Representatives of the Catholics’ Change Their Tune
Unfree Citizen1974The Southern state and its partiesLabour, the left and left unityInternment, repression and the courtsLoyalism and unionismBritish troops and the occupationThe Southern state and its partiesLabour, the left and left unityInternment, repression and the courtsLoyalism and unionismBritish troops and the occupation
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The SOLP have done a lot of crining and manoeuvering in their short history in Northern politics. They jumped on every . bandwagon possible in order to woo the support of the anti-Unionist working class. From the days when claiming to be ‘the representatives of the Catholic minority’ when they withdrew from Stormont after the murder in Derry by the British army of two young men, Cusack and Beattie, they have lead a very winding path indeed. In the early months after internment they staked their political identity on ‘opposition to internment’; in the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday murders in Derry they cashed in on demonstrations to try to boost their (even then) soured credibility. From then on though, they have outdone only the most bigoted Unionists Time and time again in ‘Untree Citizen’ we have warned of and cited samples of the creeping repression that has been going on in the South over the past 5 years, particularly since the introduction of the Offences Against the State Amendment Act in 1972. This repression and the manipulation of the law against the rights of the citizen has arisen as a result of the political integration of the Southern government with British policy in Ireland.
This political integration is common to all the Dail political parties, since the present Labour/Fine Gael Coalition are pursuing the laws of repression brought in by Fianna Fail — laws which they hypocritically opposed while in opposition. The people who administer these laws, the Gardai, have been traditionally portrayed as being an impartial “‘peoples police’, languishing on the support they received over 50 years when they replaced the para-military R.1.C.
Now, in line with developments in Britain, the North and in Europe, we have the emergence of high-ranking Gardai officers seeking to further manipulate the law to the advantage of the Gardai and the state. in their condemnations of the people of the North who have continued to fight and support the resistance struggle.
Never willing to miss a chance they have been on every bandwagon of pro-British propaganda that has been dreami up by the Imperialists to undermine that struggle. And of course when there was the prospect of elections and the promise of fat jobs, there they were, out around the doors, more Provo than the Provos themselves, slamming internment, torture and army harassment. They were, they said, “the only legitimate representatives of the Catholic people’. And they got their jobs, and went back again to the old business of attacking and undermining the struggle of the people who had voted them in. London they claimed to be the the SDLP.
the representatives only of the In the Westminster elections, in the Assembly elections, at Sunningdale and on every cap-in-hand trip to “representatives of the Catholic people’.
But where has this “honourable” tradition suddenly gone? What has happened to the “representatives of the Catholic people’? For last week John Duffy party secretary of the SDLP stated that he didn’t know how the myth had got around that they were a party representing ‘Catholics’! The SDLP, he said, were a ‘SOCIALIST’ party first, and they were “merely trying to bring about social equality”! — Yet another swing in stated policy for We always said that the SDLP were Catholic middie class, that section of the Cathotic community who down through the years have consistently . tried to be more Unionist than the Unionists themselves. We said that they represent those who have no interest in seeing even the border removed and all-Ireland unity, not to mention a Socialist republic. Every move they have made has gone further and further to prove just that.
Duffy's statement last week can only show even more clearly that they are aiming at appealing to the milder unionists, that they are becoming more and more embarrassed with being labelled “Catholic”. ;
If more proof is needed then consider that also last week the SDLP said that me they were “not ooking for any solution that would involve the south”. By implication the are saying that they have abandoned their (hypocritical) claim to want the border removed.
The SDLP are becoming more and more absorbed into the imperialist’s political system. They are rapidly losing all credibility in the eyes of the antiUnionist working class and are clearly being cemented into the structure of the sectarian six-County state.