Ireland's left breakthrough posted by Richard Seymour

Looks like the United Left Alliance has made a breakthrough in the Irish elections gaining three confirmed seats, with two pending. The formerly ruling Fianna Fail had its first preference votes slashed by 24%, with the surplus distributed among Fine Gael, Labour and Sinn Fein. The Greens got less than 2% of first preference votes and lost all their seats (I hope the Liberals are taking note). Here's the analysis:

Voters have given the main Irish bosses' party a drubbing in the country’s general election. And the radical left has made a breakthrough, getting at least three TDs elected, with more results to come.

The biggest shift is the slump in support for the Fianna Fáil. Its share of the vote fell to less than 15 percent nationally – compared to 42 percent in the 2007 election.

This is the worst ever defeat for the party that has dominated Irish politics since independence from Britain in 1921 and that has been in power since 1997.

Fianna Fáil’s support in Dublin stood at less than 8 percent. They went from 13 to 1 TD in the capital. This is from a party that historically had 100,000 members when the country’s population was 3.5 million. It previously would have expected to get 40 percent of working class votes. Political dynasties that have controlled constituencies for decades are gone and places that have returned Fianna Fáil TDs (MPs) since the 1920s are now looking elsewhere.

The Irish Green Party, which had slavishly propped up the Fianna Fáil government in coalition, was decimated at the polls and now has no member in parliament.

The Irish Labour Party vote rose massively. But its determined lack of radicalism means that it will not look to use that vote to campaign against austerity. Instead, it is likely to go into coalition with the bosses’ second preference party Fine Gael. Sinn Fein gained and looked set to be the biggest opposition party after getting around 18 percent of the vote.

The radical left made a significant breakthrough with the candidates who are part of the United Left Alliance.

Newly elected TDs in the Alliance include Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party, Clare Daly of the Socialist Party, and Seamus Healy of the Tipperary Unemployed and Works Action Group.

Richard Boyd Barrett for the People before Profit Alliance and Joan Collins of the People before Profit Alliance and could both be elected, as the counting continues. Other members of the United Left Alliance polled strongly but are unlikely to win a seat.

The vote was so close in Richard Boyd Barrett’s Dún Laoghaire constituency that a recount has been called for tomorrow.

And here's the essential background.

Labels: bankers, fianna fail, finance capital, fine gael, green party, housing, ireland, labour, neoliberalism, recession, sinn fein, united left alliance

It's all over bar the shooting posted by Richard Seymour

The Real IRA's campaign seems to be directed as much against Sinn Fein as the British state. The latest attacks include not only the killing of a peeler, but also a (failed) pipe bomb attack on a Sinn Fein office. Gerry Adams argues that it is an outright attack on the 'peace process', and risks squandering the fruits of the Provos' struggle - which means it is an attack on the mainstream Republican leadership. There is some truth in this: the RIRA are certainly attacking the existing settlement, and do risk drawing the British Army back onto Catholic streets. That would appear to have been the aim for some time, and it has already been successful to the extent that Sir Hugh Orde took the opportunity of an alleged increase in 'dissident' Republican activity to start bringing in undercover British Army troops to crack down on said 'dissidents'. They in turn waited for three days after this policy was officially announced to start this campaign, which of course is likely to catalyse the militarisation of the hunt.

Although Sinn Fein are taking the unprecedented step of backing the PSNI - still a Protestant-dominated component of the British state - in their crackdown on the RIRA, there has been a great deal of hypocritical whining about how cool and clinical his statement was. Now, Gerry Adams' response to this criticism is vain and indicative of an elitist political outlook: he claimed that it was his wisdom that had manoeuvred the Republican community to where it presently was, and that therefore he should be trusted to know how to communicate effectively with his own base. This is absolute horseshit. The Republican leadership adapted to the realities in the grassroots, not the other way around. But, nevertheless, I fail to see how he could have gone further than to say that the attacks were "wrong and counterproductive" given that it is the explicit position of Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA that the armed struggle was until Good Friday a necessity, brought about by the British state's refusal to admit peaceful means for resistance. Moreover, the British Army remains an army of occupation that the vast majority of Catholics do not accept. The issue, then, is obviously the political context in which attacks on troops take place and what strategy is involved. Furthermore, many of the people complaining about this supported the British state's war for as long as it went on, and obviously aren't pacifists. During the course of the war, the British Army killed 105 IRA members - I doubt a single one of those was even considered 'wrong and counterproductive' by Unionists.

