The British worker has got to

Fheis, surreptitiously found their way into the movement. So many members of the Republican movement (of which I wasn’t one) increasingly found it more difficult— and ultimately impossible— to continue to work inside the organisatior They ieft because there was no revolutionary alternative for them. They remained as independents, playing a supportive role for demonstrations, but unorganised and therefore ineffective in any real sense.

People like Seamus Costello and a number of others who did attempt to raise issues inside the Officials were expelled, generally on non-issues, so that again the political issues never came to the fore in the movement.

There were also people like myself, who had worked as independent socialists, supporting the various organisations and taking our own line, who felt we could never join an organisation because all the existing organisations divided on which was the more important— the national question or the class question. And you had a position where from 1972 the Officials, in an effort to bridge what they callec the ‘sectarian gap’, more and more dealt in reformist policies of a working class nature: dealing with wages, or issues like the Ring Road Is Key The Plough — page 4 Our immediate demands are for an immediate declaration of intent by the British Government to withdraw militarily and politically from Irish affairs, and, having made that declaration, to then immediately set avout taking their troops out —withdrawing them to barracks, taking them out of Ireland.

We also call for the immediate release of the internees and sentenced prisoners; an amnesty for all other persons convicted for playing their part in the anti-imperialist ° struggle; and an amnesty for all the people involved in the resistance struggle, whether that be people who are on the run, or people who are financially in debt because of the civil resistance rentand-rates struggle. $0858050800040046444448004444 In a sense these are very similar demands to those of the Provisionals. In what way will you bring what you see as the class element to the fore’? HERERERERARERAEREA ARAL ER EH ERA The difference is not in the demands —there is no-one who would disagree with those demands— but in the effort to bring those demands onto the streets and involve people in the struggle for those demands. This is different from the Provisionals, who adopt. a completely military point of view. They think that in Is SEREERSESEERERALESARRARERREEE the organisations involved in the anti-imperialist struggle. But we would not, for example, co-operate with organisations like the SDLP, because we feel that while they would raise the same demands they have entirely different implications for the members of the SDLP.

Where we would differ with many of the other organisations is that we are convinced that the only people who can make those demands and actively work towards them are the working class in independent action.

RERERREARAEAERAREARES EAR AEK What does this mean jn terms of your attitude towards the armed struggle?

9905848686009600006080898009% AS we see it, the working class of Ireland are entitled to the ownership and control of Ireland. If repression by means of arms is used against us then, as we retain the right to self-determination, the right to our own country and the right to our own future, so we retain the right to fight for it. The working class has more right to armed struggle than our oppressors.

We are not a pacifist organisation.

Our argument with, the Provisionals is not that they conduct an armed struggle, but the manner in which they do it, the political The formation of a new organisation, the Irish Republican Socialist Party, is an These militants unfortunately drew the wrong conclusions from this awareness. Instead of calling on the movement to advance the struggle for democracy, into a struggle against the state itself, they called for a dropping of democratic demands in favour of a concentration on economic demands which would politically unite the workers (an impossibility when the workers were divided on basic democratic questions).

The second example concerns a motion at the 1973 Ard Fheis from a cumann in Bray which called for less emphasis on Marx and Lenin and more on Connolly and Mellows. Firstly, it should be stated clearly that this motion does not mean that the Officials are Marxist and the I.R.S.P. are anti-Marxist, but rather that the crude and vulgar “‘Marxism” of the O’Murchu’s and the O’Hagens is seen by genuine militants to be irrelevant to the needs of the real struggle in important development for the Irish was influenced ‘by Lenin, that he was capable of class unity.

‘ 4 while the crass “economists”, the Walkers, the phenomonen. Although they haven’t yet their own imperial powers. understand the nature of the