textfiles/politics/SPUNK/sp000418.txt

            WORKERS SOLIDARITY
     Paper of the Irish anarchist group,
         Workers Solidarity Movement
   No 43 Autumn 1994 (electronic addition)

Part 2  (Ireland & Imperialism) 21k

In this section

It was always time to go..Troops out now!
When British army chiefs refused to obey orders
Nationalism...No Thanks
When the Falls & the Shankill fought together

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        IT WAS ALWAYS TIME TO GO
             TROOPS OUT NOW

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, on Thursday, August 
the 15th, 1969, 400 soldiers from the Prince 
of Wales Own Yorkshire Regiment took up 
positions around Derry city.  Why they 
arrived has been the subject of myth making 
and distortion for the last 25 years.  The 
myth is a simple one, that the function of 
the British army in the 6 counties is to 
preserve the peace, to keep apart fanatical 
Catholics and Protestants who would 
otherwise tear each others throat out at the 
first opportunity.

It is a myth, which like all good ones, 
incorporates elements of the truth.  After 
the last months few need to be reminded of 
the vicious actions of the loyalist death 
squads.  But despite this grain of truth it 
is in fact a distortion, even a lie.  Far 
from the aim of the army being to break down 
such sectarianism their role was to support 
it and prevent the development of an 
alternative to it.  The point the army moved 
in was the point at which the Stormont 
controlled sectarian police was losing 
control of Derry and there was a danger that 
if this situation continued an alternative 
centre of power could develop.

The troops arrived in the six counties, not 
to enforce equality, but in opposition to 
what the demand for equal rights had come 
to.  The refusal to grant reform and the 
deployment of considerable state force to 
smash the reform movement had led not 
surprisingly to people fighting back.  It 
was this fightback that the troops had 
arrived to defuse and if necessary smash.  

The northern state was created in 1921 as a 
sectarian state, "a Protestant state for a 
Protestant people" as Lord Brookeborough, 
one of its Prime Ministers called it.  Its 
ruling class protected their power by 
maintaining sectarianism; from calls by 
Brookeborough (again) to only employ loyal 
Protestants, to loyalist death squads 
killing and driving out those who resisted 
(Catholic or Protestant).  It was created as 
a society where your chances of housing and 
employment depended on your religion.  This 
happened with the full approval of the 
British ruling class.

In 1967 the Northern Ireland Civil Rights 
Association (NICRA) was formed.  Its demands  
were most striking for their extreme 
moderation:

o one man - one vote

o allocation of housing on a points scheme

o redrawing of gerrymandered electoral 
borders

o repeal of the Special Powers Act*

o abolition of the B specials**

o laws against discrimination in government

* The Special Powers Act allowed arrest on 
suspicion, and imprisonment without trial.  
An additional clause gave the Minister for 
Home Affairs authority to do anything else 
required!
** The B-specials were a state paid armed 
militia of the Unionist Party, officially an 
auxiliary of the RUC.

In August of 1968 NICRA called its first 
march.  2,500 marched from Coalisland to 
Dungannon to protest against local housing 
discrimination.  Since 1945 71% of local 
houses had gone to Protestants, yet the area 
was 53% Catholic.  The march was peaceful 
despite the occupation of Dungannon town 
centre by loyalists.  Yet when a second 
march was called in Derry the Home Affairs 
Minister (William Craig) banned it.

Local left wing activists along with the 
Derry Labour Party announced they would 
march anyway, and NICRA decided then to go 
ahead.  2,000 people turned up and that 
evening the TV footage of the police 
attacking the demonstrators with batons, 
punches and water cannon were seen around 
the world.  A march for peaceful reform was 
met by the northern state with physical 
violence and smashed off the streets.