Another potential consequence of the RIRA campaign could be to give carte blanche to loyalist groups who - although you don't hear much about them - have not yet decommissioned and show no signs of doing so. So far, the signs are that the loyalist leadership is happy to leave the British state to deal with this. But Gusty Spence, the doyen of the Ulster Volunteer Force, has already explained that his outfit have kept their weapons on the grounds that certain unspecified "activities" could lead them to undertake renewed "resistance". Such resistance would involve the murder of Catholic taxi drivers and postmen, and the shooting up of pubs in Catholic areas. Attacks on Catholic civilians constituted the vast majority of their activities. True, they are generally absorbed in racketeering and drug-dealing these days, even though they are known to 'police' loyalist estates with a supposed anti-drugs policy. Equally true, some of their number have been drawn into the penumbra of the far right, with activists beating up Chinese and black people. But there must be some nostalgia for the old days. As for the UDA/UFF, those poetasters of death, as far as we know they no longer have a gig with British intelligence. But, as their dalliances with sociopathic neo-Nazis and their bloody internecine feuding have demonstrated, they still have a penchant for ultra-violence.

Despite such dangers, however, it is hard to see the RIRA's campaign as anything but a death rattle. They reportedly have 300 members and guns, but little else going for them. They lost the argument inside the Provos, and they aren't about to manufacture a victory now. This is because the majority of the rank and file were not as doctrinally committed to a united Ireland as advertised. The impetus behind the struggle was the desire to seize the whip from the overseer's hand, as it were. When the majority of activists decided that it was possible to obtain civil rights for Catholics within the context of a British state, they overwhelmingly supported it. The RIRA can at most create a temporary state of tension, although I also note that they are capable of certain lexical innovations. For example, pizza delivery men are heretofore reclassified as a "collaborators". But I don't see any other party ready as yet to return to war. And as the Cedar Lounge points out, there isn't in any of this a strategy to unite Protestants and Catholics, or to build any other political basis for the struggle than the simple idea of placing the north of Ireland under the sovereign control of the Republic. Does that really address the needs of the Catholic working class today, much less the majority of the people of Northern Ireland? I mentioned its lack of support recently, but the larger question is, does it even seek popular support? The manner in which it is conducting itself suggests otherwise. Eamonn McCann, speaking for the Irish SWP, puts the case well:

"we reject entirely the strategy of 'armed struggle' carried out in the name of the people but, of necessity, behind the back of the people and without sanction of the people. We rejected armed struggle when carried out by the Provisional IRA. We reiterate that position now.

"The attack comes at a time when the need for working-class unity was never clearer. Here, as in the South and across the water, we are faced with a relentless attack on jobs, wages and public services, from employers’ groups and the governments of Gordon Brown and Brian Cowan. The killings on Friday are a disruption and diversion from these urgent issues.

"We reject the hypocrisy of Brown and others who promote war in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, then profess a belief in peace when this suits their purpose. Brown was preparing to dispatch the soldiers killed at Antrim to kill or be killed in the doomed, imperialist adventure in Afghanistan."

Labels: antrim, british occupation, imperialism, ira, loyalism, northern ireland, republicanism, sinn fein, uda, uvf

Shooting up squaddies. posted by Richard Seymour

Northern Irish politics is, as a rule, boring. Think about the material you have to work with. Between Martin McGuinness' lachrymose banalities and Peter Robinson's rigid bigotry (there is a great deal of both in Stormont), there is little room to be inspiring. The only occasional frisson is when one of the demented crackpots of the hard right says something unspeakably ignorant and stupid. Sammy Wilson, the environment minister, denies that there is such a thing as man-made global warming, and that ensures that his smug, dopy-eyed, reddened face gets on the news for a week. (Sammy is also, you may care to know, an Ulster Jobs for Ulster Workers guy). Likewise, when Iris Robinson MP, spouse to First Minister Peter, describes homosexuality as being "viler" than child abuse, there follows a brief uproar before the the usual run of anti-gay violence is resumed with vengeance. (Not that Nothern Ireland has a problem with exaggerated machismo - anyone who says it does will receive a boot in the ballicks.) Though I have not visited NI for years, and don't feel much connection to it, it is hard not to be embarrassed by the kinds of people who get elected in that neck of the woods. They are so obviously unfit for the job. They should be spreading mulch and spouting misanthropy out in the suburbs and farming communities.

