Any hope that the Irish capitalist ruling class and their current government had that people had given up — or even had just got tired of marching — were dashed on Sunday 29th August 2015.
Hundreds of thousands gathered again from far and near; banners were on display from the West, South, North-East and North-West, Midlands, and of course many parts of Dublin and the East coast.
The main march columns started off from two train stations: Connolly Station, to the east of the city and Heuston, to the west. The latter contingent crossed the river at the station then marched eastward towards the city centre along the southern quays while the other marched westward along the northern quays and then crossed the river to the north side further upriver (Essex Bridge) and turned towards the city centre. Both columns had contingents and individuals joining them en route while others went straight towards O’Connell Street, they were greeted by a musical performance from the main stage by Don Baker and other musicians, also a performance by a rapper.
Aerial shot of rally in O’Connell Street (photo: Communities Against the Water Charge)
STATE REPRESSION
State repression was focused on at times: the Jobstown 23 banner got strong applause from bystanders at various points along the route, another banner denounced Garda violence including pepper-spraying and a number of speakers spoke about Garda repression, including one who talked about the Special Branch opening files on anti-water tax resisters.
This banner got strong applause from bystanders at various points along the route
As usual on large demonstrations of this kind, the Gardai refrained from violence or bullying and in fact were in very low profile, in stark contrast to their behaviour and numbers when dealing with smaller numbers in local resistance to water tax and the installation of water meters.
ELECTIONS, TRADE UNIONS
Among the speakers there was of course much mention of elections and getting rid of the current capiltalist government and also statements about the fight for the Republic in history, compared bleakly to the situation in Ireland today with unemployement, emigration, cuts to services, homelessness, privatisation. John Douglas, Gen. Secretary of Mandate and President of Mandate covered many of those issues, including the Dunne’s Stores dispute and the sudden closure of Clery’s in a rousing speech. However, those two are cases in point illustrating the weakness of the Irish trade union movement today: Mandate had one day’s strike in Dunnes’ many weeks ago and have won no gains as yet, while Clery’s managed to sack their workers without the union leading even a sit-in to hold the building and stock as a bargaining chip
Belfast Trades Council banner on the demonstration — they also had a speaker on the platform
A new presence on this demonstration was Belfast Trade Council, who were made very welcome and who had a speaker on the platform. He said that there was no EU directive to tax the water and that in the Six Counties they had defeated the water tax. He was not long speaking when the heavens opened and rain poured down on demonstrators and bystanders alike.
SUMMARY
What today showed is a strong will to resist across the country and across a great age spread, but with noticeably lower numbers across the teenage and young adult band, as well as a relatively weak leadership of the movement.
It remains to be seen whether RTÉ and newspapers will give a reasonable estimate of the numbers and coverage or instead do the usual of quoting ridiculously low figures or remain vague about them while giving minimal space to what was a large event, with participation from around the nation, as part of the biggest civil disobedience campaign in the history of this State.
End
Video of unaccompanied rapper Stephen Murphy at rally
At the Mayo v. Dublin GAA football game in Croke Park the following day, on Hill 16 (Photo from Right to Water FB page)
(Postcript: In their on-line report, RTÉ showed a photo of a packed O’Connell St. and said the organisers were claiming around 80,000. Also, at the Dublin GAA football match of Mayo v. Dublin the following day in Croke Park, attended by Enda Kenny, whose seat is in that county, Dublin supporters unfurled a giant banner of Right to Water).
NB: This article was written about the 11th October 2014 demonstration but arrived too late to use. Normally that would mean it just getting binned or at best getting mined for useful bits to put in a future article. However, the decision is to use this now in the run-up to the forthcoming demonstration at the end of this month against the water tax.
The size of the turnout for the anti-water charges demonstration in Dublin on Saturday 11th of October must have been something of a shock for the Irish ruling class and for their current government, the Fine Gael-Labour coalition. The implementation of water charges forms an important part of their programme to make the ordinary people pay for the crisis caused by financial and property speculators. Other parts of this programme that people have been experiencing to date over the last few years (and including the Fianna Fáil government preceding this one) have been bailing out the banks and their bondholders, financed first through the Household Charge and, after that was defeated by massive resistance, the Household Charge taxed through the Revenue Department; then the pension levy on public service workers; followed by the extensive cuts in social spending at the same time as implementing the “Social Charge”.
Marchers heading southward after leaving the Garden of Remembrance/ Parnell Square area (RTÉ tried to play down the figures to 30,000
The ruling class and their government are of course well aware that the water charge is unpopular among the vast majority of the population – supporters of the tax have failed to convince the people that it is anything but another way of “paying the bankers”. But the unpopularity of a measure is no guarantee whatsoever of wide-scale mobilisation against it and the Government was probably expecting the resistance to meter installation to remain local, marginal and uncoordinated. Clearly this was one case where “Ní mar a shíltear a bhítear”.
But the size of the demonstration surprised not only the ruling class and their government but also anti-water charge campaigners themselves. “I thought we’d be doing well to get 15,000” said one long-time community activist and “If we got 50,000, we thought it would be brilliant” according to an activist from one of the political groups active on this issue. A realistic estimate of the attendance at the demonstration on Saturday puts it at between 100,000 (as quoted by an unnamed Garda source to an Irish Times reporter) and 150,000. The march from the Garden of Remembrance heading across the river before turning again towards the GPO took over one-and-a-half hours to pass a fixed spot in O’Connell Street while another large number reportedly marched from another direction also toward the GPO.
So how was it that so many mobilised?
Any attempt to answer the first question must be speculative but there are a number of indications other than the widescale unpopularity of the water charge and any measure seen as “bailing out the bankers”. One of these is the highly-publicised police repression of local protests against meter installations in a number of Dublin areas, where the population is overwhelmingly working-class and lower-middle class. These protests and the police repression, completely ignored by the national mass media, however received widescale publicity through social media, with videos posted on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter. And the people sharing and sometimes posting these reports and images were for the most part not political or even community or trade union activists. Another source tapped was that of past mobilisations against the Household and Property Taxes. Much of the mobilisation took place in small to medium-sized communities where for the most part, unusually but according to my sources, the activists promoted the resistance and the demonstration rather than their own political party or organisation.
“Apart from a few political activists, only the middle-class mobilise through Facebook”, said long-time political activist to us about a year ago. “Who cares how many ‘Likes” on Facebook an event or campaign gets – it doesn’t mean anything!” said another. Rebel Breeze would have agreed with them too, knowing that the way to mobilise working class people was mostly through personal contact, door-to-door and workplace leafleting. But it seems that is no longer true and that working people, who previously used Facebook only socially, have now begun to use it politically too.
An aerial view down towards the rally after the march at GPO/ O’Connell St
Why did it surprise even the campaigners?
So much for how such a large number came to protest. But how is it that the campaigners themselves were taken by surprise? Of course there may have been unexpected mobilisations in some areas where campaigners had not been active but the main reason for their surprise is almost certainly their lack of coordination. Their are a number of Left organisation and “dissident” Republican organisations campaigning against the water charges, along with a large number of independent activists of a mainly political or community background. In some areas Sinn Féin activist have been out too, although the party does not advocate non-payment or prevention of meter installation.
In a united campaign where all the activists worked towards a united mass resistance, sharing information, the numbers would not have caught them so much by surprise. Of course, their expectations might have been exceeded but each group would have been aware of the actions in other groups’ areas along with the massive rise in Facebook hits, “Likes” and “Shares” to postings of resistance and police repression. Such a united campaign against the water charge does not yet exist. A previous attempt to float such a united campaign on the Household and Water Charges foundered on a number of rocks – political party opportunism, social democratic illusions and the failure of the traditional Left to engage with the independent activist constituency and the “dissident” Republican movement probably being the main ones.
There are a number of attempts to portray the active resistance to the Water Charge as spontaneous but it is likely that where there have been no campaigners active locally, the people have responded to what they have seen elsewhere, both through anger and encouragement. On the other hand, any attempt by any group or individual to take the credit for the growing resistance or for the mass attendance at the demonstration would have to be laughable.
The “passive Irish” jibe refuted once again
Rebel Breeze has long been tired of the wailing often heard to the effect that “the Irish are not like the Greeks”, or that the Irish are passive, accept all kinds of shit without resistance, etc. etc. With the history of class and national struggle of the people of this island it is extraordinary that such an notion ever gained wide acceptance among commentators – but it did. The Irish working class has generally responded militantly and enthusiastically when they have been called to battle by what they consider a credible leadership. In Ireland, that leadership was the trade union movement and no other. In 1913 a fighting trade union was forged in Ireland and, when the employers tried to break it, the workers of Dublin (mostly) fought that attempt for up to eight months, in a city of wide-spread poverty and with most charity services discriminating against strikers and their families. In that struggle, the workers faced also the hostility of the media and state (not much has changed there) and of the main churches. Although defeated in that struggle, the union did not break and came back years later stronger than ever.
Deprived of revolutionary and militant leadership, the movement nevertheless maintained a fighting front for workers through decades of high unemployment and emigration. But in the mid-1980s the trade union leadership opted for what they called “social partnership”, an arrangement in which employers, trade union leadership and the State (which is also a huge employer) sat down and agreed the salary levels for the next period. This had a disastrous impact on the trade union movement. “Use it or lose it” is a general physiological rule about muscle : the trade union leadership became unused to strike action and, when strikes did occur, to instructing members of unions not directly involved to pass the pickets. Recruitment fell dramatically and, when in 2010 the employers and State no longer saw any point in negotiating with the trade union leadership, as they believed the leadership to be no longer capable of resistance, the latter lacked the spirit and confidence to take them on. After a demonstration called by ICTU with a threat of a general strike days away, which received a massive response from trade union members, the leadership instead opted for more negotiations, in which they agree to the pension levy on public servant workers and industrial peace in the private sector: Croke Park I (June 2010). So the workers no longer have a leadership they consider credible and the revolutionary and radical socialist organisations are too small to be thought credible and also have not generally built bases within the trade union movement from which to offer a leadership for struggle.
Nevertheless, the working people of Ireland turned out in huge numbers once again on Saturday to protest an unjust tax which is being used for an unjustifiable purpose. The class is still there, it never lost its fighting spirit – what it needs is a viable leadership. It remains to be seen whether this will be built and whether it can lead a broad militant movement against this tax and other attacks on the working class, without repeating the errors of the recent ‘broad movements’.
