nothing to be lost in saying hello to us. Actually Gerry Adams had a good tactic for dealing with far left critics at meetings. He cultivated this avuncular thing where he would say hello and sometimes buy a paper. Then he puffed his pipe while someone denounced the Provo pan-nationalist strategy before replying by thanking the ‘comrade from the League for a Revolutionary Socialist Republic (deliberately making up a mad lefty title, well an even madder one than whoever the speaker actually belonged to) for advising the people of the north how to fight the war, but they were getting on ok without them etc.’ Cue loads of laughing and big rounds of applause.
If PD and the LWR were one benchmark than the CPI and Militant were the others. The CPI offered critical support to Fianna Fail and saw Haughey as potentially progressive, especially in contrast to the Coalition government. They opposed extradition, Section 31 and plastic bullets and still actually had Protestant members in the north. But the softness for Fianna Fail and of course their support for the Eastern Bloc meant we never really had much dealings with them. Militant, in retrospect I think had a fairly sensible position, stressing workers unity and being active in the Labour and Trade Union Group, in both communities. (Actually I remember one of their comrades was murdered by the UVF about 1986). They also opposed repression however. Crucially they simply called on the Provos to stop, which we would never do. But we saw them as making all sorts of concessions to Unionism, especially the ‘federation of Ireland and Britain’ idea which even today galls me. Most of the Irish working class spent a fairly long time trying top get away from a federation with Britain! I also disliked Militant however because I remember at one meeting someone from the SWM was stoically making the point that workers unity would not last without clear anti-imperialist politics, because after all hadn’t the great days of the ODR riots been followed just three years later by the 1935 sectarian pogroms? Peter Hadden sneered back that the speaker was obviously not very well read because there were no sectarian killings in Belfast between 1922 and 1969. Well I went home and looked up my history books and lo and behold, there was a spot of unpleasant bother in 1935. Never liked Hadden since. As for the WP, well we just thought they were absolutely pro-imperialist and had very little contact with them anyway. I know that was very simplistic but we just went by their calls to support the RUC and their view of the Provos as the root of all evil. Reading recent discussions on this site I realised that I’d never actually heard of several of the feuds etc. There were also recurring rumours that the WP in the north were involved with the cops and Loyalists in some way. Funnily enough though we called for a vote for them in southern general elections!
Now the SWP in Britain were a slightly different story and loads of them thought the Provos were the bee’s knees in the 80s. Think of a more extreme version of Ken Livingstone. Sinn Fein speakers used to get great ovations for saying absolutely nothing at Marxism in London every year. When I went there I sounded like I was in Militant compared to many members. This also began to change in the late 1980s. Aside from Bambery their big Irish experts were Pat Stack, (from Cork I think) and basically anyone else with an Irish surname. There were quite a few Irish born and second generation Paddies in the SWP and I believe the joke in the 1970s was that it was largely an organisation composed of Catholics and Jews! Their line on the north did get them into trouble occasionally but many people in Britain did not really give a shite about Ireland and weren’t too troubled if you were selling a paper that said ‘troops out’ on the cover. The obvious exception was after IRA bombs.
As far as I know in the early 1990s the SWM’s line went under a big revision as Kieran Allen discovered after 20 years that the Provo’s armed struggle was actually counter productive (that was not the line in the 80s and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) and was not doing a great deal to advance the workers cause at all. I think this position was eventually adopted about five minutes before the Provos declared their ceasefire in 1994. For a while the SWM seemed to moving towards a Militant type position but have perhaps changed again. I don’t know. Personally these days I think the whole thing was a tragic mess, the war in the north that is, not the SWM. If we thought the armed struggle was the wrong tactic then we should have simply called on them to stop using it. They wouldn’t have listened of course but it would have at least been clear what we meant.
Ed Hayes
From Ed Hayes - a guest post about the SWM/SWP
Like any left wing organisation operating in Ireland the SWM/SWP’s analysis of the northern conflict has undergone several changes and twists and turns, though they would probably deny this. A good overview of the original leadership’s views can be found on the archive of International Socialism documents featured on the BICO thread elsewhere on Cedar Lounge. Suffice to say the SWM emerged out of a milieu in the early 1970s when PD, the Young Socialists and several other tendencies were interacting with elements from the Official republican movement and the Provos. The early SWM was strongly ‘workerist’ in orientation and geared mainly towards rank and file trade union activity. However certainly by 1974 they seem to have taken the position that the Provos were in the vanguard of the struggle against British imperialism and therefore were entitled to ‘unconditional but critical’ support from socialists. What this meant in practice however, was often far from clear. Did it mean you thought you unconditionally supported the armed struggle but criticised the politics of the Provos or were critical of particular aspects of that armed struggle, or indeed the whole tactic itself? In my experience most members weren’t entirely sure themselves.