Faced with the violent state repression of 
such mild demands, Catholics (with the 
support of the small number of socialists 
from a Protestant background) decided this 
time they were not going to just lie down.  
Six weeks later 15,000 marched through 
Derry.  The RUC, outnumbered 50:1, stayed in 
their police stations.  In Belfast an 
earlier march of 800 had resulted in the 
formation of Peoples Democracy (PD) which 
aimed to extend the campaign to winning 
improvements for working class Protestants 
as well.  In November part of the ruling 
class around Terence O'Neill tried to defuse 
the situation by granting some of the 
demands and promising a review of others.  
This was sufficient to satisfy the 
'respectable' leaders of the civil rights 
movement, like  John Hume.

However this was too much for other elements 
of the bosses who started an "O'Neill must 
go" campaign, including William Craig who 
ranted on about "unnecessary reforms".  And 
they were all united in saying nothing more 
would be given.  When PD organised a march 
across the north from New Years Day 1969 it 
was harassed by the RUC all the way, until 
it was finally forced into an ambush at 
Burntollet bridge outside Derry.  Here it 
was attacked by 350 loyalists, including 
many off-duty B-specials with rocks and 
clubs spiked with nails.

Despite the fact that many marchers were 
seriously injured, two nearly being killed, 
the RUC made no move to intervene and none 
of the attackers was ever brought before a 
court.  O'Neill indicated his approval by 
going on TV and saying "we have heard 
sufficient for now about civil rights.  Let 
us hear a little about civil 
responsibility".  

This was how the northern state dealt with 
peaceful attempts that stayed within the 
normal rules of "democracy" to reform it.  
Not surprisingly this caused massive anger 
among Catholics.  On August 12th 1969 the 
Apprentice Boys in Derry marched and threw 
pennies off the city wall into the Bogside.  
Local youths threw stones back.  The police 
used this as an excuse to charge in, 
cracking heads open and storming into 
houses.  But the local people fought back 
and drove them out, erecting barricades to 
keep them out.  

The RUC tried to fight their way in over the 
next few days using CS gas but met with an 
increasingly organised defence force armed 
with bricks and petrol bombs.  In 
inspiration, and also to draw some of the 
RUC off, other working class nationalist 
areas rioted.  Huge numbers of RUC were 
injured and it was clear that there were 
unable to restore 'stability' on their own.  
To help them out the British army was sent 
in on the 15th.  In the meantime the 
loyalists got their revenge in Belfast, 
storming the Falls with the aid of the RUC 
and burning down 200 houses.

Up to this stage the IRA were non-existent 
in terms of activity.  They had last been 
active in a failed and short lived border 
campaign from 1956 to 1962.  Their 
unpreparedness for the "troubles" was 
reflected in graffiti at the time which read 
"I Ran Away".  But the gun had been re-
introduced into Northern politics by the 
forces of the British state, most notably 
when the RUC had driven up the Falls on the 
14th firing Browning sub-machine guns from 
armoured cars (their victims included a 9 
year old boy in bed and a British soldier 
home on leave).  If even the moderate 
demands of the NICRA had been met with force 
from the state, the lesson was clear that in 
order to fight back you had to meet force 
with force.  The left at the time failed to 
offer a coherent alternative and so people 
turned to the politics of republican armed 
struggle.

Andrew Flood

      *****************************

        WHEN BRITISH ARMY CHIEFS 
         REFUSED TO OBEY ORDERS

The Ulster Workers Council (UWC) strike of 
May 1974 was just one of the incidents that 
showed, far from being "impartial", the RUC 
and the British army did their best to prop 
up loyalism.  

This strike was a response to the 
Sunningdale agreement signed in the Autumn 
of 1973.  This allowed for a "power-sharing" 
government made up of the Unionists, 
Alliance and SDLP parties.  The agreement 
also bought into existence, in the spring  
1974, the so-called "Council of Ireland".  
This was somewhat like the existing Anglo-
Irish Secretariat, i.e. a talkshop mainly 
concerned with cross-border security co-
operation.  

However loyalists reacted angrily to what 
they saw as Southern Irish "taigs"  being 
given a right to meddle in the affairs of 
"Ulster".  They launched a strike which 
aimed to shut down the six counties and 
bring the power-sharing government to it's 
knees.  They succeeded.