A Derry schoolboy has been subjected to emotional blackmail and pressure by his school to sign a “peace scroll” and, arising out of an altercation over his refusal in which it was alleged he was being “sectarian”, was sentenced to two after-school detentions. Why is he being treated in this way, what is this “peace scroll” about and who is promoting it?
According to Pauline Mellon, writing about it in her blog, a boy in her Derry community in September last year was pressured by a teacher in his school to sign a “Peace scroll” with which a Reverend David Latimer is trying to create a world record with the number of signatures. “The child was told by a teacher that he would be ‘the only child in the North not to have signed’ and was further questioned as to whether his refusal was sectarian in nature.” Not surprisingly, the child reacted to this suggestion and used a word for which the school seeks to discipline him.
“The school has a policy (on “abusive language”) which makes no provision for contributing factors,” says Pauline Mellon. However, although the school Board is sticking to the letter of their policy in this regard, they seem not quite so rigorous in upholding their own procedures in other respects.
“When the parents questioned the School Principal over his decision to impose two detentions and what circumstances if any he had taken into consideration, the Principal immediately cut off communication with them and escalated the issue to stage 4 of the school’s complaints procedure. Stage 4 of the school’s complaints procedure requires a written submission to the Chair of the school board from parents.”
Although the parents at this stage had made no such written submission, a sub-committee of the School Board declared that they had investigated the complaint (from whom?!) and upheld the Principal’s decision.The sub-committee had decided to use as “a written submission” some letters written by the parents to the Principal after he refused meet them, thereby violating the parents’ rights to prepare their own submission if they wished to go to Stage 4 of the Complaints Procedure and, indeed, violating the terms of the Procedure itself.
As if to underline their casual attitude to their own procedures, the School Board wrote to the parents to outline their “findings” without even using the school’s headed paper. When this was pointed out to them, the Board apologised for sending the decision on plain paper and said it would not happen again. However, there was a much more significant breach of their procedures, in that the sub-committee had kept no minutes of their meeting, about which the parents have learned only recently. Then when the parents did actually submit a level 4 submission, it was totally ignored.
As Pauline Mellon observed, the Chairman of the Board was in breach of his duties according to “Department of Education guidelines which state that the chairperson has responsibility for all meetings and must ensure that minutes of ALL meetings are retained.”
One can imagine the impact of a comparable chain of events on any individual, let alone a child studying for his GCEs. The parents took him to a counsellor, after which they wished to discuss the counsellors’ report with the boy’s form teacher. The Board prevented this meeting, confusing the counsellors’ report with the parents’ “ongoing issues with the Board”.
Nine months after the first incident in this chain of events, the Board invited the parents to meet with them. The parents brought along an observer and the Board refused to allow the meeting to go ahead with the observer present and when the parents protested, they were escorted off the premises, witnessed by an Independent local authority councillor. The Board in this case is the authority and has the power and the school is also their territory. There are a number of people on the Board. In summary, they held the advantages of power, territory and numbers – yet they refused to allow two parents to be accompanied by an observer to support them (and at a later date to bear witness to what went on, should that become necessary). One must wonder what they had to fear in allowing this one additional person …. and why.
The School Board has a Parent’s Representative on it – the parents of the child sought a meeting with this person, not once but a number of times, but the person concerned has so far failed to meet with them. This is indeed extraordinary – how can anybodfy discharge their duties as a Parents’ Representative to the Board if they refuse to meet with parents who are in dispute with the Board?
There is a body which governs Catholic schools, of which the school in question is one – the Catholic Council for Maintained Schools (CCMS). This is an organisation of the Catholic Church but receives public funding through the Northern Ireland Executive. The parents took the issue to that Council. The CCMS admitted that headed paper should have been used in writing to the parents and commented that the school’s Board had not fulfilled their role; they also noted the parents’ attempt to discuss their child’s counsellor’s report with his form teacher but would not comment on whether the refusal would be normal practice. All in all, the CCMS considered that the Board’s actions of using a letter to the Principal as a submission and refusing the parents the right to submit their own Level 4 submission were “reasonable” and “in accordance with School policy”.
Presumably in their deliberations, the CCMS had discovered that the Board’s sub-committee had failed to keep any minutes but left the parents to discover this through other means at a later date. At a later complaint to the CCMS, the Council refused to acknowledge the failure of the School Board’s Chairperson in ensuring minutes were kept, as laid out in the Department of Education’s guidelines. Finally, the CCMS denied that any breach of the child’s rights took place.
The Chairperson of the CCMS is Bishop John McAreavey, who according to Pauline Mellon, has not even had the decency to acknowledge or respond to two separate letters the parents of the child in question sent to him. This was in contrast to the Bishop of Derry, Rev. McKeown who replied to the parents after they wrote to him. “Bishop McKeown who has knowledge in these matters agreed with the parents that a common sense approach should have been taken and expressed concern that such a small matter had used up so much time and energy.”
Pauline Mellon takes a similar line in concluding her article: “… a matter that should have never made it outside of the school assembly hall from the outset has exposed the School Board in question as being ineffective, unprofessional, non-transparent and unaccountable. It has exposed CCMS, a group acting under the wing of the Catholic Church, as not having learned from previous incidents when the Church has closed ranks and has attempted to silence people.”
As to the Rev. Latimer himself, the promoter of the “Scroll” signatures, although he promised the parents to look into the matter, they have heard nothing from him since.
Who is the Rev. David Latimer?
According to the Department of Education of Northern Ireland, Rev. Latimer is “a visionary”, for which term they offer no explanation apart from his Guinness Book of Records bid for “most signatures on a scroll” and his promotion of it in the schools. http://www.welbni.org/index.cfm/go/news/date/0/key/922:1 Indeed, it is amazing that 84 schools have signed up to the project, as the article says on their website – even more so if none of those saw any wording to endorse and to which to encourage their children to subscribe (see further below).
The Rev. David Latimer, photographed in church
David Latimer was a systems analyst with the Northern Ireland Electricity Board and married before he decided to become a cleric. He did so in 1988 and is now Minister of two churches, the First Presbyterian in Derry’s Magazine Street and the Monreagh Presbyterian, established in 1644 across what is now the British Border in Donegal.
In 2011, David Latimer was invited to address Sinn Féin’s Ard-Fheis and did so. On that occasion he said, referring to Martin McGuinness, that they had “… been journeying together for the last five years and during that time we have become very firm friends, able to easily relax in each other’s company.”
Rev. Latimer went on to say that “The seeds of division and enmity that have long characterised Catholic and Protestant relations were neither sown in 1968 or 1921 but during the 1609 Settlement of Ulster. Mistrust and bad feelings resulting from the colonisation of Ireland by Protestant settlers were followed by centuries of political and social segregation. Partitioning Ireland did little to ease sectarian mistrust and separateness between Protestants and Catholics left in the 6 counties as each community continued to be defined by its particular religious affiliation with little mixture between the two groups.”
The impression given there is of some peaceful colony of Protestants arriving in Ireland around 1609 which led to “bad feelings” and “mistrust”. No mention of the seizure of land from the Irish and their expulsion to the hills or abroad. No mention of the suppression of the religious faith of the majority and the imposition of that of the minority, centuries of discrimination, theft of land, genocide. One can see that this might quite rationally give rise to “bad feelings” and “mistrust”. No mention of the actual promotion by the British of sectarianism and the creation of the Orange order, with the intention of breaking up the unity between “Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter” of the United Irishmen at the end of the 18th Century.
It was again reasons of “little mixture between the two groups” which Rev. Latimer went on to blame for the recent 30 Years War:
“Little wonder this part of Ireland descended into a spiral of communal disorder and violence that was to last for decades. Victims of differences, extending back across trackless centuries that have isolated us from one another it is, with the benefit of historical hindsight, not surprising that our two communities should view each other with suspicion and regard one another as ‘the enemy.’”
Dr David Latimer, First Derry Presbyterian Church, conducts a redediication ceremony on the City’s fortifications, “Derry’s Walls”. Photo: Stephen Latimer
Did the Catholics and Protestants go to war with one another in the late 1960s or at any time during the 30 Years War? No, what happened was that Catholics demanded civil and human rights of which they had been denied in that British colony-statelet since 1921; the state forces tried to suppress their peaceful campaign with batons, tear gas and bullets; right wing and sectarian forces among the Loyalists were mobilised and burned Catholics out of their homes and murdered some. The British Army were sent in to support the “Northern Ireland” sectarian police and the IRA came into limited action to counter them, after which hundreds of “nationalists” were interned without trial, followed by escalation of IRA action, the Paratroopers’ massacres in Derry and in Ballymurphy, and so on.
In fact, Latimer’s false account of history has been the standard British ruling class’ version to justify their war in Ireland for foreign consumption and to the British population throughout those years: the reasonable British with the thankless task of keeping the two tribes apart.
I found the content of the Latimer’s speech on SF’s website without an account of the audience’s reaction but according to the Irish Echo, an Australian on-line newspaper, it “received a rapturous reception from the republican audience”.
Reverend David Latimer and the British Army
Pauline Mellon says that according to the parents, “the child based his decision not to sign the scroll on Rev Latimer’s service in the British Army and with him being stationed in Afghanistan. The child also raised concerns over what he views as Reverend Latimer’s “selective” approach to local human rights issues.”
Surely the boy is mistaken? At least about him having served with the British Army? Well, actually no. In June 2008 Rev. Latimer gave an interview to the Derry Journal to explain why he felt justified in going with the British Army to Afghanistan although he had to “wrestle with his conscience”. Presumably he is an accomplished conscience-wrestler by now since he also admitted to having participated in other British Army missions for more than 20 years.
“It would be against my nature to be part of something that is creating destruction or generating pain or grief within any community”, he was quoted as saying. “The only way I can reassure myself in being part of this is that I am involved with a unit that is going out to provide resources to people who have no choice but to be there because they are under orders.”
Who are they “who have no choice …. because they are under orders”? Ah, yes, the soldiers, pilots and drone technicians who have invaded another country, killing those who resist and generally intimidating the population. Leaving aside the spurious question of “choice”, does one help justice by administering spiritual comfort to an invading army? To whom does one have a greater moral duty? The answer is clear I think and if one lacks the courage to stand up for the population the least one could do is not to offer comfort to their invaders.
