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Progressives and democrats must organise for unity
This week’s Andersonstown News, because of Easter, was only looking for 500 words for the column. So I had to edit back a little on what I had written. But there is no word limit on the blog so here is the full version.
Ba mhaith liom go mbeadh Cásca sona, síochánta agus taitneamhach ort, agus féachaint ar an seacláid.
Saturday morning started bright and early. A 7.10
flight brought RG and I to Heathrow Airport where a smiling Ray, one of the
stalwarts of the Irish community in London over many years, picked us up. Sinn
Féin was holding a one day conference on the theme of ‘After Brexit – the prospects for a United Ireland’. We met up with
Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O’Neill at a hotel just across from the British
Parliament and then headed to the Congress Centre.
The conference was excellent and well attended. The
two panels were very good. The discussion ranged across key themes including the
likely impact of Brexit on the island of Ireland, British government policy on
Brexit and the border, the importance of the Good Friday Agreement, our
relationship with political and civic unionism, the strategies we need to achieve
a united Ireland, and Sinn Féin’s vision for the kind of Ireland we want to
build.
The starting point for Irish republicans in
developing strategies to challenge these issues is our belief that it is
impossible to properly understand the island of Ireland, its
people, politics and society, unless you set it in the context of the long
history of the English occupation, colonisation and partition of the island.
The island of Ireland today has been and continues to be shaped by these events
and by British government policy. That policy is inevitably determined by what
is in British national interests not in the interests of the people of our
island.
The current alliance at Westminster between the
Conservative Party and the DUP is an example of this. For its own narrow, party
political selfish reasons and in an effort to stay in power, Theresa May’s government
has actively encouraged the most negative, regressive, intransigent and
sectarian elements of political unionism to attack and undermine the Good
Friday Agreement. She is collaborating with the DUP to deny citizens our
rights.
In addition, right wing politicians in Britain and
ardent Brexiteers, from former British Secretary of State Owen Patterson, to Labour
MP Kate Hoey, to Tory MEP Daniel Hannan have all attacked the Good Friday
Agreement which they claim has failed. British national interests, in their
view and in this instance a hard Brexit, trump Ireland’s interests. They are
being facilitated in their rhetoric by the Tory party leadership.
No one who
knows anything of Irish history will be surprised by this. This is the
historical record of Britain’s relationship with Ireland and its disgraceful
exploitation of the fears of those who came as planters four centuries ago. The
connection between the Tories and Irish unionism can be traced back to early
nineteenth century when an alliance between the Orange Order and the Tories,
which opposed Catholic Emancipation, secured two seats in the 1832 Westminster
election.
The
unionists celebrated their victory by attacking Catholics in Belfast. The
Northern Whig reported how one prominent Orangeman speaking from the window of
the Tories’ Committee room said: “Mr.
Boyce … flourished a staff exultingly, and told them that the Protestants had
gained this victory, and that they would continue to maintain their ascendancy:
they had trodden down their enemies, and they would keep them down…”
The
Orange Order declined in the mid nineteenth century. But it was given a violent
lease of life with a new alliance with Tory leader Randolph Churchill’s. His
visit in February 1886 saw an outbreak of widespread sectarian violence in
Belfast. Churchill told a packed Ulster Hall in Belfast; “I am of the opinion that the struggle is not likely to remain within
the lines of what we are accustomed to look up as constitutional action …”
Later,
in an open letter in the Pall Mall Gazette he provided unionists with their war
cry in the years ahead. Churchill wrote: “If
political parties and political leaders …should… hand over coldly … the lives
and liberties of the loyalists of Ireland to their hereditary and most bitter
foes, make no doubt on this point – Ulster will not be a consenting party;
Ulster at the proper moment will resort to the supreme arbitrament of force;
Ulster will fight, Ulster will be right …”
The
Tory stance was dictated by a belief in the British Empire and a desire to use
the issue of Ireland as a means of defeating the Liberal governments of
Gladstone and take power.
The
Tories and the unionists did the same less than 40 years later when they
threated civil war in order to achieve partition. When it was over and the
northern state had been created, the then leader of unionism Edward Carson, speaking
in 1921, on the Tory intrigues that had led him on a course that would
partition Ireland said: “What a fool I
was. I was only a puppet, and so was Ulster, and so was Ireland, in that
political game that was to get the Conservative party into power.”
The Tories and the unionist leaders are at it again
today. They want to turn back the clock to the bad old days of unionist
domination. So, what should the response of progressives and democrats,
particularly in Britain, be to this, and to the threat to the Good Friday
Agreement? The first step should be for unity of purpose in defending the Good Friday Agreement and
ensuring that all aspects of the Agreement are implemented in full.
Last Saturday’s conference
majored on the two big issues which must be resolved if partition is to be
ended. One is the need for the rest of us and the unionists to become friends
or at least to be tolerant and respectful toward each other. The second issue
is for a British government to embrace Irish unity and to see it as in
Britain’s national interest. Both these matters are interconnected.
Some commentators speculate
endlessly about why the British government remains in Ireland or about why it
would love to leave. I see no evidence of it wanting to leave. If it did it
would but very few states willingly give up territory. The British government
supports the union but it is obliged to end it if what is what the people in
Ireland vote for.
That is why progressives in
England must organise to bring this about. In the past such demands for justice
for Ireland or on Irish issues made a considerable impact on political and
public opinion.
The advent of the Good
Friday Agreement and the success of the peace process understandably removed many
of these issues from the public agenda. The war in Iraq. The Middle East.
Syria. Other important issues filled the space. Brexit has changed that and
Saturday’s conference provided ample proof of that.
Sinn
Féin believes that the demographic and political changes that have and are
taking place require a referendum on Irish unity to take place within the next
five years. The responsibility of progressives and democrats in Ireland, in
Britain, in the USA and elsewhere must be to campaign to secure a date for such
a referendum and then it is up to progressives in Ireland to devise the means
to win it.
After
almost 100 years of a failed partitionist system and centuries of British
involvement in Irish affairs, it is time for the Irish people, all of us on the
island of Ireland, to shape out our own future.
We done to everyone involved with the London
conference for creating a forum to discuss this.
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