[Marxism] Dissolution of anti-SF Republicans in the North of Ireland

["D OC" <donaloc@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This article is of interest. There are many points on which I obviously 
disagree. Perhaps the only point is that the article conveys the absolute 
sense of dissolution which those political forces supported by Phil Ferguson 
face in today's Ireland. It reflects the end for those without feet in the 
struggle.

It might be useful to recount some events following the historic elections. 
As it feels like an epoch has passed since March 8th.

Ian Paisley led his party to agree to share-power. In so doing, he lost 
their only MEP who went independent and called Ian Paisley a Lundyite.There 
was surprisingly little opposition elsewhere in the DUP but over time there 
has been a steady loss of DUP lower-echelon representatives who cannot 
stomach Ian sitting down with Sinn Fein/IRA as they term it.

Ian Paisley and Martin Maguinness' first act was to send a letter to the 
'English Ministers' as Paisley put it to leave Stormont. Ian went onto a 
chat show recently and made it clear in no uncertain terms that he felt that 
the British had betrayed his community and forced them to enter the GFA 
institutions and share power with Sinn Fein. You could see that his anger 
against the British was such that he felt that working with the rest of 
Ireland would be less distasteful. Virtually everyone I am talking to are 
making comparisons with Ian Smith and Rhodesia.

A day later and Ian Paisley was shaking hands with the Irish Taoiseach 
Bertie Aherne. He was speaking about the need to tear down the fences 
between north and south.

It is hard to envisage whether the time ahead will be as difficult as 
everyone might have suspected. Although nearly everybody would have expected 
the DUP and SF to stalemate each other in the institutions - that may not 
happen given the new found DUP willingness to move on. The north is an 
economic basketcase and can only survive as either an appendage to the 
British state or as an integrated part of a united Ireland. The British 
government have made it clear to the unionists that the former option is not 
a runner.

It may be also of interest that SF and the DUP may share a common platform 
of dislike for English politicians and their enforced cutbacks. The DUP 
largely originate from the Protestant working class and although they are 
highly infected with sectarianism they have a complex approach to issues 
which will make things interesting going forward.

There is certainly the possibility that the northern power-sharing executive 
will be a radicalising element in wider Irish society through increased 
all-Ireland working and the all-Ireland Ministerial Council. This is a 
possibility which radical republicans are keen to develop.

The process of rebuilding the Irish nation has begun. It is far more 
advanced in the north but undoubtedly it will hold huge challenges for the 
highly liberal Dublin Government and ruling class.

Against this historical backdrop it is perhaps understandable why those who 
are ideologues such as Phil who are totally cut off from the realities of 
Irish society - are incapable of a correct orientation.

The struggle continues and Sinn Fein continues to grow.

Le meas,
DoC


The Cul de Sac called 'Futility'

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save?

Anthony McIntyre ? 27 March 2007

The republican performance in the recent Stormont elections was nothing 
short of abysmal. Nationalist Sinn Fein humiliated Republican Sinn Fein and 
the accompanying fissile gathering that had decided to throw its patchwork 
hat into the ring.

Some may seek comfort in claims that Sinn Fein was intimidating its 
republican opponents. A number of people were indeed visited by Sinn Fein. 
In at least one case a prominent leader of the nationalist party made a 
thinly veiled death threat. But this comes no way near explaining the 
embarrassing trouncing republican candidates sustained.

It is a veritable truth that despite massive resources and an ability to 
dwarf any contender to its throne Sinn Fein finds it excruciating to have to 
co-exist with a different idea. Slavoj Zizek may as well have been writing 
about it rather than the totalitarian regimes of the former Eastern Bloc 
when he said:

? the ruling party acted with the utmost nervousness and panic at the 
slightest public criticism, as if some vague critical hints in an obscure 
poem published in a low-circulation literary journal, or an essay in an 
academic philosophical journal, possessed the potential capacity to trigger 
the explosion of the entire socialist system.

It is the permanent state of self-induced angst that the authoritarian 
mindset is forced to carry around like a hump on its back. There is no need 
for it. Sinn Fein's hegemony faces not the remotest hint of erosion within 
the nationalist community. The republican position has no appeal.

Whatever thoughts were harboured that Sinn Fein seriously feared a 
republican electoral challenge should have dissipated at a February debate 
in Derry where at the same venue only a week previously 500 republicans 
critical of the party's acceptance of the British PSNI gathered to vent 
their opposition. If Sinn Fein strategists were perturbed by that turnout 
they showed little sign of it by the time they filed into the same hall in 
the Tower Hotel to listen to a discussion organised as part of the Bloody 
Sunday Weekend Programme, 2007.

I had been roused out of an afternoon Belfast slumber and asked to take 
part. Wearily, I acquiesced rather than agreed. Once there, I shared the 
platform with Sinn Fein's Declan Kearney, Alex Atwood of the SDLP and SEA's 
Eamonn McCann. Although a letter writer in the Derry Journal graciously said 
that my contribution on the evening made uncomfortable listening for many in 
the audience, that was not my reading of the night. The same writer's notion 
that the main debate was between myself and Declan Kearney was far removed 
from my view of proceedings. My input for the most part consisted of passing 
the microphone back and forth between Declan Kearney and Alex Atwood who 
respectively had to field the bulk of the compliments and questions coming 
from the floor.