Put perhaps Rev. Latimer intends to be some kind of Camillo Torres, preaching for the poor and castigating the wrongdoer? No, of course not. Well then, perhaps subtly undermining Army propaganda? He invites us to think so: “In the quieter times, I will be around for people who will have questions about what they are doing there and about God. I might not have all the answers but I am there to give a view different to the Army view.”
In what way his view might be different to that of the Army he once again fails to explain, or to inform us whether his views were also different on the other more than twenty occasions in which he served with the British Army previously. Surely if he were intending to undermine Army propaganda, he’d hardly be telling us and the Army in a newspaper interview!
He tells us the hospital he’ll be working in over there will be treating Afghanis as well as British servicemen. Hopefully, they will be treating Afghani victims of torture in British and US Army prisons as well as children given a beating in the barracks. He won’t be trying to convert the Muslims to Christianity, he tells us. And I think we can believe that, since abusing people’s religion, their culture, customs, raiding their houses and generally intimidating them is hardly likely to incline them towards one’s religion.
Going on to discuss the possible dangers he would face, Rev. Latimer informs the readers of the Derry Journal that “We know the (military) base is likely to be attacked and we will undergo training in how to deal with chemical, biological and nuclear attacks.” He need not worry, the Afghans don’t have any of those weapons. However, he should exercise caution should he ever have cause to pass through the special arms stores of the British or US military, who do indeed have precisely those weapons and, furthermore, have used most of them in warfare at some point.
“I will receive some weapons training, although this will be limited on how to disable a gun and make it safe.” Useful, just in case any member of the Afghani resistance accidentally drops a gun …. perhaps when calling on the Reverend to make enquiries about the philosophy of the Christian religion.
“Peace” and “Peace” Treaties and Agreements
The vast majority of people would say that Peace is a good thing; despite that, “peace” remains a problematic concept and not one upon everyone can agree. And “peace” is also frequently being promoted in some part of the world by some of the most warlike states with the most horrifying armaments. For those in power, the invoking of the word “Peace” can be a powerful way of invalidating resistance, silencing dissent and of justifying the status quo which has been achieved through vanquishing the enemy in battle or by the recruitment of collaborators in the enemy’s leadership.
During WWI, the British and the French concluded the secret Asia Minor Agreement (also known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement), with the endorsement of Imperial Russia; the Agreement divided the Arab world between the French and the British should they succeed in beating the Ottoman Empire. To the shock and embarrassment of the imperialists, the Bolsheviks published the terms when they took power in 1917. Although this Agreement was intended to bring “peace” between the competing British, French and Russians, it has been in part the source of many wars with others, as well as coups and uprisings in the Middle East since then.
“Peace” does not mean the same to all: many of the British and French public during WWI would have said that “peace” meant defeating the Germans and Turks, conversely many Germans and Turks would have thought the direct opposite. The Russians mostly wanted an end to the War so “Peace” was one of the most popular of the Bolsheviks’ slogans for their October Revolution, after which they pulled Russian troops out of the War; it was one of the reasons so many soldiers and sailors sided with them.
The end of the First World War brought “peace” and “peace treaties”; among these was the Treaty of Versailles between Britain and France on one side and Germany on the other. In effect, the principal victors screwed Germany for war reparations, occupying the industrial Ruhr Valley. Many historians agree that the Versailles Treaty was a contributory factor to the later rise of the National Socialist Party (the “Nazis”) in Germany and also to the Second World War.
After WWII, the “peace” treaties divided the world largely between the USA, the British, the French and the USSR. Some aspects of that division led to two big wars — the Korean and Vietnam Wars – and a host of smaller ones. The USA has fought 20 military engagements since WWII; the British have fought 28 and the French have been directly involved in 15 military actions or wars (these figures do not of course include the wars and coups fought by the many proxies of these powers). Furthermore, not one of those wars was fought on the territories of those states and, in most cases, took place far from them.
To look for a moment further than the three world powers above, Sri Lanka had a war going on inside it since 1983 and had peace talks a number of times. The origin of the war was the communal differences and inequalities promoted by the British when they ruled Ceylon as a colony and continued by the Sinhalese majority Government afterwards. In 2008, the ruling Sinhalese Government decided on all-out war and, abandoning the mutually-agreed ceasefire, surrounded the Tamil Tigers’ “liberated areas” with a ring of steel through which no-one could pass. They then subjected the areas to indiscriminate continuous shelling and air bombardment before sending in their troops, wiping out most of the opposing guerrillas but also thousands of civilians. According to UN estimates, 6,500 civilians were killed and another 14,000 injured between mid-January 2009. The Times, the British daily, estimates the death toll for the final four months of the war (from mid-January to mid-May) at 20,000.
There’s peace in Sri Lanka now, all right — the peace of the grave.
Sri Lanka’s “peace” is similar to the one that followed the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland – that was “peace” after a defeat of the Irish Republican forces by bloody suppression and rabid sectarianism. Of course that “peace” was temporary only (as Sri Lanka’s will no doubt prove to be too) and was followed by other brief uprisings in 1803, 1848, 1867, the Land War 1879-’82, 1916 Rising, the War of Independence 1919-1921, the Civil War 1922-’23, the IRA campaign during WWII …. The partition of Ireland as part of the 1921 Agreement was supposed to bring peace to both parts of the country but again it proved to be a temporary one.
Despite the sectarian riots burning Catholics out of their homes and the wave of terror and repression by the Six Counties statelet in the early 1920s, conflict broke out again with the IRA’s Border Campaign of 1956-’62. In 1967 the Civil Rights campaign in the Six Counties began; the repression with which it was met by State and Loyalists caused the uprising of the Catholic ghettoes of Derry and Belfast afterwards. Then more repression, more resistance, then troops, then 30 years of war with the British Army and colonial police against the Republican guerrilla forces. The Good Friday Agreement claims to be bringing peace but history – and the ongoing repression of dissent by the statelet’s forces — indicates otherwise.
One of the reasons that peace is not necessarily brought by treaties and agreements is that they are themselves intended as temporary measures: by both parties, as in agreements between competing imperialist and colonialist powers, or by one of the parties, for example by the US Government in the case of the Native American Indians. Or they are violated by succeeding governments, as in the case of William of Orange’s promises in the Treaty of Limerick. Or they don’t deal comprehensively with the underlying causes of conflict, as with treaties and agreements between Britain and Ireland in general.
In fact, when a colonial or imperialist power seeks an agreement or treaty with a people or a weaker nation, what it is seeking is not usually peace but pacification – it wants an absence of conflict, or of resistance, so that it can continue extracting the benefits which it was doing before the people began to resist.
Or sometimes, the stronger power wants merely to delay things, to “buy time” until it is expects to be in a better position (and its opponent perhaps in a weaker one) than that which it was at the time. In 1925 the British Government intervened in a conflict between the mine-owners and the miners in Britain, paying a subsidy for nine months to prevent the miners’ pay from dropping. During that period, the Government laid in stocks of coal and bought up newsprint to prepare for a big battle with the miners’ union in particular. In 1926 they took on the British trade union movement and succeeded in forcing the TUC to call it off the General Strike within nine days of its beginning, leaving the miners to fight on alone for eight months until they were defeated.
So what kind of “peace” is being promoted by the Reverend Latimer? Some detailed plan, or some wishy-washy generalisation? That is not an easy question to answer. It is known to be an attempt to get into the Guinness Book of Records by having the most schoolchildren sign it which many have done, including in Donegal and Derry. Is it just a publicity stunt, where people sign up to some vague notion of “peace” which can mean one thing to one person and something completely different to another? What is the context for this “scroll”? “Peace” between whom and on what terms? Or is there a political agenda, as there was in the campaign around the Good Friday Agreement?
The Scroll’s FB page does not explain and the parents have not managed to find out; in addition a number of Google searches of mine failed to turn it up either. What is known about its origins, perhaps the only thing apart from it aiming at a world record, is that it is being energetically promoted by Rev. David Latimer. And as we have seen, he goes on British Army missions and his role in all this is far from clear.
Schools in our society
Coming back to where we began, the pressure and attempted intimidation of a schoolboy is wrong and should not have been inflicted on this boy (and on who knows on how many others). It should not have been but it was and, when the parents objected, the agents of that blackmail, intimidation and repression should have backed down. And if they refused to back down, the managing agents, the School Board should have upheld the parents’ objections. And if they did not, the Catholic Council for Maintained Schools should have done so. All of them failed to do what was right.
As adults, we tend to see schools as neutral institutions, some with good standards, some not so good, with a continuum of teachers ranging from great to abysmal. Schools however do play a role in socialising children to accept authority and discipline outside the home and also into accepting ideas dominant in the society in which the school is located. Seen in that light, we should perhaps be less shocked at this treatment of a boy and his parents.
However this Guinness Book of Records project is not even part of the school’s official program nor of the State’s curriculum and it was the boy’s resistance to the undue pressure brought to bear on him that sparked the verbal response for which he is now being ‘disciplined’ and which he and his parents are resisting.
If the school were an institution dedicated to real learning, it would encourage questioning, even though its teachers and managers might find that uncomfortable at times. It would value courage and principle and instead of persecuting this boy, would encourage him and value his principled stand, his courage and his persistence. But instead it does the opposite and because the boy’s parents do value their child’s principles and courage and want to support him, they also find themselves in conflict with the school.
Such small-scale battles go on constantly everywhere in our society, in institutes of education, in workplaces, in other organisations and associations, in communities. People fight those battles, often on their own or in little groups, or they fail to resist; whichever they do will affect their individual character and their social and political attitudes thereafter, one way or the other. Drawing on those lessons can lead to understanding more general truths about society and can also help to develop the strength of character to withstand psychological and other bullying and pressure at other times in life. Fair play to the boy for his principles and the courage to stand up for them against authority figures and fair play too to his parents who are supporting him.
They came down O’Connell Street in their tens of thousands – colourful banners and heart-shaped balloons, music in sections, black, brown and white faces and if many were old, many were also young – and not just the children brought by a parent. “Right to life” was the most common chant, obviously tailored to undermine their opposition’s “Right to choose”, from those who favour the unfettered right to abortion. And LIFE is the name of the organisation that brought these marchers together on their annual march through Dublin city centre.
