PD -CRA Where to now?

It is now some eight months since P.D. cut itself loose from N.I. -C.R.A. and a suitable time to examine what way the original relationship developed and what the N.1I.C.R.A. has been doing since.

At the Annual General Meeting of N.1I.C.R.A. in February last P.D. members did not go forward for election to the Executive Committee, instead members pressed for radical proposals. to be adopted from the floor. In the previous year the P.D. had two members on the executive as well as others on local civil rights committees. This withdrawal from C.R.A. was based on two main grounds.

1. The need, all the more urgent after the events of August '69, to put our engeries into the first priority of building a socialist movement.

2. Disagreement with the proposed future direction of N.I.C.R.A.

1. Building a socialist movement. Puting all efforts into the creation of a revolutionary socialist organisation, fighting for a Workers Republic in Ireland, was a logical extension for P.D. from working within the civil rights framework. In the mainstream campaign from October 1968, P.D. had three broad ideals, which became clearer to it as it got more involved. First to ensure the campaign was militant. There is a silly equation made by some between being militant and being sectarian. No group concerned itself more with being non-sectarian than P.D. Indeed the drive to smash sectarianism explains the two other ideals P.D. represented in the C.R. movement. First to ensure that the movement for civil rights was a movement of the people, and didn't lead solely toa shuffling of the pack of opposition M.P.'s at Stormont. In the event it failed in part because people did grab power, solely out of their unrepresentative positions in civil right organisations, and became M.P.'s. They now see themselves as a group apart; they had the arrogance even to create a 'party' that consisted of'themselves alone.' Since they have entered Parliament, not one single radical idea, thought, or action has come from the lot of them. A parliament is not almost entirely unimportant, but the potential opportunities it had were almost entirely lost to the civil rights movement by the character of the representatives who were elected.

radical issues The third and most important ideal of the Peoples Democracy was to widen the sense of grievance felt by the Catholic working class over discrimination into awareness that 'equal shares' , while necessary, was not enough. That only through agitation for more work, houses and prosperity would a final solution be found. That while discrimination was suffered by Catholics, shortage was endured by all working class people Protestant and Catholic. The demands 'One Man One Job', 'One Family One House’ were examples of the issues raised by P.D. which helped radicalise the civil rights programme.

Such demands predictably raised the hackles of the conservative Green Tory element in N.I.C.R.A. Their cries against 'splitting the movement! and ‘introducing politics came less from a genuine concern for the campaign than from a fear thet the C.R. movement might move away from a simple recitating of Catholic grievances as presented by the Nationalists over the years to developing an analysis of how things came to be as they were, and how they might be changed, in action by the people themsleves. They were afraid simply of being left behind by the growth of a class consciousness they had helped to stiffle for years.

By this process which has continued more freely outside C.R.A. P.D. has radicalised the political pressure on Unionism and opened the way for the possibility of socialism in the North... But what of CRA? in the last few months has made a total farce out of both the demand and the C.R.A. It has been acclaim ed and proposed as the solution to everything from the smallest riot in Ballymurphy to votes of no confidence in Unionist M.P.'s. A 'Bill of Rights' campaign demanded by paper thin organisations from Liverpool to Skegness has confused people in England about what is going on in Ireland. The demand has been thus trivialised and is a sham because it displays an excessive faith in laws; law is a ruling class instrument, whether it be Unionist or British variety. The fate of ‘Bills of Rights' elsewhere, from South Africa to South America, should show that such total faith in | the law is naieve But the people be- | hind the demand are not inthe least | naieve, the cold control of the Dublin ideologues is calculated, and it seems they have secured what they j ,wanted: the C.R.A. as a mechanical agent of propaganda, lifeless , disturbing no-one, least of all the Unionists in that 'most Irish of institutions' Stormont.

The burden of any campaig.. to protect demands already won firc)n the backsliding Unionists will h: to \be borne by P.D. and other active lorganisations.