The strike was entirely controlled by the 
UWC.  This council was set up in 1973 by 
loyalist politicians and paramilitaries.   
The presence of UDA paramilitaries was to 
prove vital.   Andy Tyrie, a UDA leader,  
described the strike as a triumph of 
"intimidation without violence".

INTIMIDATION AND COLLUSION

In Belfast a total of 862 UDA roadblocks 
were erected under the watchful eye of the 
RUC and British army.  They did nothing to 
hinder the para-militaries from shutting the 
city down and many soldiers and cops chatted 
and joked with the UDA men on the 
barricades.  Shops and small businesses were 
systematically visited and ordered to close.  
Most did.

The RUC's F division at Castlereagh received 
709 reports of intimidation.  Only two of 
these were "detected" through their 
fantastic policing ability!  On May 19th the 
Northern Ireland Secretary, Merlyn Rees, 
declared a state of emergency giving him 
power to use troops to maintain essential 
supplies.  They never were. 

MUTINY?

It is now clear that the Labour government 
and the power-sharing executive faced a 
virtual mutiny as senior army officers 
refused to co-operate.  One of the major 
successes of the UWC was their shutting down 
of virtually all of Northern Ireland's power 
generating capacity.  Army engineers might 
have been able to maintain at least some of 
this power.  But no attempt was made to do 
so.

Three months after the strike a senior 
British officer boasted in the ultra-right 
"Monday Club" magazine:

"For the first time, the army had decided 
that it was right and that it knew best and 
the politicians had better tow the line"

According to another general quoted 10 years 
later (Irish Times 15th May 1984):

"If you'd a decisive man who had arrested 
the strikers on the first day it would have 
created chaos and bought the province to the 
point of no return."

These sort of veiled threats make it clear 
that the army top brass backed the strike 
and wanted the power-sharing government to 
fall. 

         *************************

       SINN FEIN'S STRANGE 'SOCIALISM'
          NATIONALISM...NO THANKS

Anarchists are for the defeat of British 
imperialism.  We would like to see an end to 
the killings in the 6 counties but we 
understand that the ultimate cause of the 
troubles lies at the feet of Britain and the 
northern sectarian statelet.  But we want 
more, we stand for the creation of a new 
society in the interests of the working 
class and against the bosses, both orange 
and green.

This is very different from the politics of 
Sinn Fein.  We see the way forward as unity 
of Catholic and Protestant workers in a 
common fight against capitalism.  They look 
for alliances of bosses and workers.  Their 
interest in Protestant workers seems to stop 
at who can best control them.  Hence Gerry 
Adams speech at this years Ard Fheis said 
that Protestants needed a De Klerk to lead 
them to compromise.  

This is alternated with the idea of the 
British controlling Protestant workers, 
presumably through the army, as seen in 
Adam's statement of Sunday 17th July when he 
said:

"The London Government which has 
jurisdiction over part of Ireland cannot 
forever dodge its responsibilities"

and asked of John Major

"Is he prepared to become a persuader for 
peace and for justice for all the people of 
Ireland?"

Who is he calling on them to persuade, and 
which responsibilities are being dodged?  
Indeed this whole approach to the British 
government, where it is seen as one of the 
forces for peace and progress, must stick in 
the guts of all those who supported Sinn 
Fein in the 1980's because they saw them as 
socialist and anti-imperialist in a general 
(rather than merely local) sense.  But it 
should come as no surprise.  After the Hume-
Adams talks of 1988 Adam's described them as 
"part of a quest for common interests 
between nationalist parties", again talking 
in terms of an all-class alliance.

There is a real danger of this current round 
of talks with the British government just 
serving to fuel the loyalist death squads.  
Sinn Fein has made it clear that it sees a 
settlement as being in the interests of the 
British government rather than being forced 
on them.  So this means that either the 
settlement will not solve the real economic 
inequalities suffered by Catholic workers or 
it will only solve them at the expense of 
Protestant workers.  

Catholics are still two and a half time more 
likely to be unemployed.  The option of 
bringing Catholic workers living standards 
up at least to the level of Protestant 
workers would involve a massive cost to the 
bosses.  Anything else would promise at best 
a temporary peace, with the real possibility 
of sectarian massacres.