Bad photo of approach of anti-abortion march in O’Connell Street
“Nobody has a right to kill!” was the last line in another chant. So with that, the name of their organisation and “Right to life”, we have what they are about, right? They are for life and are upholding, apparently, the Christian Commandment “Thou shalt not kill”. Yes, it was there on the tablets of stone Moses brought down the mountain, Number Six – wayyy down the list. Actually, apparently in Hebrew it translates as “Though shalt not murder”. And defining “murder” is not so simple either. But anyway, the Jewish faith has the same prohibition. In fact, there is hardly a religion that does not. Of course, the Old Testament also calls for “an eye for an eye” and says that “you shall not suffer a witch to live”. But anyway ….
Interestingly, the highest leaders of organised religions across the world have blessed their soldiers as they went off to kill soldiers and civilians in other lands. Sometimes their victims were infidels according to the ones who were killing them but often they didn’t even have that excuse, as when the first Crusade attacked the overwhelmingly Christian city of Damascus, or when Catholic Spain fought Catholic France, or when Protestant England fought Protestant Germany, or Catholic Italy invaded Catholic Spain, Catalonia and the Basque Country. But presumably, those pastors, bishops, pontiffs, cardinals and mullahs can fall back on the dispute about the meaning – it wasn’t “murder”, it was legal killing.
Two Special Branch officers (political police) centre photo in sunglasses — blue pattern shirt and brown T-shirt top next to him. There were eight SB identified, all watching the counter-protesters. The blue-patterned shirt individual threatened a counter-protester without identifying himself.
The wiping out of the Guanches of the Canaries was not murder, the genocide of the indigenous American “Indians”, the enslavement and consequent killing of hundreds of thousands of Africans – they were not murder either. Nor the wiping out of every single Tasmanian and most of the Australian Aborigines. The West was exploring and, by the way, bringing Christianity and civilization to those poor benighted people.
I’d hazard a guess that compiling a list of Christian bishops in most denominations who condemned the wars in Malaya, Korea and Vietnam would a short one. Cardinal Spellman, notorious as anti-communist and anti-militant organized labour, a supporter of McCarthy’s witch-hunts, had the words “Kill a Commie for Christ” put into his mouth due to his enthusiastic support for the US waging the Vietnam War. Leaving out the maimed in mind and body, even in the wombs of their mothers, somewhere between 1.5 and 3.6 million were killed in that war – but presumably they weren’t murdered.
Billions of people are killed by unsafe working conditions, uncontrolled pollution, police and army repression, crime in slums, famine, alcohol and drug addiction, curable disease – almost all conditions that can be avoided except that doing so would cut into profits of local capitalists and/or foreign “multinationals” (read, monopoly capitalists/ imperialists). Those “entrepreneurs” aren’t murdering anyone either, even when their practices are illegal (even by their own laws) …. The ways of God are indeed mysterious, certainly so if the ways of his representatives on Earth are anything to go by.
Some suggested actions for lowering the abortion rate which involve caring for people instead of just foetuses
I have digressed, mea culpa. I have gone down a well-worn philosophical and logical path to ask a particular question: Are those tens of thousands marching down O’Connell Street really for Life and against killing human beings? I doubt it and I have not seen among their number most people I see against the bombardment of Gaza or the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, nor vice versa. A few, certainly, but not many. So I have to assume that it is not life that they value so much, except the life of a foetus. And once born, it is pretty much up to luck what happens to that foetus, as far as most of these ardent defenders of life are concerned.
As I said, that philosophical and logical path of discussion has been well trodden before me and no doubt to better effect than mine here. But I wish now to take another path of discussion – I wish now not to criticise the opposition, the anti-abortion brigade, but rather ours, the pro-choice movement of which loosely I am a member.
All Irish surveys and opinion polls published show a rising trend of support for the unfettered right to abortion, even if that section is still a minority. The majority of those polled have been for a greater access to abortion than is currently available in this state. Furthermore, some scandals involving refused abortions, refused permission to travel and the death of a woman who needed an abortion have mobilised considerable passion which the pro-choice movement could enlist in its favour.
Yet, despite what the polls tell us, and despite those high-profile cases, the anti-abortioners succeed in mobilising much larger numbers in opposition to abortion than do those who are in favour of permitting it. Putting this conundrum to some pro-choice campaigners, they have all answered to the effect that the anti-abortioners receive huge funding from reactionary political and religious foundations, especially in the USA. They spend millions on advertising and propaganda, I am told.
I’m sorry, I don’t accept that reply. Because despite their well-funded advertising and propaganda, the opinion polls show a climbing majority for some access to abortion and a climbing minority in favour of unfettered access.
The Riot Squad were also there for the counter-demonstrators. Some may be seen in this misty image of them at the Princes Street end of the GPO.
The Antis just seem to be better at mobilising their supporters – why is that? Well, the funding again, I’m told. They hire coaches and bus people in. So why can’t we do that? Are we incapable of raising money to hire coaches? Obviously not in the case of the Water Tax, for example. Republican groups hire coaches traveling to other parts of the country and pay their share as individuals; they often fund their posters, placards, banners public meeting-room hires, for example through fund-raising events. We don’t see many fund-raising events in support of the right to abortion. In fact, the public doesn’t see much evidence of the movement as a rule except when we come out to protest about a high-profile case or to oppose the march of the anti-abortioners. And our movement doesn’t seem to do much mobilising for the latter, either. And this march happens every year so it can easily be planned for.
Yet how many were there to show their opposition to these tens of thousands of anti-abortion campaigners? Maybe six hundred …. at a very long stretch, a thousand. Going by the opinion polls, in Dublin alone there are a great many more people who support unfettered access to abortion than appear on that counter-demonstration.
Nor did we even distribute our meagre forces in the most effective way.
Each year, it is the same. The anti-abortion people march down from the Garden of Remembrance, and the pro-choice people wait for them at the Spire. Most on the island, some on the east side pavement. The heaviest concentration of people is on the island (or pedestrian reservation), between the Spire and for about 20 or so yards heading north. Then the line starts to straggle. We didn’t even stretch quite to Larkin’s statue. Even those low numbers, properly distributed, could reach from the Spire down to O’Connell Bridge. But we don’t do that. We bunch up in a short concentration so that every section of their march is quickly past us and, what’s more, it allows them to focus their loudhailers and PA systems on our heaviest concentration in order to drown us out, as they were doing on Saturday.
The section containing most of the counter-demonstrators, from left photo to the Spire. The anti-abortioners were able to park two mobile PAs in front of them there to drown out their opposition as the march went by.
Broadly speaking, we outnumber them but on most mobilisations, they outnumber us hugely. They appear more broadly militant and organise better. And they learn. I didn’t see anything like as many people in religious robes this year, which suggests to me that they are tailoring their presentation to avoid an over-identification in popular perception with religion. They can’t keep all their religious nutcases under wraps but I saw much less crosses or rosary-waving this year. They have adapted their slogans and chosen what seems the hardest argument to oppose, that which appears to be for “life”, and they ensure that they are all on message, chanting the same lines, again and again.
They are the reactionaries – how is that they seem better able to learn than us? Should it not be the other way around?
“In conclusion, it seems clear that both states in Ireland, the Irish one and the British colonial one, are employing refusal of bail and restrictive bail conditions in order to harass and intimidate political activists and to seriously disrupt their work.”
In excess of 50 Demonstrators formed three lines in Dublin’s O’Connell Street on Friday (19th June) to protest the continued incarceration of Steven Bennet, a political activist arrested while peacefully resisting the installation of water meters. Bennet was arrested on two consecutive nights – in the York Road area of Dun Laoghaire and in Bray – and on each occasion he was kept in custody overnight despite the Gardai knowing his address and where he could be contacted and despite the suggested charges not being particularly serious. Brought to court then, he was offered bail if he could provide a €1,000 surety, would submit to a nightly curfew between the hours of 10pm and 8.00am, would sign at a police station daily and would refrain from participation in political activity. A previous High Court ruling that his bail conditions should not interfere with his political activism was thereby changed by the same Court. Stating that these conditions were unreasonable, he refused and has been in jail now for nearly four weeks.
Protesters in Dublin outside GPO demand freeing of Steven Bennet (view northward excluding some on west side of central island)
The Irish Government has imposed a Water Tax on the population of the state although they pay for the maintenance of the public water system already through their taxes (and bizarrely, it was recently revealed, through their Motor Tax also). The Water Tax is extremely unpopular in Ireland and has given rise to huge national demonstrations as well as to local resistance and to the most widescale movement of civil disobedience since the resistance to the Household Tax a few years ago. Most people believe these new taxes are a means of funding the banking bailout and also that the public water service is being prepared for privatisation (a likely benificiary being Denis O’Brien, part-owner of the company currently installing the meters and among the 200 top world billionaires).
Banner and demonstrators protesting jailing of Steven Bennet (photo Vivienne)
Some of the local resistance involves blocking the road to the water meter trucks or, more usually, walking slowly in front of them to slow down their work. People have also interposed their bodies between the meter installation crews and the spot where they intend to drill into the pavement in order to install the meters.
(photo Vivienne)
We should ask ourselves and interrogate the State about why it wishes to impose these restrictions on an arrested political activist. Keeping someone in custody is a serious step in any democratic system. If they have not been convicted, the step is even more serious. Let us not forget that the legal system claims that any accused is presumed innocent until that changes by being found guilty in court. Keeping an innocent person in jail is supposed to be an extreme step, justified only by one or both of the following circumstances:
The accused is thought to be
a serious risk of flight from the jurisdiction before trial
a risk of interfering with witnesses expected to testify against him/her at trial
The “seriousness of the crime” is sometimes raised but that seems related to the “risk of flight”, i.e that the accused might contemplate fleeing the jurisdiction because of the likely seriousness of the punishment if s/he were to be convicted.
As observed earlier, the default position should be that bail is granted.
(photo Vivienne)
Conditions of bail
Conditions of bail are usually that the accused reside at an address supplied to the court – this relates to the defendant being found if required by the State. The accused may be released in his or her “own recognizance”, i.e without any sum being set.
