By Joe Higgins: from Daily Mail, March 11, 2009
The brutal killing of two soldiers by the so called Real IRA in Antrim at the weekend sent a shudder through most people who lived through the Troubles from the late 1960s to the early ‘90s.
The killings and the near fatal shooting of two workers doing a routine pizza delivery – because they were ‘legitimate targets’ – brought echoes of the thirty year nightmare of State repression and paramilitary attacks, sectarian killings and community division that left the people of Northern Ireland utterly war weary.
Among the big majority of ordinary people throughout the island of Ireland, there is huge revulsion at this attempt to drag the North back to the nightmare. But the coldblooded shooting dead of a policeman in Craigavon on Monday night underlines the determination of Republican sects to press on in defiance of the mood of the big majority of both communities in Northern Ireland itself who reject a return to the horror.
The groups responsible for these killings are obviously incapable of learning any of the lessons of the recent past. Their immediate goal is to destabilise the power sharing Executive leading to its collapse and therefore a defeat for Sinn Fein who they see as having sold out on the ‘armed struggle’ to achieve a ‘united Ireland’.
Then they believe that a paramilitary campaign will force the withdrawal of the British army and a united Ireland. This is an utter delusion.
What they apparently still fail to understand is that the opposition to a united Ireland in current circumstances comes from the Protestant population which would resolutely resist being pushed into a State where they would legitimately fear being a discriminated against minority. If that were true during the years of the so called Celtic Tiger, what possible attraction could now lie for them in a State whose economic ruling and political classes have plunged it into an unprecedented crisis with horrific unemployment and vicious attacks on public standards and the living standards of working people.
For the sake of argument, should the Protestant population find itself seriously threatened with being pushed into a united Ireland in current circumstances, it would lead to civil war. The result would not be a united Ireland but a repartitioned Ireland and further sectarian divisions.
Currently, the Republican splinter groups hope to benefit from the failures of the power sharing Executive to transform the lives of working class communities. Sinn Fein have shown itself to be as bankrupt as the DUP in having no alternative economic policies to the neo liberal thrust of British Government policy over the past decades, which have resulted in continuing unemployment blackspots in both Catholic and Protestant communities and constantly threatened living standards.
Cynically the Republican sects believe they can recruit from unemployed Catholic youth who see no way forward in current circumstances. But for those young people these groups and their tactics would represent the same dead end as the Provisional IRA was thirty years ago. As, indeed, were the Loyalist paramilitaries for the Protestant youth who joined them.
In the North it is working class people who bore the brunt of the suffering during the thirty years of the Troubles. Now they face an economic crisis with record job losses, attacks on living standards and on public services. In this situation it is paramount that they can come together across the divide to fight for a better life. It is a measure of the utterly reactionary nature of the Republican splinter groups that, instead, they seek to cause deep division and fear between the communities.
Working people do not have political representation as such in Northern Ireland today. They are left to the mercy of political parties based on one side or other of the divide, that is parties that represent a continuation of division. The political situation in the North cries out for a new political movement that could challenge the political establishment both Republican and Loyalist.
The Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has called a ‘silent protest’ today in Belfast, Derry and Newry. But it isn’t really silence that is required now but resolute action. The trade unions in the North could play a key role in thwarting those who would divide working class communities whether paramilitary groups or political parties.
As happened in a previous historical period in Ireland, in Britain and throughout Europe they should launch a new political movement based on uniting working people in fighting for a solution to all their shared problems both economic and political. As James Connolly pointed out nearly a century ago it is in a common challenge to the capitalist establishment for a better life for all that Protestant and Catholic working people will find the basis for unity.
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