Indifferently anticipating a hostile audience I was surprised to find that 
there was no rancour apart from a member of the audience who asked what for 
me was an inaudible and stupid question, until asked to repeat it. Inaudible 
because it was grunted rather than asked; stupid because it provoked an 
angry put down for its author from Sinn members who more or less told him to 
go back to amusing himself with his play dough. After the event Sinn Fein 
people were friendly. Even the handshakes were not limp-wristed.

This on its own was instructive. But there was more. The strategically 
crafted questions came from Martina Anderson, now a Sinn Fein MLA, and were 
directed at Alex Atwood. The acrimony on the panel was between Eamonn McCann 
and Declan Kearney. On our way back to Belfast I suggested to my companions 
that the entire Sinn Fein demeanour indicated that the party was not in any 
way concerned about the critique made of it by myself or anybody else from 
the republican camp. Its members concentrated their energy on challenging 
Alex Atwood. In Derry at any rate, for Sinn Fein the SDLP was the party to 
watch. The concern was hardly without merit. Mark Durkan had surprisingly 
but comfortably defeated Mitchel McLaughlin in the last Westminster 
election. Sinn Fein had ground to make up and was not prepared to have its 
eye taken from the ball by a perceived irritant on its flank.

Apart from Peggy O'Hara in Derry and Davy Hyland in Newry/Armagh the 
republican challenge proved a damp squib. In West Belfast Geraldine Taylor 
limped in behind the traditionally miniscule Workers Party vote with a 
derisory showing of her own. Even the poor return for the most radical 
candidate in the constituency, Sean Mitchell, who fought on a platform of 
opposition to water taxes, was twice what Taylor achieved. RSF candidates 
throughout the North were more or less laughed at by the electorate. Former 
blanket man Paul McGlinchey fared no better. Gerry McGeough, tipped by many 
as a potential vote getter, polled poorly despite having a much more robust 
election campaign than many of his fellow republican contenders.

What Sinn Fein's republican challengers failed to grasp is that the imagery 
of the hunger strike and blanket men which featured prominently in much of 
their campaigning is not a vote winner. As an astute republican observer of 
the political scene commented, the voter will respect the enormity of the 
sacrifice made by the hunger strikers and protesting prisoners but most 
certainly does not wish to return to the era of death that so enveloped the 
times in which the hunger strikers lived and died. The argument can be made 
that the rise of Sinn Fein has been proportional to its readiness to abandon 
everything that was associated with the republicanism that produced both the 
IRA and the hunger strikers to the point where the party is now a Northern 
version of Fianna Fail.

That poses enormous challenges to republicans. Since the onset of partition 
Fianna Fail has been the most popular party in the island. Politically, 
republicanism never mounted any serious challenge to Fianna Fail hegemony. 
It is even less likely to so do so against 'Provisional Fianna Fail' in the 
North whose adroit nurturing of sectarian nationalism secures for it a 
following that republicanism at its most popular failed to attain.

Moreover, republicans were quickly disabused of their illusions if they were 
tempted to militarily challenge a Fianna Fail government. It will be no 
different for any republican who may in their finite wisdom opt to wage 
armed struggle against a government which contains Sinn Fein. Critics can 
debate all they wish the extent to which they feel Sinn Fein has sold out 
and been responsible for a divagation of the republican project. Even with 
Sinn Fein proclaiming, a la General Douglas MacArthur, 'we are not 
retreating - we are advancing in another direction', that very direction is 
immensely popular as confirmed by the electorate two weeks ago.

For militarist republicans a productive exercise would lie in teasing out 
the lessons to be learned from the absolute failure of armed struggle as a 
strategy to remove partition rather than labouring under the damnosa 
hereditas of physical force which republican tradition has unkindly 
bequeathed to them. As the French revolutionary Robespierre discovered far 
too late, "no one likes armed missionaries."

For politicist republicans, it should be recognised that republicanism 
rather than the Northern state is the failed entity of six county politics. 
Since partition there has been no effective republican challenge, as 
traditionally understood, to the existence of the Northern State. The 
Provisional campaign was based less on widespread republican sentiment 
against the British presence, than it was based on popular nationalist 
resentment towards the British reinforcing of unionist created inequality. 
The energy that sustained the Provisional IRA was not primarily a response 
to the British being here, but to the manner in which the British behaved 
while here. The difference did not go unnoticed by the British, who realised 
that they did not have to leave Ireland, but to merely change their 
behaviour while in Ireland and the wind would be taken out of Provisional 
sails.

There is no republican strategy, either political or military, for ending 
partition; only the terms dictated by the British ? consent of a majority in 
the North, which Sinn Fein long ago dismissed as a partitionist fudge. 
Republicans facing the cold blast of a post-republican world need to 
consider what micro contributions they can make to the smatterings of 
radical politics that battle to survive in a conservative political 
environment. Expending effort in rebuilding the grand macro republican 
project will only take radical energy down a cul de sac called futility. To 
kiss the corpse is not to breathe life into it.

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