Where sums of money are required to be placed as a surety for bail, these seem again to be related to “risk of flight” — in other words, the accused is thought less likely to flee if it will cost money to the accused or to the person guaranteeing the bail.
The justification for requiring a person to report at a police station every day at a certain time also seems also to have been conceived with regard to risk of flight – it is hard to see what other justification there could be for this. But in fact this makes no sense, since one can present at a police station at eight or nine pm (a frequent time given) but yet be out of the jurisdiction by midnight (in the case no curfew) or by 12 noon when there is a curfew imposed. One supposes it does permit the police to issue a warrant for arrest should the accused fail to sign in at 8pm or 9pm the next evening but that can hardly be a great advantage.
A curfew is sometimes imposed and it is difficult to see the justification for that either, unless it too is related to fear of the accused absconding from the jurisdiction but the same reservations apply to that as to the signing on at the police station requirement.
When these conditions and restrictions are imposed on political activists on charges which normally attract only fines if the accused were found guilty and only very short prison terms in worst case scenarios, what can the justification be? As a rule the accused is still politically active, highly visible to the police and without a history of absconding from the jurisdiction (in fact, often a history of the exact opposite, as in Bennet’s case). The witnesses against the activist are normally the Gardaí, who are supposed to be impervious to “interference” and even when they are others, there is usually no allegation of a fear that the accused is going to intimidate them).
It seems clear that the real reason for these restrictions and conditions are
to disrupt the life of the accused and thereby make him/ her pay a price whether or not s/he is later convicted in court
to disrupt the political life of the accused (interfering with organising, traveling, etc.)
to make it difficult for the accused to get bail (in the case of financial sureties), in which case
to make the accused suffer imprisonment for a period (through refusal of bail or through setting difficult and unreasonable conditions) even though perhaps not convicted later or, if convicted, not receiving a custodial sentence
to discourage others from following in the footsteps of the accused.
Increasingly, particularly in the case of Irish Republicans in the Six Counties, another requirement imposed has been to wear an electronic “tag” or bracelet which may not be removed until the State orders that done. This is usually explained as merely an enforcement of the above conditions but is a physical reminder, every minute of every day, a demeaning intrusion into one’s life.
Three lines of protesters in front of GPO, Dublin’s O’Connell Street (view southward), seeking freeing of Steven Bennet (Jim Larkin statue just visible in the background).
Also in the Six Counties, Irish Republicans on bail are being banned from use of the Internet, from having a mobile phone or, in the case where they are permitted one, being required to supply to the State the phone numbers dialed. Yet another condition has been not to reside within one’s own home town. Very common has been the requirement not to be in the company of others “convicted of terrorism” (if so, have they not served their time?) or merely “suspected of terrorism” (how would one know? The State will tell you!). In the Six Counties in particular, with its history of 30 years of war and subsequent political dissent from the Good Friday Agreement, not associating with anyone who has at some time been convicted of “terrorism” or is currently “suspected” of it, must be seriously difficult.
Apart from the restrictions on one’s personal freedom imposed by the above conditions, these are a massive interference with the facilities of a political organiser and there seems not even a pretence of any other justification for them. They are therefore unwarranted abuses of people’s civil liberties.
In conclusion, it seems clear that both states in Ireland, the Irish one and the British colonial one, are employing refusal of bail and restrictive bail conditions in order to harass and intimidate political activists and to seriously disrupt their work.
Accept the conditions?
Steven Bennet is currently refusing to accept the unreasonable restrictions being required of him in order to avail of bail. In the past, particularly in the Six Counties, others have done so too. One example there was Stephen Murney, of the Éirigi republican party, who was expected to agree to curfew, daily signing at a police station, electronic bracelet, not to reside in his home town of Newry or to approach within five miles of it and not to attend any political events. He refused to accept those conditions for 14 months and eventually was released on bail without the conditions shortly before his trial – at which he was found “not guilty”, which was no surprise since the charges were completely spurious. But Murney had already spent 14 months in jail.
Irish Republican Stephen Murney happy to be out on bail as his trial collapsed — but he had still done 14 months in custody before that.
In recent months, there seems to be a trend of people accepting the conditions in order to receive bail; this includes Republicans in the Six Counties and other water-meter protesters in Dun Laoghaire (on whom a variety of restrictions are being reported). Such acceptance represents in the short term a small victory for the State and in the longer term a significant defeat for civil liberties and the political opposition to the states.
One can hardly blame the activists who have accepted these conditions. The liberal civil liberties sector is silent on what is happening, as is largely the case with the organised Irish Left. When it seems that continued opposition to the bail restrictions can achieve no political objective due to lack of wide-scale protest, and one may be facing long months or even years in prison awaiting trial as a result of refusal, there seems little reason to continue the refusal to accept these restrictions.
Of course, these attacks are taking place on what the Left and liberal civil liberties sectors may see as the “fringes” — the Republicans and some unorthodox anti-water-meter protesters. Have we not learned the lessons of history? The attacks of fascism and the repressive State nearly always start at the “fringes”, from which they move in towards the core. Our silence on this now is in reality an assent to the State — “Go ahead if you like,” is the message the State is receiving, “we’re not going to do anything”. Unless the State goes for the core, of course. But will there be anyone left to mount a decent resistance when we finally decide we should?
Rebel Breeze: This piece was received months ago but somehow got overlooked for which we apologise. Events since then make the points in this short document perhaps even more relevant.
Red Roja describes itself as “a revolutionary marxist organisation active within the Spanish state”. It states that it is “an autonomous organisation independent of any other party or organisation and also economically and politically independent of the State or of any other power, being anticapitalist, of the class, feminist, radically democratic, internationalist, anti-fascist and ecologist.”
(Translation D.Breatnach from http://redroja.net/index.php/que-es-red-roja/quienes-somos)
In Spain, ‘The people should rule — that would be Dignity’
The following is a statement of the organization Red Network in Spain to the Dignity marches of March 21, a year after a similar march brought 1.5 million people to Madrid to protest austerity measures.
On March 22, 2014, more than a million people from all over the Spanish state
marched in Madrid for ‘Dignity’ against austerity
We once again demand that those who caused the crisis be made to pay for it.
An unpayable debt is crushing us, we who suffer every day from unbearable job insecurity, dismantling and privatization of health and education, increasing retirement age, the disappearance of aid for dependents, and our millions of unemployed people who are worth less than nothing to those in power. … The austerity measures and cuts are only being used to pay for a debt created to rescue the gang of bankers, big business people and their servants in the National Assembly, who are playing chess with our lives. Besides using our suffering to line their pockets, they expect us to hang our heads and die in silence. That we refuse to do.
Regarding this, we are nowhere near satisfied with hearing only about “restructuring” or “audits” of that debt. We cannot stop at half-measures when our lives are at stake, when there can be no doubt that this debt is responsible for the criminal foreclosures, the endless unemployment and for the disappearance of even the modest steps taken against domestic violence that condemns many women to terror, suffering and death. It is not a technical problem to say, “NO DEBT PAYMENT.” It is a punch that the people can throw to demand control of their own lives.
In these times, it is understandable that there are illusions that an election can bring “victory,” that we can “throw out the PP” [the rightist Popular Party] or “get rid of the wealthy strata.” But more is needed. No one involved in the new electoral initiatives is speaking about the national and European laws that impose the payment of that illegitimate and criminal debt before anything else. Good will is not enough; neither is honesty. Proof of this is the victory of Syriza in Greece, which has not pushed back by even one step the measures the Troika [the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank] had taken against the Greek people. It has become clear who rules Greece: It’s the EU dictatorship. Democracy is an illusion.
Moreover, even this demonstration, though necessary, is insufficient. It is not enough to come together to demand “Bread, Work and Housing” (things that would only be possible after we refuse to pay the debt), or to have a great demonstration of dignity. As seen in Greece and as we see every day in our streets, bankers and big business are not going to give up lining their pockets out of good will.
We need to unite, to organize neighborhoods, towns, businesses and schools, and strike a blow together, all at one time. Only through the unification of our struggles, only if the people who are working and suffering get organized, can we bring about policies that work in our own favor.
The vote is not enough. The people need to organize. The people need to rule.
The role of women has been often ignored and undervalued in the body of Irish historical writing. Whatever the reasons for this state of affairs, a tendency in more recent writing has been, at least to a degree, to attempt to rectify this. In the decades since Margaret Ward’s Unmanageable Revolutionaries (Brandon, Ireland, 1983), this rectification has been slowly gathering pace. Dissidents – Irish Republican women 1923-1941, by Anne Matthews (Mercier, 2012), is a contribution to this movement in historical writing; it is essentially the history of an Irish women’s political movement, Cumann na mBan, during the years outlined. A previous work of hers, “Renegades”, deals with Irish Republican women from 1901 to 1922.
Although Dissidents deals with the period 1923-1941, Cumann na mBan was founded on 2nd April 1914 as an auxiliary to the all-male Irish Volunteers’ organisation, which had been founded in 1913. In 1914 the Volunteers split after John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party (in Westminster) and the main open Irish political party in Ireland, committed the Irish Volunteers to fight in the British Army in WW1. The smaller section of the split went on to participate in the 1916 Uprising and more coherently later in the War of Independence (1919-1921). Redmond’s party and “constitutional” Irish nationalism was all but wiped out in the British General Elections of 1918, at which time the whole of Ireland was still under British rule and Redmond’s nationalist opponents, then amalgamated under the name of the reformed Sinn Féin, gained the vast majority of parliamentary seats in Ireland.
Today it is common to define the ideology of both both Cumann na mBan and the Irish Volunteers as “Irish Republican” and, although they quickly became so, and the impulse in the formation of the Volunteers in 1913 was of the secret Republican organisation the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood), both organisations at first could be more accurately described as broadly nationalist. Both organisations contained prominently in their midst people whose ideology conformed to that of Irish Republicanism as well as those whose thinking did not, people who expressed a strong interest in equality for women as well as those who were against it, people with at least a sympathy for socialist ideas and those who condemned any such tendencies – and of course variations in between.
