Sinn Fein Ard-fheis “Not waving -Drowning!

Where do Sinn Fein stand after their recent ard-fheis? Is this, as Gerry Adams says “the year in which Sinn Fein’s crucial and pivotal role ....became clear.” Or are they, as one dissident said, “floundering out of their depth in territory controlled by the enemy.”

The analogy is an apt one. Despite the hype of the Sinn Fein leadership, the movement is not waving signals of victory - it’s drowning.

A simple test of the political health of the movement lay before it - the framework document presented by the British and Dublin governments. This document outlines at every stage a unionist veto on the future development of the Irish people. It proposes the return of a partitionist assembly at Stormont. It outlines plans to change the claim to a national independence contained in articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution. It offers crossborder bodies whose aim is not to quietly abolish partition but to reinforce it. ‘ Even this reactionary document has been shifted significantly to the right in the face of an explosion of unionist bigotry and reaction. Its overall status has been demoted from “framework” to “consultation” and last minute additions made to reinforce the unionist veto.

Significant Advances?

What have Sinn Fein to say?

Formally nothing - the leadership claimed the publication date was too close and the issues too complex for a formal debate. This didn't prevent them from putting their own positive spin on the document. According to Gerry Adams;

"great new possibilities have opened up"

"one of the most significant advances of recent times is the widespread acceptance that an internal six-county settlement is not a solution."

“The framework document[s] .... publication.... is a clear recognition that partition has failed, that British rule in Ireland has failed.... the political framework envisaged is clearly an all-Ireland one..."

Significantly an assertion that Ireland's right to sovereignty needs to be upheld contains no opposition to proposals in the framework document to change article 2 and 3 of the Republic's constitution.

Code The Sinn Fein leaders are speaking in code. They are not yet ready to set out the full outlines of their strategy. Some of their supporters are not so shy. They claim that the IRA have won, that the British want to leave and have no strategic interest in Ireland. The only thing keeping them was the IRA campaign! Now that that's over the British will become persuaders. They will set up partitionist structures in order to reassure the unionists but these will be transitional. Cross - border bodies to manage tourism and other areas will weaken partition. In any case the British and Dublin governments will ensure equality of treatment for the nationalist minority and this plus the

growth in the Catholic population will eventually lead toa united Lreland.

All that is needed to swallow this guff is the ability to believe that the IRA campaign was simultaneously the mechanism for British withdrawal and the main obstacle to that withdrawal, plus total amnesia about the nature of imperialism. To be fair to Sinn Fein, large sections of the British and Irish left are equally willing to accept elements of the analysis.

The historic programme of the Republican movement is for Brits out now and self-determination for the Irish people. No amount of spin can make the framework document match these demands. How does the Sinn Fein leadership square this circle?

Reformism Easily. All that is required is for the central demands to be shifted into the future - the far future - and for a schematic and mechanical theory of historical stages to be adopted. It then becomes not only dangerous but positively wrong to fight for your maximum programme in the present. All you have left are immediate demands and an attempt to modify existing capitalist society to meet the needs of your supporters.

Atthe beginning of this process you arearevolutionary. At the end you are a reformist.

Of course this doesn’t work. Political processes in capitalist society aren't part of a debate but the outcome of class struggle. The negotiations that the Sinn Fem leaders hold up like a magic wand are simply mechanisms for confinming the terms of the stronger force - in this case British imperialism. At the same time by refusing to fight for your own programme you demobilise your own supporters. As you get weaker less and less is on offer and as you lose your original bearings all sorts of weird concepts hold sway -that British and world imperialism can play a progressive role - that they can be “persuaders” who will help deliver a better world for the Irish people.

Road to nowhere Irish history, and the history of the worker's movement internationally, is littered with the political corpses of individuals and movements who followed the reformist road. In the Middle East and at slower rate in South Africa we see the decay of anti -imperialist movements which turned to reform. The last attempt at a gradualist solution to the Irish question was the Treaty - and that led directly to a half-century of bloody reaction and then the present troubles. A dramatic result of the evolution of reformism can be seen in the British labour movement today - with leaders who openly repudiate socialism and whose principles centre around the worship of capitalism and the market. The attraction of reformism is not based o= its historical successes. Rather it serves the interests 07 social layers whose needs can be met within existing cap: alist property relations. The programme and the historic social base of Republicanism meet these criteria. The programme is revolutionary nationalist with no formal commitment to socialism. The petty-bourgeois rural base have always looked to "Nationalist unity” and alliances with Irish capitalism. The working class base in the Northem nationalist ghettos has exerted a social weight without exerting a political or programmatic weight.

The mass mobilisations that pushed Sinn Fein to the left are long gone. They ended with the hunger strikes and for over a decade the day to day work of militants has been elections, community work and activity based on local town councils. In all of these Sinn Fein has taken a determined reformist line. The straw poll a the Ard fheis which indicated that 20% of delegates would support changes in articles 2 and 3 indicate the development of a hardened reformist current in the middle ayers of Sinn Fein. The rank and file define revolution as support for armed action rather than organisation around a revolutionary programme and are badly placed to challenge the politics of the new turn. Reality breaks through At the Ard-fheis reality broke through in asession where ‘the leaders asked for comments and criticisms on the peace process. The delegates sat in sullen and demoralised silence. There was no serious challenge to the leadership but the rhetoric of victory ran strangely dry against that funereal silence. Where there was a formal chalienge in the debate it was concentrated in the Dublin branch - they see too much of the effects of Irish capitalism at first hand to buy easily the new alliance.

The framework document is not a solution to the Irish question - rather it is the latest and most determined attempt by imperialism to impose its own sealement. The decay of republican politics has done great damage in demobilising resistance and promoting pro-imperialist currents within the population as a whole. But it is not in their gift to deliver a capitulation by the irish working class as a whole. The class struggle will continue and the republican movement will face greater and greater difficulties as imperialism demands greater asd greater capitulation and begins to call on the ieaderskip to condemn and repudiate the forces moving into oppesition.

The tasks of Irish socialists are clear. They should repudiate the framework document and stend in unremitting opposition to an imperialist settlement They should stand for a united opposition to attacks on democratic and national rights and they should seek to builc the independent organisation of the working class that is the only real solution to the imperialist oppression of Ireland.

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