Sectarianism

Saying you are opposed to sectarianism is one of the easiest and most popular things to do but the reason it is so easy is that most of those who claim to be fighting sectarianism arerit ga confronting it at all.

Recent events show that sectarianism is as important an issue today as ever. We have seen a blatant example of it in the Richardsons dispute where Unionist politician Fraser Agnew has blamed a “disruptive element” for a strike against a derisory pay offer. At Moy Meats where Catholic workers refused to work while a Union Jack flew over - the factory, the trade union representing the workers ran away from the dispute and refused to support the removal of the flag. It is these same trade union leaders who claim that the trade unions are free from the sectarianism which afflicts the rest of society. Recent reports highlighted in last months ~ SOCIALIST REPUBLIC explode this myth.

* Discrimination against Catholics is as rife in northern industry as it ever was and instead. of the trade unions in Ireland challenging this, ‘the pressure for change has come from American_ trade unions.

For trade union leaders and so called socialists like the Workers Party fighting sectarianism means uniting Protestant and Catholic workers around “bread and butter ; issues” but really challenging sectarianism means fighting for equality between Protestant and Catholic workers. This means positive discrimination in favour of Catholics applying for jobs. This isrit sectarianism in reverse because if real equality is to be achieved it means making up for decades of past discrimination. Formal equality doesnt mean real equality, after all haverit Catholics been formally equal with Protestants for the past 60 years.

Does this mean we are offering nothing to Protestant workers? This is the usual accusation from the same _ trade union leaders who have presided over tens of thousands of workers both Protestant and Catholic who have been made unemployed. It is these misleaders who have offered no plan to fight back against unemployment and the cuts for any workers. As Marx said in the “Communist Manifesto” socialists have no interest separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. This is why socialists demand the ending of unemployment by the introduction of a 35 hour week with no loss in pay and a massive _ increase in useful public spending to give unemployed workers real jobs. Its a lie that there isrit enough money, the banks are making enormous profits and Thatcher doesrit have any problem in finding the money when it comes to the Falklands.

Some organisations like “Militant” say we shouldnt raise “sectarian issues” like demanding a united Ireland. In reality this isnt a sectarian issue but a democratic one and it is difficult to see how people claiming to be Marxist can hope to _ achieve political power without standing up for democratic rights. There is nothing sectarian in demanding the unity of ALL Irish workers, north and south. We _ should remember that it is Britain which has created sectarianism and divides Irish workers and: it is not.

1968 saw the coincidence of —— a world-wide upsurge of radicalism by students and working people with a new awaking by the oppressed Catholic minority in the six counties. It was the year of the May uprising in Paris, student revolt in Germany and the USA and of the Prague spring and the Russian invasion of Czechoslavakia. It was also the year when the slowly germinating Civil Rights movement in the North began to take to the streets.

In June 1968 a Young Socialist Alliance was formed in Belfast by young people influenced by the semi-marxist ‘New Left’ ideas then in vogue. It was ‘concerned with both local and international issues. During the summer it held protests about the war in Vietnam and bad housing in Belfast and Derry. One fateful weekend in August the YSA held a march in Belfast about the invasion of Czechoslovakia and then went to Coalisland for the, first Civil Rights march in the North. CIV RIGHTS Wet On October Sth 40 YSA supporters went to the Civil Rights march in Derry and were in the front rank when the RUC baton charged the protestors. Four days later 3,000 outraged students tried to march to the City Hall in Belfast but were stopped by the RUC and turned back. The students were frustrated and demoralised. YSA members took the initiative and proposed the establishment of a permanent Civil Rights organisation. The Peoples Democracy was born.

The P.D. was a mass democratic organisation modelled on the student-worker assemblies formed in Paris earlier that year. The structure had its drawbacks, the organisation was naive and confused at times but it had all the vigour, energy and flair of the Paris upsurge. The YSA hard-core also gave it a leaven of tough determination and the political influence of the YSA in the looser body grew rapidly.

P.D. quickly became the driving force of the Civil The PEOPLES DEMOCRACY was founded IS years ago on October Yth 1968. Todas PLD. is still battling away in” the Struggle against imperialism and fer a Workers Republic in Ireland. How did it all begin? Below Mike Farrell recalls the carly dev clopment of the organisation.

Rights struggle organising or participating in countless protests, turning out a constant stream of leaflets and posters, even occupying the Northern Parliament buildings at Stormont on October 24th. This ceaseless activity which was an essential part of the Civil Rights campaign would continue for the next two years but it was in 1969 that P.D. assumed a new role which was to be one of its major contributions to the struggle over the next 15 years.