There was some involvement with the early IRSP in 1974-75, of which I really know little except for various myths and legends. Apparently the SWM had a vote on whether or not to join Costello’s new organisation and despite the eagerness of Kieran Allen and others it was stymied by the remaining workerists, led by a shop steward from Ballyfermot, who opposed involvement on the basis that the IRPs weren’t serious enough about trade unionism. In the 1980s as the INLA tore itself apart, again and again, many of us used to thank our lucky stars for that vote! But by the time I became involved, in 1984, the SWM had come out of long involvement in both the Socialist Labour party and the H-Block campaign. In that campaign their position had been to press for industrial action to save the hunger strikers lives, and to oppose calls for Fianna Fail and the Catholic Church to be the focus of lobbying for the H-Block men. In Dublin Corporation, Dublin Bus and Waterford Glass there were stoppages and walk outs organised in part by SWM members. But in real terms they and the rest of the far left were very minor players in a movement that will probably historically be seen as making modern Sinn Fein the force they are today. (Though of course PD and IRSP members were elected to Belfast city council in 1981, mainly because Sinn Fein didn’t stand).
In 1984 the official SWM position was still that socialists had to support those resisting imperialism in the north. This was the Provos, and much as we might not like it they were there because of the failures of the left in 1969-71. Our line was that had a serious revolutionary party existed then, the struggle could have been pushed forward in a different way (of course several revolutionary organisations that considered themselves serious had existed in 1969-71, but that’s another story). We took it for granted that it was Unionist bigotry and British repression that caused the war and that the Provos were an inevitable response to this oppression. Nobody ever really talked about the origins of civil rights and the politics of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and the Officials in any real way. Only Eamonn MCann had been centrally active in that period in the north and he ploughed his own furrow to a certain extent. For some ideas about his thinking you can see the different tone he adopted in the various editions of War and an Irish Town (1974, 1979 and 1993). In the 1974 edition he is highly critical of the Provos, in the 1979 edition he argues that any socialist worth their salt has to back them and that ‘unconditional but critical’ is a cop-out and in 1993 he is very critical of them again. But McCann, while easily the best known public figure in the SWM, was not the mover ans shaker you might expect. Kieran Allen, Kevin Wingfield and Marnie Holoborow were much more central.
So the SWM essentially argued that problem in the north was British imperialism and its creation and backing of a sectarian state. That state offered nothing but discrimination and bigotry and could not be reformed. The violence occurring there was ultimately the fault of the British and we did not morally judge the tactics the IRA used, especially as most of those in society who condemned them supported far greater violence in the Falklands, El Salvador, Vietnam, Palestine etc. After Enniskillen for example the headline in the British Socialist Worker was ‘the bitter fruits of British rule’ and this was our bottom line; if you wanted peace then you should call for a British withdrawal, the IRA were a symptom, not the cause of the problem. It was a get out clause of course and often extremely abstract given the steady drip of killings in the 1980s. The Provo’s formal politics did not in theory matter to us; whether the O Bradaigh/MacStoifain leadership or Adams/McGuinness, the point was that they were taking on imperialism. We reckoned this applied everywhere; South Africa, Nicaragua, Iran, it wasn’t what you called yourself, it was whether or not you objectively opposed imperialism.
However to confuse matters further we did not actually support the use of armed struggle as a tactic. We were big on Trotsky’s ‘Against Individual Terrorism’ and stressed that the IRA could never ultimately defeat imperialism. The IRA might be brave and heroic (‘the finest people in this country’ I remember Kieran Allen stating at one meeting) but guerrilla struggle could not win in modern Ireland; we were not in Angola or Vietnam. A mass workers movement that opposed both states in Ireland, openly fighting for a workers republic was the only force that could really take on imperialism. The Provos would never lead this, because at base they were nationalists and would always search for some form of compromise with imperialism. We judged the armed struggle to be mistaken, not on individual incidents, but because it could not mobilise the popular forces necessary, either north or south, to succeed. Therefore we didn’t regard the Brighton bomb as ‘good’ and Enniskillen as ‘bad’, both were different sides of the same tactic. We didn’t offer the Provos advice on how to fight their war but we defended their right to fight it against those who condemned them, who we usually dismissed as hypocrites. Perhaps surprisingly to those who thought us Provo fellow travellers, the SWM did not believe the north was the be all and end all, especially by 1984. There was not a revolutionary situation in the six counties (though there may have been in 1969-71) and even if all the Catholics there supported the IRA they still could not win. There needed to be a workers movement in the south, which would probably emerge around bread and butter, day to day industrial struggles that would eventually give rise to a struggle that would challenge imperialism. If that movement also challenged the reactionary Catholic aspects of the south then there was even a possibility it might win some northern Protestant support.
