For Mass

When Fergus O’Hare stood 1 for PD against Gerry Fitt in the 1981 local government elections he advanced a political programme that opposed Fitt’s collaboration and outlined the need for anti-imperialist workers to organise and unite in action. He was able to point to the H Block movement as the living example of the power of mass action to bring about change. Fitt was humiliated with 500 votes. In this election in West Belfast, Gerry Adams mobilised a massive republican vote, but his failure to offer a political programme to those outside the periphupations broke out. The Dail Cabinet sent the Volunteers against several of these. During the Treaty negotiations, this unrest seems to have caused Griffith to offer to abandon his tariff schemes: in effect to acc -.t less than the pre-war Home Rule proposal.

‘ However, the actual Treaty succeeded in keeping the anti-imperialist forces divided. Labour’s majority accepted it: the small new communist party opposed but could only tail end its bourgeois opponants radical wing. These were divided not on political grounds but on military strategy.

This opened the way for their defeat in civil war. The Third Dail was a twenty-six county assembly.

The new forum is sixty years less likely to be more successful , D.R..O’Connor Lysaght. ery of Republicanism meant that Fitt was able to retire with honour with 10,000 votes - even if up to 50% of these votes came from loyalists.

The British face objective difficulties in moving forward in the North and they are made cautious by the Sinn Fein vote but to really reverse things and move forward we need an anti-imperialist alternative to the Assembly and the Council for a New Ireland. and we need a mass movement based on all 32 counties. Instead Sinn Fein have hidden behind the meaningless slogan ‘for a principled leadership’. The struggle in both Britain and Ireland is entering a new phase. It requires a new programme, new methods of struggle and a new unity of those fighting capitalism and imperialism. In the Labour Party in Britain and among Sinn Fein and their supporters here there will be major debates about the way forward. For Peoples Democracy there is one sure test we will apply .at each stage of the debates -Does the individual concerned support and encourage the independent mass action of workers and the oppressed? No substitute for mass action can give us even the hope of eventual victory.

outside the family. Abortion rights stand in their promised legislation giving women limited abortion and reversing the gains of the womens movement the anising on a national and international level. Women