In the period specifically chosen by Matthews, 1923-1941, the Irish Volunteers had morphed into the political party Sinn Féin and the armed organisation the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and become Irish Republican in ideology, as had Cumann na mBan. They had in fact been that way since 1919, although the period 1921-’23 was to expose some deep fracture lines which found expression in the Civil War (1922-1923) and later again with the founding of Fianna Fáil and its eventual management of the Irish State (the 26 Counties).
In order to compile her history, Matthews has consulted minutes of committee meetings of Cumann na mBan in its various incarnations (she identifies four periods, or versions of the organisation), personal recollections of participants recorded in writings, interviews, comments quoted by contemporaries, newspaper reports and articles, the Republican movement’s own publications, as well as records of prisons and police under both British and subsequently Free State rule. And she has used some of this material to reproduce and also compile lists such as the numbers and names of women convicted and jailed, the women who went on hunger-strike and the length of time on that protest. The lists also include figures on the decline of Cumann branches between 1934 and 1936, as well as a list of “women in organisations listed as dangerous by the Free State CID in 1934”. These lists are a particularly valuable contribution and will be of great use to many writing on the political movements of the period in Ireland.
Looking at some of those lists alone, one is struck by the sheer extent to which the contribution of women activists to the struggle for Irish independence, and the price they had to pay, has been overlooked. In 1930 twenty-nine women were in organisations listed as “dangerous” by the Free State detective branch of the police – twelve of these were in senior positions of Cumann na mBan, three in directing positions in Saor Éire, three for Comhairle na Poblachta, three also for Sinn Féin, one for the Prisoners’ Defence Organisation, two for Women Prisoners’ Defence League and one for the Anti-Imperialist League. The rest were rank-and-file members of those organisations and one was in Friends of Soviet Russia.
The Free State interned 645 women during the Civil War (as against over16,000 men). In her Introduction, Matthews points out that “There were twenty-four strikes in the three (women’s) prisons during the period from November 1922 to November 1923, in which 219 women took part.” According to the table drawn up by Matthews, one woman was on hunger strike for 35 days, another for 34, seven for 31, many for different amounts of days but the vast majority into double figures. Furthermore, some of them were on hunger strike more than once.
Matthews also provides a list of the occupations of 79 women activists jailed in the North Dublin Union, which were surveyed in August 1923: the highest number for a single occupation were the 19 listed as “at home”, while the next were 11 whose occupations were given as “packer in Jacob’s” (the biscuit factory in Dublin); 10 had been engaged in “printing”; eight were “shop assistants” while 15 were variously listed as “typist” or “clerk”. This list shows quite a variety of social background among what one presumes to be fairly politically-active women which the Free State considered its enemies.
Republican women acting as couriers or delivering weapons made many journeys by bicycle, often at night without lights in order to avoid Free State patrols, “often round trips of up to forty miles” Matthew tells us (p.32).
BIAS
As has been pointed out by a number of commentators, history writing involves a degree of bias. This bias is exercised not only in explicit judgements but in inferences made, choice of phrasing and so on. Choices are made in what sources to use and what prominence to give them as well as in the opposite, which sources to disregard.
If the Fall of Lucifer and his angel followers were a historical event, for example, we would expect Lucifer’s version to be very different from the Judaeo-Christian story with its sympathy for the Archangel Michael (a great example of history being written by the victors). There might be yet other versions, for example by the Seraphim and Cherubim, one of which might be in partial sympathy with the Fallen side and the other which might be against both sides of the conflict.
Whereas in the ancient past history writing was blatantly partial, in the past century historians have generally claimed to be impartial dispassionate observers recording what they discover. But every one of those writers had views influenced by class, ethnicity, gender, position in or out of power groups, status, upbringing and personal experience. And those views influenced their historical judgements, quite likely their choice of sources and possibly their choice of audience. Written records could only be left by literate people and yet for most of history the majority of people have been illiterate. A more recent trend in history writing is to recognise the inevitability of bias and for the historian to declare which is his or hers.
One should beware of historians who don’t declare their bias at the outset. That will not be a problem with Anne Matthews because although she does not formally introduce her bias to her readers, it very soon becomes clear. Or maybe that is not quite accurate, for in order to have a bias against a group one must presumably also have a bias in favour of another. It is difficult indeed in the pages of this book to find any group for which Matthews has any sympathy or, even more important for a historian, empathy.
To express a bias is expected, as I commented earlier. But unless one is engaged in pure propaganda or character assassination (or glorification), one should present the evidence in favour as well as that against and, in weighing one against the other, make a judgement. When Matthews has anything favourable to say about her subjects it seems to be an accident which will soon be remedied a little later – just keep reading!
A particularly clear and nasty example of this bias is in Matthews’ treatment of Constance Markievicz whom she calls a “self-proclaimed heroine” (p.28) but does not tell us when and where Markievicz allegedly “proclaimed” herself to be a “heroine”. Matthews also inferred that Markievicz was a given to warlike statements but a coward who ran away to Scotland. Whatever the reason for her departure in 1922, one wonders how, no matter how much she may dislike the person, someone could call Markievicz, who prominently took up arms and fought for a week against the British Empire, a coward.
In the Matthews view of the organisation, Cumann na mBan was a largely ineffective body, doctrinaire and full of in-fighting. The leadership and many prominent activists were aristocratic or upper middle class, used to the privileges afforded by their class. The working and lower-middle class members accepted the leadership’s decisions or just deserted.
Some of those things may be true and there might even be some truth in all of them — but where is the counter-argument before coming to judge? One doesn’t find it in Matthews, except by an inference that one can make from the lists I mentioned earlier and other information.
If a woman came from a higher social class and was used to having servants do her cleaning, do those facts diminish in the least her courage in facing bullets in insurrection, the threat of the firing squad, the pangs on hunger-strike and the risk of permanent damage to health, the risk of physical beatings and unhealthy prison conditions? Or on the contrary, in some ways, are those risks and sacrifices not all the more remarkable for one from such a background as that? And if an upper-class mother can pay a nanny to look after her children while she herself in in jail, does that take away from her courage and fortitude? A working-class mother without those resources (though she might be able to avail of extended family) of course has even more obstacles to surmount and deserves our greater praise but that is no reason to disparage the sacrifice or commitment of a woman of a higher class.
And if infighting and bad policy choices were a significant feature of the organisation, were there not others to weigh against them on the scales of judgement? What of transporting, hiding and distributing weapons? Of carrying secret correspondence and intelligence? Or of continuing to feed the flame of resistance while men were in prison, organising pickets and demonstrations, outside jails etc? What of creating the enduring 1916 emblem and Republican commemoration emblem, the Easter Lilly? Or of organising Republican commemorations year after year, as well as funerals of fighters in the midst of repression? Or the work of supporting prisoners and their dependents? Matthews records these and often the difficulties entailed but without a word of approval to balance the censorious words used in her criticisms. Nor do we see an attempt to understand the choices these women made or the constraints upon them, much less see anything to admire; we are shown few lessons to learn from, unless it is something like “don’t be these people or anything like them”.
In Dissidents, Anne Matthews has made a contribution to the story of Republican women but its judgement is clearly skewed and the work suffers as a result. Matthews could have recorded all the negative information that she did but also the points to throw in the balance – had she done so, her book would have been a much better return on her investment in historical research and writing as well as a better reward for the reader.
The returning officer, Ríona Ní Fhlanghaile, has declared that the 26-County state has voted in the Referedum IN FAVOUR OF INSERTING A CLAUSE IN THE CONSTITUTION THAT PERMITS COUPLES OF EITHER GENDER TO MARRY by 1,201,607 votes to 734,300. That’s 62.1% yes to 37.9% no. The total turnout was 60.5% which is higher than in some other Irish referenda. The “Yes” vote exceeded the “No” in every county in the state except in Roscommon, where the vote was close. The “Yes” vote was significantly higher in all other counties and generally across rural and urban areas too.
The vote in favour is not surprising given that all the main political parties, as well as Sinn Fein and Left parties were all advocating a “Yes” vote. However, on its own that does not explain the wide gap between the two positions and the high turnout, especially in the face of the Irish Catholic Church hierarchy’s position against legalisation of same-sex marriage. It is hard not to see this as to some extent a conscious decision to oppose or ignore the Church’s position and to take a stand in favour of equality and civil rights.
When the votes are counted after today, we will either have a new clause inserted into our Bunreacht (Constitution) or we will not. If we do not, many of the “Vote Yes” campaign and opinion will be despondent. The revolutionaries among them should not be so but should instead reflect on their weakness as a force and on how to make that force stronger.
Should the vote result in a change in the Constitution, it will be probably the biggest blow so far to the power of the Catholic Church in lay society, a power it has enjoyed and abused even before 1921 but certainly since. Some, on both sides of the question, will see it as a blow against the Catholic religion itself but that is not necessarily so. Christianity and its Catholic variant survived and even thrived without State support in the past – indeed when its followers were discriminated against in every conceivable way by State power, a situation its faithful endured for centuries in Ireland as a whole and continue to do today, to a lesser extent, in the Six Counties.
What is the issue upon which we were being called to vote today? Although the NO campaign has tried to make us think it is, it is clearly not about whether two-gender households are better for raising children, whether surrogate birthing is right or wrong. It is not about whether we approve or homosexuality or not – although I suspect that is the real issue at base with many of the NO campaigners. In fact, it seems to me that it would be quite possible to disapprove of homosexuality and still to vote “Tá”, a question I will return to later. This might seem illogical, until we examine the actual issue upon which we are voting: do we agree with inserting a clause into the Bunreacht (Constitution) which states that a couple has a right to marryregardless of gender.
Presented with this question, which is a legal and Constitutional one, a number of issues arise, I think.
What does the Bunreacht say at the moment about this question?
What right has the State to define anything about sexual relationships?
Are we in favour of equal civil rights for people?
1. It may come as a surprise to people that our Bunreacht, our Constitution, currently says nothing about the gender issue in marriage. There is nothing actually in our Bunreacht to prevent same-sex marriage. But the prohibition does exist in law. In other words, legislators at some point decided to propose and pass a law which confined the right (and rite) of marriage to heterosexual couples alone. Why did they do so if it was not an issue at that time? It seems to me that they were aware that same sex relationships did exist and strove to exclude those people from the rights enjoyed by others. This was the point of a number of other pieces of legislation against homosexuality which were not finally overturned until 1993 in this State (1982 in the Six Counties, 1980 in Scotland, 1967 in England and Wales) – five years after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that this state’s laws against male homosexual acts violated human rights.