The Protestant working class were not a labour aristocracy, ‘colons’ or a settler class but they did have certain marginal privileges that tied them to Unionism, which at base was a reactionary ideology. Therefore while they would have to be won to socialism in the struggle for a workers republic we did not believe that you shied away from condemning Unionism or exposing anti-Catholic bigotry. The UDA and UVF were counter -revolutionary supremacist groups and you could not be a socialist and a unionist. The examples of Jim Larkin and 1907 and the 1932 ODR strike were held up as times when workers had united but it was always stressed that unless sectarianism was challenged then this unity was always likely to collapse. Sectarianism was used by Britain to maintain its rule and it was Protestant sectarianism that was the problem. Looking back there was an amazing willingness to accept the Provo’s assurances that they were not sectarian and Socialist Worker used terms like ‘Brits’ and ‘Free State’ until the late 80s at least. The above is largely from memory but much of it was outlined in a small book by the British SWP’s Irish expert, a very dislikeable Scottish gent called Chris Bambery in Ireland’s Permanent Revolution (1987).
So that was the theory, at least. The reality was of course a bit more confused. The SWM had about one member in Belfast in the mid 80s and a small group in Derry. Most of us were southerners with no real experience of the north. There were some members who took ‘unconditional but critical’ to mean we did support the armed struggle and who cheered when the Provos killed British soldiers or cops. I cheered when they nearly got Thatcher (surely a good bomb?) but usually kept quite when they killed some off duty UDR man or killed civilians by mistake. I wasn’t alone. Some people were distinctly wary of the whole issue while others were actually close to seeing it as the be all and end all. One person I remember argued that at least the armed struggle ‘kept the pot boiling’ and allowed for a certain instability in Irish politics. Also remember at this time Sinn Fein were doing a good job of talking like a national liberation movement. Every AP/RN had stuff on South Africa, Palestine, Nicaragua etc (much more so I think than the Irish People for instance). So a few young SWM members who joined during stuff like the Reagan visit eventually went off and joined Sinn Fein, because they offered them almost constant street politics as opposed to the SWM’s theorising. The ‘unconditional’ support for the Provos could lead to people being amazingly blasé about death and destruction ‘that’s what happens in wars’ etc and there was little empathy with the victims of republican violence in the north. We never understood what the IRA’s campaign was doing in terms of destroying inter-communal relations (such as they were). Yet we thought somewhere down the line workers would still unite. For most of us our first experience of the north was going up to sell papers at the August anti-internment march in Belfast or the Bloody Sunday commemoration demo in Derry. It was grim and a bad time, though we often sold a lot of papers to people at these events.
The SWM spent a lot of time arguing that the southern labour movement had to take on board the north and oppose repression there and that was the line that we carried into anti-extradition campaigns etc. Within these campaigns the SWM argued for orientation on the unions and opposing looking to Fianna Fail’s ‘grass roots.’ Kieran Allen had written an important article arguing that the south was not a neo-colony of Britain but an independent capitalist state and the southern bourgeoisie had no objective interest in opposing partition. Fianna Fail was not in any way republican or potentially progressive. This is what usually marked us out in republican led campaigns; they’d be over the moon that Councillor Richard Greene, Nora Comisky or Willie O’Dea (yes!) had spoken out against extradition, which was supposed to presage some mass conversion by Fianna Fail to ‘Brits out’ when one of us would stand up and say it was all a front and that Fianna Fail wanted to crush the Provos as much as Thatcher did. Instead we should lobby the trades council to get their banner on the next anti-extradition demo….the grand theory was of course that because we were too small to have a real influence, participation in these campaigns offered an opportunity to connect with the ‘ones and twos’ who were possibly looking for a socialist alternative to republicanism. Significantly we did not consider ourselves socialist republicans, or any kind of republican; we used that term as interchangeable with nationalism. Culturally rebel songs were frowned on and SWM socials would usually feature fairly standard American and British labour songs (‘which side are you on’ etc). Some people did sing rebel songs of course but it was discouraged. Similarly nobody spoke Irish and there was absolutely no interest in it. There were no practicing Catholics as far as I can remember, which of course was a reflection of how marginal we were! Anti-clericalism was a given.