At the end of 1968 Terence O’Neill introduced a few half-hearted reforms and called for a halt to Civil Rights demonstrations. The respectable middle-class leaders of the Civil Rights movement were only too happy to comply because they were frightened by the mass movement they had unleashed. The P.D. refused to accept this squalid deal and went ahead with the Burntollet march which effectively exposed the _ sectarian nature of the six-county state. and its so-called security forces. That put paid to the attempts to de-mobilise the mass A month later O'Neill made a clever attempt to confuse the issue and divide the Civil Rights movement by calling a General Election in which ‘moderate’ unionist candidates sought the support of the Catholic minority against ‘hardliners’. Once again P.D. took the initiative to foil his strategy by nominating candidates who counterposed a militant Civil Rights programme to the illusory choice between two brands of Unionism. The 8 P.D. candidates got 23,000 votes between them, an effective mandate to carry on the campaign.

By now the YSA _ had dissolved itself into P.D. reckoning that P.D. could soon _be won over to the full Y.S.A. programme and P.D. was playing a new role, one it was to assume many times in the years ahead. At crucial moments in the struggle P.D. would intervene to raise new demands or guide the movement in -new directions which. would strike ever nearer the roots of imperialist control in the North and change the movement from a reformist one into one whose demands could only be met by revolution.

P.D. was also beginning to raise issues which would become ever more important as the years went by. In April 1969 it held a cross border march to Dublin demanding Civil Rights North and South. The march was a bit disorganised and its politics confused but it was the first major attempt to link the struggle in both parts of the country. Around the same time P.D. was strenuously arguing the need to broaden the Civil Rights agitation to include social and economic questions like bad housing and unemployment.

In August 1969 the Stormont Government, unable to contain the mass upsurge, unleashed the RUC, B_ Specials and Paisleyite gangs to attack the Catholic ghettos ‘ of Belfast and Derry. The people responded by sealing off the areas with barricades - The No Go Areas - P.D. immediately went to work behind the barricades. In Derry P.D. members worked with Eamonn McCann and Bernadette Devlin. In Belfast they ran Radio Free Belfast and produced a daily resistance paper in cooperation with the Republican dominated Citizen's Defence Committee though in Sept. they eventually closed down the radio and withdrew from producing the paper because of Republican attempts at political censorship. The radio and the paper had done a lot to boost morale in the ghettos however and the experience gave P.D. its first real roots in West Belfast. ees Sat Movement to its role today as a history.

Peoples Democracy at the time of its formation, 15 years ago, burst onto the Irish political scene as a totally new phenomeon. It didn’t fit into the traditional conceptions of the British and Unionists and they initially had great difficulty in dealing with us. It also caused some confusion among _§antiimperialists when they tried to fit us into the traditional mould, and to some extent there is still uncertainty about our place and role among the anti-imperialist movement, OUR ROLE Yet Michael Farrell, in his graphic account of the formation of P.D., clearly set out the main elements of our political development. We were part of the International Youth radicalisation of the 1960s. We were firmly linked to the new growth of revolutjionary socialism on an international level, following the fragmenting and weakening of the stalinist hold on the working class and through the Young Socialist Alliance P.D. is able to trace its roots back through a series of small revolutionary groups to the revolutionary socialism of James Connolly. That’s the tradition we try to represent today, not in rhetorical gestures, but in a sober analysis of class society and in action to change society.

In the early organisation we defined ourselves as socialists without any clear idea of what that meant. We did know that we should identify with the working class and we quickly saw, through our work in the Civil Rights movement that a workers unity that glossed over the oppression of Nationalist workers wasn’t worth ° having. We also saw quickly that a reform of the six county state was not possible and _ that revolution was necessary. PEOPLES Democracy has under- Revolutionary Marxist organisatgone a steady political evolution ion Below JOHN McANULTY since its beginnings as the radical notes some of the major political spearhead of the Civil Rights des clopments in P.D. in its 15 year But we didn’t have. the benefit of a developed programme and a strong foundation in _ political theory. We had to learn from experience and that has been both our strength and our weakness. It meant that we made a lot of mistakes - for example in initially looking for workers unity within the six county state. But what we learnt, we learnt well. We rediscovered for ourselves the main principle of Connollys_ socialism - that.to be a socialist in Ireland you must be an‘ anti-imperialist and that most consistent anti-imperialist fighters were always willing to unite in. action with other sections of the anti-imperialist ‘movement and with a rounded understanding of -the political, social and economic aspects of imperialist domination.

With this understanding we first came into conflict with the middle class leadership of the Civil Rights movement and their reformist fellow travellers in the Offical Republicans (now the Workers Party) and the Communist Party. We re -jected their ‘stages theory’ that reform in the North would be followed at long intervals first by a United Ireland and then by Socialism. We developed our own understanding of Trotskys theory of permanent revolution - seeing that any movement strong enough to defeat imperialism and establish a United Ireland would move on to win a Workers Republic. It was’ this understanding that led to the fusion of P.D. and the Movement for a Socialist Republic in 1977 and to the fused organisation joining the World revolutionary movement of the. Fourth International in 1981,

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