IRSCNA: Seamus Costello Commemoration

[Danielle Ni Dhighe <danielle@xxxxxxxx>]

Comrades, friends, a chairde,

Seamus Costello once visited America as the Chairperson of the Irish
Republican Socialist Party to speak on a panel at Amherst University.
By all reports, the audience was captivated by his presentation on
the problems confronting Ireland and the Irish working class and the
way forward identified by the IRSP. Like so many times when Seamus
presented his views and the views of the IRSP, people sat up and took
notice, for here was a fresh perspective--here was analysis that went
beyond well-worn cliches and tired slogans.

We believe that this approach, which Seamus Costello modelled in the
early years after the formation of the Irish Republican Socialist
Movement, continues to this day in that movement, and we believe that
the IRSP's preparedness to provide fresh and thought-provoking
analysis of Irish affairs and to offer original tactics that are
well suited to address the problems they are aimed at. An example of
this is the party's proposal for Non-Aggression Pacts, intended to
provide the working people of Ireland with a means to create a
workable and lasting peace for their communities without the
intervention of foreign imperialists and native capitalists. The
Non-Aggression Pact proposal is not a "more of the same" "peace
process" designed to impose upon the working people of Ireland a
settlement designed to meet the interests of their exploiters and it
is not simply an agreement between paramilitaries from either side of
the sectarian divide. Rather the proposal envisions labour and
community organisations from both working class communities asserting
themselves in a manner that confines the paramilitary organisations
from acting against the interests of their own community and it
provides the working people of Ireland, who have suffered most from
the violence in the six counties with a means to gain greater control
over the course of their daily lives, both separately and
collectively, and thereby to have the opportunity to recognise where
they share a commonality of interests.

Likewise, we believe that the IRSP's proposals on community policing
and restorative justice demonstrate a genuine concern for the
empowerment of working people in Ireland today. This policing
proposal isn't a design for existing paramilitary organisations to be
handed a monopoly on the maintaining of order within the nationalist
and loyalist communities--it is not the extension of proposals for
the PIRA and UVF to take over policing within their respective
communities to also include the INLA. Rather it is a proposal to put
real power into the hands of community activists, trade unionists,
women activists, and other members of these working class
communities. It is also a proposal that seeks alternatives to the
youth of these shattered communities being unnecessarily dragged into
a criminal justice system from which there is no escape, which is
focused on transforming anti-social behavior into socially
responsible behavior, and which doesn't believe that the manner in
which to deal with the scourge of addiction is to attack addicts with
baseball bats.

The ability of the IRSP to offer original and appropriate
recommendations to working class communities is a legacy bequeathed
to the party by Seamus Costello. The continuation of these fresh and
bold proposals is a tribute to Seamus's memory.

Men like Seamus Costello make history, but so too does history make
the man. When Seamus led a large contingent out of the Official Irish
Republican Movement and set about forming the IRSP and INLA, Irish
republicanism had become dominated by two equally stale and
ineffective alternatives. One was a simple, romantically backward-
looking militarism, while the other was a bureaucratic social
democracy--though none too democratic internally--masquerading as
revolutionary socialism, mired in the mistakes made in other nations
and plodding in the failed tactics of an earlier generation. Such a
circumstance called out for an approach which was truly
revolutionary and which could provide bold military action where
called for, but action that was rooted in a political course mapped
out with the genuine interests of working people as its prime
directive. Seamus Costello was there to answer that call, just as
James Connolly had been at another time in Ireland's history.

Today once again, Irish republicanism is dominated by those who see
the way forward either through participation in the state structures
of the ruling class and the board rooms of capitalists, by a backward-
glancing romantic republicanism divorced from the reality of
Ireland's people today, or through a return to apolitical militarism.
Once again, the circumstances cry out for a revolutionary approach,
which takes the reality confronted by the masses of Ireland--who are
its working people--as its prime focus. It calls for those who will
not become ensnared in bourgeois parliaments and useless talks with
occupying governments, but who can avoid the trap of engaging in an
armed struggle which lacks a popular base of support and holds little
possibility of moving events forward. We believe that the IRSP
continues to meet that challenge and in doing so, that it provides
the greatest tribute that can be paid to the memory of Seamus
Costello--the emulation of his example.

So long as that remains true, Costello has not died, for he lives on
through the party he forged.

Peter Urban
North American Coordinator
Irish Republican Socialist Committees of North America
http://www.irsm.org/irsm.html


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