There was really very little knowledge of Loyalism, the Protestant working class, the SDLP or day to day life in the north but we could of course explain most of the above with a few slogans. Like so much on the far left you were defined by your competitors or opponents. Compared to People’s Democracy and the League for a Workers Republic we actually sounded quite critical of the Provos. Both those groups orientated almost completely on the republican movement and still thought the north was where it was at (though I only saw Paddy Healy of the LWR once and they may have been almost gone by 1984). PD criticised the SWM as ‘economists’ and didn’t like us very much. After the hunger strikes a section of PD had actually joined Sinn Fein in order to push it further leftwards. Ann Speed, a fella called Meehan (who had a brother who stayed in PD) and some others were supposed to be entryists of some sort. I’ll leave others to judge whether they changed Sinn Fein or the Provos changed them. The funny thing was that even though the ex-PD had only been in the Provos a wet weekend, they acted like they were veterans of the Curragh in the 1940s and were really smug and arrogant towards the far left. In contrast the actual Provos were usually not hostile. Some of them were a bit bemused by the array of literature they would be offered outside an Ard Fheis, while others smiled cynically, but very rarely would someone tell you to ‘fuck off.’ Mostly they would stop and talk and generally act civilly. I later realised why so many of the ones whose faces I knew were friendly but reserved and rarely offered strong opinions on anything. Loads of them were in the IRA and several were later caught on robberies or on various missions in Britain. It seems to me that being a young SF member in the south in the 1980s was still only sort of an apprenticeship for the ‘army.’ So the SWM were a fairly harmless diversion to them and unless we were going to actually really annoy them there was nothing to be lost in saying hello to us. Actually Gerry Adams had a good tactic for dealing with far left critics at meetings. He cultivated this avuncular thing where he would say hello and sometimes buy a paper. Then he puffed his pipe while someone denounced the Provo pan-nationalist strategy before replying by thanking the ‘comrade from the League for a Revolutionary Socialist Republic (deliberately making up a mad lefty title, well an even madder one than whoever the speaker actually belonged to) for advising the people of the north how to fight the war, but they were getting on ok without them etc.’ Cue loads of laughing and big rounds of applause.
If PD and the LWR were one benchmark than the CPI and Militant were the others. The CPI offered critical support to Fianna Fail and saw Haughey as potentially progressive, especially in contrast to the Coalition government. They opposed extradition, Section 31 and plastic bullets and still actually had Protestant members in the north. But the softness for Fianna Fail and of course their support for the Eastern Bloc meant we never really had much dealings with them. Militant, in retrospect I think had a fairly sensible position, stressing workers unity and being active in the Labour and Trade Union Group, in both communities. (Actually I remember one of their comrades was murdered by the UVF about 1986). They also opposed repression however. Crucially they simply called on the Provos to stop, which we would never do. But we saw them as making all sorts of concessions to Unionism, especially the ‘federation of Ireland and Britain’ idea which even today galls me. Most of the Irish working class spent a fairly long time trying top get away from a federation with Britain! I also disliked Militant however because I remember at one meeting someone from the SWM was stoically making the point that workers unity would not last without clear anti-imperialist politics, because after all hadn’t the great days of the ODR riots been followed just three years later by the 1935 sectarian pogroms? Peter Hadden sneered back that the speaker was obviously not very well read because there were no sectarian killings in Belfast between 1922 and 1969. Well I went home and looked up my history books and lo and behold, there was a spot of unpleasant bother in 1935. Never liked Hadden since. As for the WP, well we just thought they were absolutely pro-imperialist and had very little contact with them anyway. I know that was very simplistic but we just went by their calls to support the RUC and their view of the Provos as the root of all evil. Reading recent discussions on this site I realised that I’d never actually heard of several of the feuds etc. There were also recurring rumours that the WP in the north were involved with the cops and Loyalists in some way. Funnily enough though we called for a vote for them in southern general elections!
Now the SWP in Britain were a slightly different story and loads of them thought the Provos were the bee’s knees in the 80s. Think of a more extreme version of Ken Livingstone. Sinn Fein speakers used to get great ovations for saying absolutely nothing at Marxism in London every year. When I went there I sounded like I was in Militant compared to many members. This also began to change in the late 1980s. Aside from Bambery their big Irish experts were Pat Stack, (from Cork I think) and basically anyone else with an Irish surname. There were quite a few Irish born and second generation Paddies in the SWP and I believe the joke in the 1970s was that it was largely an organisation composed of Catholics and Jews! Their line on the north did get them into trouble occasionally but many people in Britain did not really give a shite about Ireland and weren’t too troubled if you were selling a paper that said ‘troops out’ on the cover. The obvious exception was after IRA bombs.
As far as I know in the early 1990s the SWM’s line went under a big revision as Kieran Allen discovered after 20 years that the Provo’s armed struggle was actually counter productive (that was not the line in the 80s and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise) and was not doing a great deal to advance the workers cause at all. I think this position was eventually adopted about five minutes before the Provos declared their ceasefire in 1994. For a while the SWM seemed to moving towards a Militant type position but have perhaps changed again. I don’t know. Personally these days I think the whole thing was a tragic mess, the war in the north that is, not the SWM. If we thought the armed struggle was the wrong tactic then we should have simply called on them to stop using it. They wouldn’t have listened of course but it would have at least been clear what we meant.
Ed Hayes
