Ireland

Follow-up AWL day school on Ireland

Discussing events and issues 1968-2006. Saturday 10 June , 11:00 to 13:30, Marchmont St Community Centre, 62 Marchmont St, London WC1. Notes and discussion points.

Notes for AWL day school on Ireland, May-June 2006

Saturday 20 May 2006, 12:00 to 17:00, St Matthew's Hall, Carver St, Sheffield. Saturday 3 June 2006, 14:00 to 18:00, Sebbon St Community Centre, Sebbon St, London N1 (behind Islington Town Hall). Basic reading Workers' Guide to Ireland (not available online: printed copies £1 including postage from AWL office) # texts from Ireland: a socialist answer # The partition of Ireland: the events of 1912-22 and their consequences for Ireland today Supplementary reading: Provos, Protestants, and working-class politics (Workers' Liberty 5) Structure of school: We will develop a collective understanding...

The Partition of Ireland

The events of 1912-22, and their consequences for Ireland today. 1912 April: Third Home Rule Bill introduced into Parliament by Liberal Government. The House of Lords veto has been abolished in 1911, so the Bill seems sure to pass. September: 447,000 people sign Ulster Solemn League and Covenant, pledging to resist the Bill. 1913 January: Ulster Volunteer Force formed and begins drilling. November: Irish Citizen Army and Irish National Volunteers formed. 1914 March: Army officers at the Curragh camp in Ireland declare they will resign rather than coerce Ulster. Government backs down and gives...

Northern Ireland - Crisis and Breakdown, 1968-1985: What Happened, and Why

Introduction From the mid-1960s a sizeable minority of the people of the USA turned against the war their government was waging in Vietnam. They marched, demonstrated and lobbied to force their government to stop the war. This active opposition of a section of their own people was a major factor in making the Indochina war unwinnable for the mighty US government. Since about 1972 opinion polls have more or less consistently shown that half or more than half the people of Britain do not want Britain to continue to rule Northern Ireland, do not want the British troops there, and therefore do...

Our record on Ireland

Socialist Organiser [the publication at the time of the tendency now represented by Workers’ Liberty and Solidarity] traces its attitude on Ireland back to the small group of socialists who produced the journal An Solas/Workers Republic in 1966-7, under the umbrella of the Irish Workers Group. We believed that traditional Republicanism was not and could not be a consistently anti-imperialist force; that it was, by its ideas, goals and methods a petty - bourgeois movement; that its petty-bourgeois nationalism was a barrier to working-class unity, that its 'little Irelandism' cut in the opposite...

Militant -Socialist Party on Ireland

This article deals with the views argued on Ireland in the 1970s and 80s by Militant, forerunner of the Socialist Party and Socialist Appeal. The Militant tendency argues that bread-and-butter trade union unity and a drive to for a Labour Party in Northern Ireland show the way to a socialist united Ireland. Why are they wrong? From a working class point of view the basic problem about the Six County state is that in that state framework, working class unity, developed on a trade union level, has always shattered at any political test. So long as the 'constitutional question' remains at the...

AWL day school on Ireland

Saturday 3 June , 2-6pm, Sebbon St Community Centre, Sebbon St, London N1 (behind Islington Town Hall). Notes and discussion points.

Theses on the Anglo-Irish (Hillborough) Agreement of 1985

1. What is the Anglo-Irish agreement? The Anglo-Irish agreement sets up an inter-governmental conference - backed up by a permanent secretariat stationed in Belfast-between the London and Dublin governments which will jointly run Northern Ireland. The executive power stays exclusively in British hands but the political control of the executive is normally to reside in the intergovernmental conference. The Anglo-Irish agreement is an international treaty registered with the UN, according to which the British government obligates itself to run Northern Ireland in agreement with the 26 County...

The Left's accommodation with Islam now and the 1960's Stalinist “dialogue between Marxism and Christianity”

INTRODUCTION, 2006, TO ARTICLE FROM WORKERS REPUBLIC, SUMMER 1967 Much of the ostensibly “revolutionary socialist” left has fallen on its knees before the forces of reactionary anti-Western political Islam, hailing it as a progressive “anti-imperialism”. The increasingly strange organisation that still, perhaps for old times’ sake, calls itself the Socialist Workers’ Party, welcomed the victory in Palestine of the Islamic fundamentalist party Hamas! It has aligned itself on the side of a world-wide reactionary-Islamist offensive against secularism, liberal civil rights, women’s liberation...

The Ballad of James Larkin

By Donagh MacDonagh In Dublin City in 1913 the boss was rich and the poor were slaves The women working, the children starving, then on came Larkin like a mighty wave The workmen cringed when the boss man thundered, seventy hours was his weekly chore He asked for little and less was granted, lest gettin' little, then he'd ask for more But on came Larkin in 1913, a mighty man with a mighty tongue The voice of labor, the voice of justice, and he was gifted and he was young God sent Larkin in 1913, a labor man with a union tongue He raised the workers and gave them courage; he was their hero, the...

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