For anarchists, the way forwards lies in 
workers' unity.  There has been significant 
unity around economic issues in the past, 
from the 1919 Belfast Engineers strike to 
the 1932 Outdoor Relief riots.  Both these 
saw thousands of Catholic and Protestant 
workers uniting to fight their common enemy, 
the bosses.  Both of these were smashed by 
the bosses using sectarianism to win 
Protestant workers back to loyalism.  This 
is why unity cannot be maintained by 
ignoring the border.  

More recently we have seen strikes in the 
DHSS against sectarian threats and a walkout 
by the mostly Protestant shipyard workers 
over the killing of a Catholic workmate.  
These demonstrate the potential of workers' 
unity in the north, but for this unity to 
become lasting Protestant workers need to be 
won to a clear anti-imperialist position and 
opposition to the British presence.

Anarchists should continue to defend the 
right of the IRA to fight back against 
imperialism.  But we must be clear that 
their nationalist politics and military 
methods offer no way forward.  Our task is 
to begin the difficult task of building a 
mass anti-imperialist movement, uniting all 
workers in Ireland.

Joe Black

     *****************************

               INTERVIEW
          WHEN THE FALLS AND 
     THE SHANKILL FOUGHT TOGETHER

THIS YEAR is the 60th anniversary of the 
Outdoor Relief strike in Belfast, which saw 
unemployed Catholics and Protestants 
fighting alongside each other.  In 1982 one 
of the few survivors from the strike, 
William Burrows, talked to Outta Control, a 
local anarchist paper in Belfast.  Twelve 
years later we are pleased to help uncover a 
small bit of anti-sectarian working class 
history be reprinting William's 
recollections.  He talked firstly of a march 
up the Newtownards Road, and secondly 
described the rally of 40,000 at Queens 
Square.

"I remember the march up the Newtownards 
Road.  It was organised by the Revolutionary 
Workers Group.  The agitation was against 
the 10% cut in welfare benefits the 
government imposed.  The bru was 17/- but 
they brought it down to 15/-.  It was the 
same year as the Invergordon mutiny in 
Scotland when the sailors struck against a 
reduction in their wage.

"There were about 1,500 of us on the march, 
with a red flag, and we were to have a 
meeting at Templemore Avenue.  Bob Stewart 
from Scotland was to speak but there was a 
mob of about 40 to greet us.  They went 
under the name of the Ulster Protestant 
League and were out to get him as he was 
well known.  They had lambeg drums, deacon 
poles (with a spear at the end), and a union 
jack.  

"John Crumlin, a notorious bigot from the 
shipyards (during the early '20s he stirred 
up sectarian hatred against the Catholics, 
which drove many of them out) carried the 
Union jack.  He was one of the 'three Cs' - 
Carson, Crumlin and Connor, who ten years 
earlier had been responsible for stirring up 
sectarian hatred in the shipyards and 
chasing Catholics out.  Crumlin, in 
particular, made the most maledictory 
speeches then.

"There were about fifty police there.  But 
they weren't there to protect us.  It was a 
sham defence.  They let the mob through and 
then joined in.  There was a lot of fighting 
and it ended with nine arrests.  Jack White 
had his neck cut by one of the deacon poles, 
not too seriously.  He was fined #10 and 
bound over to keep the peace.  So was Harold 
Davidson, a student from Malone.  But the 
rest, who had no connections, got about 
three months each.

"We had an improvised band to lead us.  We 
borrowed three drums from St Malachy's pipe 
band in the Markets.  But they were 
destroyed that night.  I remember Tommy Hill 
being there.  He was a tram driver, and was 
known as Red Tommy because he always wore a 
red tie.  He wasn't in the RWG, but was an 
independent from the Shankill Road.  He 
spoke at all the meetings.