According to the Catholic Church (and most other churches), despite the current legal situation with regard to homosexuality at the moment, it is still wrong. Well, the Catholic Church – and before them the established Anglican Church of Ireland – can have their views but they are not entitled, nor is any other church, to impose those on lay society, neither by legislation nor by other means. They are, of course, entitled to express their opinion – just like any other organisation.
“God and Nature say NO” was the caption on this placard paraded in O’Connell St. near the Spire, some weeks prior to the Referendum. Some young people are arguing with the placard-holder.One of the many badges worn in support of a vote to insert the clause into the Irish Constitution. There was also an English-language one and each were to be seen nearly everywhere in public in the weeks prior to the Referendum.
So, going back to the beginning of the legal status of heterosexual marriage within our current legal system, it was introduced as an excluding measure, at a time when male homosexuality was illegal and subject to heavy punishment and when lesbianism was frowned upon (though not actually illegal for complicated reasons). In other words, a law excluding a group of people was passed at a time when any man who declared himself to be one of those people was subject to prison sentence and any woman who did so was subject to extreme opprobrium in society. What chance was there for their point of view to be represented? In the absence of such representation and informed opinion-making, how can any democrat defend the laws passed at that time?
2. Turning now to the question of what right the State has to make a ruling of any kind upon a sexual relationship between any two people, of either gender, it must be difficult indeed for anyone to justify that without recourse to church canon or prejudice. Those who do so tend to bring up questions of childcare, inheritance and taxation – in fact just about the same questions that were brought up in the Irish referendum on divorce in 1995. But childcare, or at least the financial aspect of it, can be regulated by the State without any interference whatsoever in the sexual relationship between the parents. Whether it does so fairly at the moment is another question which has no bearing on the concept. And inheritance – ignoring for a moment whether we agree with a political economy where land and other wealth may be appropriated by individuals or families and then legally handed on through their following generations — can also be managed without recourse to State regulation of marriage. Taxation, similarly. Were we to have a socialist society, one based on other principles than that which we now have, even those current excuses for state interference should no longer be even a consideration. In fact, it is difficult to see any reason why even now the State continues to have a role in the formalisation of a sexual contract between two individuals or, indeed, in its dissolution, except perhaps in ensuring fair divisions of belongings.
3. Those opposed to insertion of the new clause into the Bunreacht have done so from a number of perspectives of opposition: to lesbianism and homosexuality on religious or other grounds; to formalising same sex relationships; to the alleged undermining of the “sanctity of marriage” or of “romance”; in opposition to surrogate child-bearing and raising of children by gay and lesbian parents ….
Those supporting the new clause have defended the naturally-occurring continuum of sexual preference; maintained that the “sanctity of marriage” will be the same between same-sex couples, as will “romance”; denied that it opens the way to or encourages surrogate child-bearing and raising of children within a gay or lesbian household ….
Who is right and who is wrong? There is no doubt that as long as cultural beliefs and practices have been recorded, homosexuality and lesbianism have existed within societies — sometimes tolerated, often repressed, on rare occasions celebrated. We see homosexuality occurring too among animals. If there is such a thing as “sanctity of marriage” and “romance”, why should same-sex couples have any less of it than heterosexuals? Surrogate child-bearing is already possible and the hugely unequal distribution of wealth in our society – and between even our society and many others – ensures it can and will continue while the rewards are financial. Raising of children within a same-sex household is already happening, even without surrogacy. It is more difficult for gay men at present, but in the case of a gay man having custody of his children through widowhood (yes, some gay men do marry women), or the mother deserting the children or being deemed unfit by a court to have custody, a gay man may bring up his children within a homosexual parent household.
But will this change in the Constitution (and therefore also in the law) make surrogacy and child-rearing by gay couples more likely to happen? Will it increase the frequency of its occurrence? I think the answer to that, logically, must be yes – despite all the denials of the “Vote Yes” camp. And I think some of them must know that. Slowly perhaps and who knows by how much – but logically it must tend to increase the chances. But is that so awful? I find the idea of surrogacy in general distasteful but isn’t that just a prejudiced reaction? Probably. Will children reared by same-sex parents experience uncertainty about their own sexuality? Some will probably and some won’t. And if they do, why should they not be able to resolve that in time – as children reared in heterosexual relationships also find themselves having to do? Is uncertainty about sexuality such a terrible thing? In a judgmental, prohibitive and penalising society, it can be – so let’s create a society that is the opposite.
However, I have to say that I think all those questions and considerations are beside the point. If marriage is to be a legal status, then it is a civil right for everyone who is at the age of consent (and of sufficient mental ability to know to what they are consenting — in so much as any one of us was or does!). The right to same-sex marriage, as a civil right, should be supported even by people who do not approve of homosexuality, or marriage, or surrogacy, of child-rearing in a homosexual household. As for myself, someone who seeks revolutionary social, economic and political change, who wishes to see the overthrow of this State, a revolutionary as opposed to a reformist, I must nevertheless support reforms that extend civil rights, even when not led from below …. and so I voted “TÁ”.
Politics is about the present and the future, obviously … but it is also about the past.
Different political interests interpret and/or represent the past in different ways, emphasising or understating different events or aspects or even ignoring or suppressing them entirely. There is choice exercised in whom (and even what particular pronouncement) to quote and upon what other material to rely. And by “political interests” I mean not only groups, formal (such as political parties) or informal, but also individuals. Each individual is political in some way, having opinions about some aspects of questions that are political or at least partly-political. For example, one often hears individuals say today that they have no interest in politics, yet express strong opinions of one kind or another about the right to gay and lesbian marriage, the influence of the Catholic Church, and how the country is being run by Governments.
So when an individual writes a history book, there are going to be political interpretations, although not all writers admit to their political position, their prejudices or leanings, in advance or even in the course of their writing. One historian who does so is Padraig Yeates, author of a number of historical books: Lockout –Dublin 1913 (a work unlikely to be ever equalled on the subject of the title), A City In Wartime — 1914-1919, A City in Turmoil – 1919-1921and his latest, A City in Civil War – Dublin 1921-’24. The latter was launched on Tuesday of this week, 12th May and therefore much too early for people for who did not receive an earlier copy to review it. So it is not on the book that I am commenting here but rather on the speeches during the launch, which were laden with overtly political references to the past and to the present. If a review is what you wanted, this would be an appropriate moment to stop reading and exit – and no hard feelings.
The launch had originally been intended to take place at the new address at 17 D’Olier Street, D2, of Books Upstairs. However the interest indicated in attending was so great that Padraig Yeates, realising that the venue was going to be too small, went searching for a larger one. Having regard to how short a time he then had to find one and with his SIPTU connections, Liberty Hall would have been an obvious choice. Whether he had earlier been asked to speak at the launch I do not know but, having approached Jack O’Connor personally to obtain the use of Liberty Hall, in the latter’s role of President of SIPTU, the owners of that much-underused theatre building, it was inevitable too that O’Connor would be asked to speak and act as the MC for the event.
O’Connor’s introduction was perhaps of medium length as these things go. He talked about the author’s work in trade unions, as a journalist and as an author of books about history. O’Connor’s speech however contained much political comment. Speaking of the period of the Civil War (1919-1923), he said it had “formed what we have become as a people”. That is a statement which is of dubious accuracy or, at very least, is open to a number of conflicting interpretations. The Civil War, in which the colonialism-compromising Irish capitalist class defeated the anti-colonial elements of the nationalist or republican movement, formed what the State has become – not the people. The distinction between State and People is an essential one in our history and no less so in Ireland today.
Talking about the State that had been created in 1921 (and not mentioning once the creation of the other statelet, the Six Counties) and referring to the fact that alone among European nations, our population had not risen during most of the 20th Century and remained lower than it had been up to nearly the mid-Nineteenth, a state of affairs due to constant emigration, O’Connor laid the blame on the 26-County State and in passing, on the capitalist class which it served. He was undoubtedly correct in blaming the State for its failure to create an economic and social environment which would stop or slow down the rate of emigration – but he did not explain why it was in the interests of the capitalists ruling the state to do so. Nor did he refer to the cause of the original drastic reduction in Ireland’s population and the start of a tradition of emigration – the Great Hunger 1845-’49.
The Great Hunger memorial on Dublin’s Custom House Quay. The Great Hunger and its immediate aftermath initiated mass Irish emigration.
Even allowing for the fact that O’Connor wished to focus on the responsibility of the 26-County State, the Great Hunger was surely worthy of some mention in the context of Irish population decline. Just a little eastward along the docks from Liberty Hall is the memorial to that start of mass Irish emigration. It was the colonial oppression of the Irish people which had created the conditions in which the organism Phytophthora infestans could create such devastation, such that in much less than a decade, Ireland lost between 20% and 25% of its population, due to death by starvation and attendant disease and due also to emigration (not forgetting that many people emigrating died prematurely too, on the journey, upon reaching their destination and subsequently). Phytophthora devastated potato crops in the USA in 1843 and spread throughout Europe thereafter, without however causing such a human disaster as it did in Ireland. In Mitchell’s famous words: “The Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.” And that is what makes that period of population decline uncomfortable for some historical commentators.
Indeed, O’Connor did not mention British colonialism once, nor Partition, nor imperialism. And nor did either of the other two speakers, nor the author. I remarked on this to an Irish Republican present, to which he responded with a rhetorical question: “Did you expect them to?” Well, yes, perhaps naively, I did. While not expecting an Irish Republican analysis from Padraig Yeates and perhaps not either from anyone he would consider appropriate to speak at the launch of one of his books, dammit, we are talking about history. The presence of Norman/English/British Colonialism for 800 years prior to the creation of the Irish Free State, and its influence on that state’s creation and on subsequent events in Ireland, is worthy of at least a mention in launching a book about the Civil War. Not to mention its continuing occupation of one-fifth of the nation’s territory.