At any rate, this grotesque charade is underwritten by a neoliberal and sectarian consensus that is impoverishing an already vitiated and lacklustre social landscape. The parties compete not on the basis of class issues or even left-right ideologies as such, but strictly on the Nationalist-Unionist dichotomy. To be represented, one has to accept one or other label. Meanwhile, the only answer that any of the political parties offer to the poverty and social misery of the statelet is to turn it into a sort of corporate theme park, open up investment opportunities by privatizing and cutting business taxes. Intriguingly, this is one question on which even Ian Paisley favours a 'united Ireland', in that both he and Martin McGuinness favoured cutting corporation taxes to 12.5%, the level pertaining in the Republic of Ireland. If the name were not already taken, the place could soon be re-dubbed the Northern Marianas. No wonder people are anxious to get the hell out of the place. Emigration is at record levels, and a quarter of the permanent residents have spent more than six months abroad. People get as far away as they can for as long as they can, before family commitments or whatever else it is draws them back in. This is grim stuff, but it doesn't make good copy. It is boring.

No wonder that the newspapers are almost uniformly treating the attack on a military base in county Antrim last night as back-to-the-good-old-days. They are not the only ones to see it that way. Ian Paisley Jr., who is his father with the interesting bits removed, apparently remarked that the attacks represent a "defining moment", adding that "For the last 10 years people believed things like this happened in foreign countries, places like Basra. Unfortunately it has returned to our doorstep." How to begin to parse a thought like that? With the suggestion, from a Unionist, that the occupation of the north of Ireland in some sense recalls the occupation of Iraq? Or with the insinuation that the relative peace since Omagh was illusory, merely what "people believed"? Actually, the Unionist right has for some time been trying to increase their leverage by highlighting an alleged resurgence in 'dissident' Republicanism, first raised by Sir Hugh Orde. It would be just dandy for them if there was a plausible new terrorist threat with which to either undermine the Assembly, weaken the Republicans, or just mobilise a disheartened electoral base (the DUP were supposed to chase Sinn Fein out of Stormont, not form a coalition with them).

Are we really on the verge of a new war, as the Unionists suggest, and as so much lurid commentary in the British media implies? Hardly. Whoever carried out last night's attack doesn't have the muscle to duke it out with the British state, even supposing it isn't penetrated from top to bottom by intelligence moles. The Provos fought that war for a quarter of a century, and could only reach a stalemate. That failed guerilla strategy was precisely what resulted in the timid consensus politics of today's Sinn Fein. Groups like the 'Real IRA' and 'Continuity IRA' don't take this point, of course. Representing dissenting minorities in the Provisional IRA's leadership at the time of the Good Friday agreement and the peace process that preceded it, they still insist that a Republic can be acquired by an elite armed struggle. If it can't, then all has been in vain. As Bobby Sands' younger sister, former Provisional IRA executive member, and current 'Real IRA' member Bernadette Sands McKevitt put it: "Bobby did not die for cross-border bodies with executive powers. He did not die for nationalists to be equal British citizens within the Northern Ireland state". The blood that was shed in the course of that war is indeed hard to square with such an inglorious outcome. But ironically it was this insistence that led the 'Real IRA' to undertake their most infamous attack, the Omagh bombing, which itself was the final nail in the coffin for this kind of combat Republicanism. The idea that the armed struggle could be revived today is frankly absurd. Gerry Adams can openly call for his constituents to support the police hunt because he knows full well that the Catholic working class is sick to death of the futile armed struggle, the brutal 'discipline' that went with it and the harsh counterinsurgency of the British state. There is no popular constituency for this kind of fight.

The dull reality is that this shooting amounts to a brief, bloody intrusion on a perpetually gloomy twilight of increasing sectarianism (there are more 'peace walls' than ever before), rising poverty (the worst rates in the UK), and violent criminality (often by the husks of former combatant organisations). It is the convulsion of a movement experiencing its last gasps, one whose purpose was just but whose means were always ruinous. No one who matters need panic. Soon enough, everyone can get on with squandering and selling out yet another generation.

Labels: 'terrorism', ira, northern ireland, republicanism, sectarianism, sinn fein, socialism