"October, fifty years ago, was a wonderful 
event in the workers' struggle for better 
conditions.  On that occasion there was a 
fight against the Poor Law Guardians of 
Belfast, who were controlled by the Unionist 
Party.  The Guardians had imposed extremely 
harsh conditions on unemployed workers.

"Whenever the benefit of an unemployed 
person ran out due to not having enough 
stamps, they had to do task work three days 
a week.  They got paid 16/- a week, not in 
cash but in the form of a chit.  This was 
given to the grocer who gave you groceries 
for that amount.

"The workers, of course, took exception to 
this form of payment and thousands of 
Outdoor Relief workers took to the street to 
protest against it.  Some of these protests 
ended up in clashes with the police and in a 
series of riots, with a large number of 
people being arrested.   The worst riot 
occurred on the Falls Road where two 
protesters were shot dead.  They were Samuel 
Baxter and John Keenan.

"The Outdoor Relief workers replied with a 
massive protest to Queens Square, organised 
by the Revolutionary Workers Groups.  There 
were about 40,000 workers in Queens Square 
that night on 11th October 1932.  They came 
from all parts of Belfast, and from Derry 
and Coleraine.  Four hundred workers set out 
to walk from Dublin to Belfast, but as they 
reached the border the RUC stopped them and 
turned most of them back.  But some did 
manage to reach Belfast and took part in the 
march.

"The main speakers that night were Tommy 
Greehan, Davey Scarborough, Jimmy Koter, 
Betty Sinclair, Sean Murray and Arthur 
Griffin.  Thomas Mann came over from England 
to speak at the funerals of the two Falls 
men.  He was arrested and deported to 
Clogher Valley, before returning to his 
home.  Other well known speakers I remember 
of that time were Bob Stewart from Dundee, 
Willie Gallacher and Charlotte Despard.

"Two weeks after that march I lost my job.  
I was a farm labourer employed by David 
McAnse.  He was the father of Anne 
Dickinson, who until recently was a Unionist 
politician in East Belfast.  

"There were RWGs in different parts of the 
city.  In East Belfast were Bob Ellison, Bob 
Stewart, Eddie and Sadie Menzies, Jimmy 
Woods, James Connolly (no relation!), Davey 
Greenlaw, Jimmy McKenzie, Joe Lather, Jimmy 
Spence, Jimmy Kernoghan, John Lavery, Billy 
Bishop, Billy Tomlinson and his brother Joe, 
Billy Somerset Snr., and Lofty Johnson.

"The Falls Road group members were Johnny 
McWilliams, Jimmy Quinn, Tom Picken, Johnny 
Campell and Jimmy Hughes.  Jimmy McKurk was 
a very militant worker in the ODR strike 
from the Falls but wasn't in the group.

"Group members from the Shankill were Norman 
Taggart and his brother Bob, Bob McVicker 
and his brother Sam, Billy Johnson, John 
Sinclair, Aggie Young and Martha Burch.  
>From the Donegal Road were John, Mary and 
Nora Griffin.  Billy Boyd came from York 
Street.  Other members of the groups 
included Maurice Watters, Jack White and Ben 
Murray".

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Part 1  (Intro & Shorts)

    Socialism & freedom
    10 years of the WSM
    Thats Capitalism
    World Unemployment
    Revolutionaries
    letter from Serbia

Part 3  (Drugs)

In this section

    Legalise it
    The heroin menace

Part 4 (Campaigns & Struggle in Ireland)

   TEAM workers told not to expect a decent job
   Lets get together
   Anti-Water charges campaign gets off ground
   Reasons to bin the bill

Part 5 (A rotten world)

    Interview with Italian anarchist
    Ireland..The land of a 1000 welcomes?
    Hicksons chemical spill
    37% illegally underpaid
    

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Workers Solidarity currently comes out four
times a year.  For subscription details write
to WSM, PO Box 1528, Dublin 8, Ireland.  
Also appearing in the near future will be a 
theoretical magazine called Red and Black 
Revolution.

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The Workers Solidarity Movement can be contacted at 
     PO Box 1528, Dublin 8, Ireland

or by anonymous e-mail to an64739@anon.penet.fi

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