Colonialism and Imperialism and, in particular, the Irish experience of the British variant, were not so much ‘the elephant in the room‘ at the launch as a veritable herd of pachyderms. They overshadowed us at the launch and crowded around us, we could hear them breathing and smell their urine and excreta – but no-one mentioned them. The date of the launch was the anniversary of the execution of James Connolly 99 years ago, a man whom the Labour Party claims as its founder (correctly historically, if not politically), a former General Secretary of the ITGWU, forerunner of SIPTU and the HQ building of which, Liberty Hall, was a forerunner too of the very building in which the launch was taking place. His name and the anniversary was referred to once, though not by O’Connor, without a mention of Sean Mac Diarmada, executed in the same place on the same day. And most significantly of all, no mention of who had Connolly shot and under which authority.
That circumspection, that avoidance, meant that a leader of Dublin capitalists, William Martin Murphy, could not be mentioned with regard to Connolly’s death either — i.e. his post-Rising editorial in the Irish Independent calling for the execution of the insurgents’ leaders. But of course he did get a mention, or at least the class alliance he led in 1913 did, in a bid to smash the ITGWU, then under the leadership of Larkin and Connolly. This struggle, according to O’Connor and, it must be said also to Padraig Yeates, was the real defining struggle of the early years of the 20th Century, not the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence nor yet the Irish Civil War. It was in 1913 that “the wrong side won”.
One-eyed as that historical vision must be, we have to question whether it is even partially correct. The Lockout was a great defeat for the ITGWU and for the leading elements in the Irish workers’ movement. But the Lockout did not break the trade union and, in fact, it later began to grow in membership and in branches. Other trade unions also survived and some expanded. So in what manner was 1913 decisive in ensuring that “the wrong side won” in later years? The Irish trade union movement was still able to organise a general strike against conscription in April 1918 and the class to organise a wave of occupations of workplaces in April 1919.
True, the Irish working class had lost one of its foremost theoreticians and propagandists by then, in the person of James Connolly. And who was it who had him shot? Not Murphy (though he’d have had no hesitation in doing so) nor the rest of the Irish capitalist class. In fact, worried about the longer-term outcome, the political representatives of the Irish ‘nationalist‘ capitalist class for so long, the Irish Parliamentary Party, right at the outset and throughout, desperately called for the executions to halt. General Maxwell, with the support of British Prime Minister Asquith, ordered and confirmed the executions of Connolly and Mallin of the Irish Citizen Army and British Army personnel pulled the triggers; in essence it was British colonialism that executed them, along with the other fourteen.
For the leaders of the Labour Party and of some of the trade unions, and for some authors, Padraig Yeates among them, the participation of Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army in the Rising was an aberration. For these social democrats, the struggle should have been against the Irish capitalist class only (and preferably by an unarmed working class). It is an inconvenient fact that Ireland was under colonial occupation of a state that had strangled much of the nation’s economic potential (and therefore of the growth of the working class) in support of the interests of the British capitalist class. It is an inconvenient fact that the Irish capitalist class had been divided into Unionist and Nationalist sections, the former being descendants of planter landowners and entrepreneurs whose interests were completely bound up in Union with Britain. It is an inconvenient fact that the British and the Unionists had suppressed the last truly independent expression of the Irish bourgeoisie, the United Irishmen and, in order to do so effectively, had created and enhanced sectarian divisions among the urban and rural working and middle classes. It is also an inconvenient fact that the British cultivated a client “nationalist” capitalist class in Ireland and that the police and military forces used to back up Murphy’s coalition in 1913 were under British colonial control.
To my mind, a good comprehensive analysis of the decline inprominence of the Irish working class on the political stage from its high point in early 1913 and even in 1916, has yet to be written. One can see a number of factors that must have played a part and the killing of Connolly was one. But something else happened between 1913 and 1916 which had a negative impact on the working class, not just in Ireland but throughout the World. In July 1914, WW1 started and in rising against British colonialism in Ireland, Connolly also intended to strike a blow against this slaughter. As the Lockout struggle drew to its close at the end of 1913 and early 1914, many union members had been replaced in their jobs and many would find it hard to regain employment, due to their support for the workers and their resistance to the campaign to break the ITGWU. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that many joined the British Army or went to work in war industries in Britain. Although the Irish capitalist class supported the British in that War (up to most of 1917 at any rate) it was imperialism which had begun the war and British Imperialism which recruited Irish workers into its armed forces and industries.
Reaching back in history but to different parts of Europe, Padraig Yeates, in his short and often amusing launch speech, cracked that “for years many people thought Karl Kautsky’s first name was ‘Renegade’ ” — a reference to the title of one of Lenin’s pamphlets: The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Yeates apparently admires Kautsky and quoted him on Ireland. But Kautsky advocated no uprisings against imperialism or colonialism in the belief that “super-imperialism” (also called “Hyper Imperialism”) would regulate itself peacefully, letting socialists get on with the task of evolving socialism. Two World Wars since then and current developments have negated Kautsky’s theory but more to the point, to advocate his theory as a guiding principle at the time he did was a major ideological threat to proletarian revolution and to the evolving anti-colonial struggles of the world and therefore he was a renegade to any variant of genuine socialism and socialist struggle.
This is relevant in analysing the position of the trade union leaders and the Irish Labour Party today. They are social democrats and their central thesis is that it is possible to reform capitalism, by pressure on and by involvement in the State. They deny what Lenin and others across the revolutionary socialist spectrum declare, that the state serves the ruling class and cannot be coopted or taken over but for socialism to succeed, must be overthrown.
It is the social-democratic analysis that underpinned decades of the trade union leaders’ social partnership with the employers and the State, decades that left them totally unprepared, even if they had been willing, to declare even one day’s general strike against the successive attacks on their members, the rest of the Irish working class and indeed the lower middle class too since 2011. Indeed Padraig Yeates, speaking at a discussion on trade unions at the Anarchist Bookfair a year or two ago, conceded that social partnership had “gone too far”. Can Jack or any other collaborationist trade union leader blame that on the transitory defeat of the 1913 Lockout? They may try to but it is clear to most people that the blame does not lie there.
Two other speakers addressed the audience at the launch, Katherine O’Donnell and Caitriona Crowe. Catriona Crowe is Head of Special Projects at the National Archives of Ireland and, among other responsibilities, is Manager of the Irish Census Online Project, an Editor of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, Vice-President of the Irish Labour History Society. She is also Chairperson of the SAOL Project, a rehabilitation initiative for women with addiction problems, based in the North Inner City. It was her, I think, who made the only mention of “Blueshirts” and her also that mentioned the anniversary of James Connolly. Although her speech was overlong in my opinion for a book launch in which she had already been preceded by two longish speeches, strangely I can remember very little of what she had to say.
Katherine O’Donnell’s contribution however made a considerable impression upon me. She declared herself early in the speech to be lesbian and a campaigner for gay and lesbian rights and is Director of the Women’s Studies Centre at the School of Social Justice at UCD. O’Donnell began by praising Padraig Yeates’ work, of which she declared herself “a fan”. In a speech which at times had me (and sometimes others too) laughing out loud, she discussed the contrast in the fields of historical representation between some historians and those who construct historical stories through the use of imagination as well as data; she denounced the social conservatism of the state, including the parameters of the upcoming referendum on same-sex marriage, the legal status of marriage in general and the climate of fear of prosecution engendered by the shameful capitulation of RTE to the Iona Institute on the accusation of “homophobia” (she did not mention them specifically but everyone knew to what she was referring).
After the launch speeches — (L-R) Padraig Yeates, Katherine O’Donnell, Caitriona Crowe.
Jack O’Connor, between speeches, made a reference to a giant banner hanging off Liberty Hall which had the word “NO” displayed prominently, saying that they had received congratulatory calls from people who thought it was against same-sex marriage. The banner was however against privatisation of bus services. The current banner on Liberty Hall says “YES” to the proposal in the forthcoming referendum and he said that now busmen were calling them up complaining …. to laughter, O’Connor commented that “it’s hard to the right thing, sometimes”. Presumablywhat he meant was that it is hard to know what the right thing to do is, or perhaps to please everybody.
It is indeed hard to please everybody but I’d have to say that it is not hard to know that the purpose of and‘the right thing to do’ for a trade union, is to fight effectively and with commitment for its members and for the working class in general. And that is precisely the responsibility which has been abrogated by Jack
In the background to this photograph of a Reclaim the Streets demonstration in 2002 is Liberty Hall, draped in a hug “Vote Labour” banner. SIPTU has maintained that position through a number of coalition governments in which Labour has participated and that have attacked the living standards and rights of workers.
O’Connor personally, along with other leaders of most of the trade unions, including the biggest ones for many years, SIPTU and IMPACT. And also by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. That is why Jack O’Connor gets booed now if he ever dares stand on a public platform related to trade union struggle, a treatment received also by David Beggs before he retired from the Presidency of ICTU.
Back in 2011, another giant banner hung from Liberty Hall – that time it urged us to VOTE LABOUR, as did leaders of other trade unions. Stretching magnanimity, we might give the trade union leaders the benefit of the doubt and say they had forgotten that the Labour Party had only ever been in Government in coalition, most often with the right-wing Blueshirt Fine Gael party and that its most recent spell sharing power had given us one of the most repressive governments in the history of the State. Let us imagine for a moment that these social-democratic union leaders had forgotten all that. But, after February 2011, as Labour and Fine Gael went into coalition and both reneged on their election promises, as the Coalition government began to attack the working class and the lower middle class, what is their excuse then? When did they denounce the Labour Party to their members, publicly disaffiliating from the party? No, never, and the fact that those disgusting connections continue was underlined by the presence at the book launch of a Labour Party junior Government Minister and the late arrival of noneother than Joan Burton, Minister for Social Constriction …. er, sorry, Protection.
Plaques in Glasnevin’s Republican Plot recording the names of 77 of the 81 Irish Volunteers officially executed by the Free State between November 1922 and May 1923. Their police and military killed about another 150 without judicial procedure.
Considering that the book being launched was about the Civil War, it is really extraordinary that no speaker mentioned the repression by the Free State during and after that war. I am certain that Padraig Yeates has not glossed over that, he is much too honest and too good a historian to do so. But that only one speaker at the launch (Catriona Crowe) should mention the sinister Oriel House and none the at least 25 murders its occupants organised, nor the 125 other murders by Irish Free State soldiers and police, nor the 81 state executions between November 1922 and January 1923, sets one wondering at just how much self-hypnosis sections of our political and academic classes are capable.
rebelbreeze 