Ireland

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...

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...

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...

April 23 marks the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising, in many ways the defining event in modern Irish history. The Rising, its consequences and aftermath shaped the situation Ireland faces today. It offers important lessons for the Irish workers today against both imperialism and indigenous exploitation and reaction. Mike Rowley tells the story. Despite its importance, the events of Easter 1916 have been downplayed in much recent historiography and in Irish politics. To the song’s defiant question: “Who fears to speak of Easter Week? Who flinches at the name?” The answer seems to be, a...

By Gerry Bates Denis Donaldson worked as a British spy within the top echelons of Sinn Fein for 20 years. He admitted that at a press conference four months ago. Now he has been shot dead at the remote Donegal cottage where he lived. The shooting of a police spy is never an entirely reprehensible or useless act, even when the spy in question worked against an IRA which was waging a war against Northern Irish Protestants and the British state which had long ceased to make any political sense. If it ever made sense. Who shot Donaldson? Ask the question “who benefits?” and the answer would be...

Northern Ireland is in chronic communal conflict. For there to be a democratic solution, a wider framework than Northern Ireland is needed. The only programme which accommodates the rights of both communities without infringing on the rights of either is a federal united Ireland with regional autonomy for the mainly Protestant north-east, linked in a voluntary confederation with Britain. That is a programme on which class-conscious Irish workers, Protestant and Catholic, can be united. And only a united working class can win full democracy and the socialist "levelling-up" which makes it viable...

By Sacha Ismail The bitter stand off between the workers and management of Irish Ferries last month, in which an occupation of two ships triggered a powerful wave of solidarity action, has been resolved. At the end of November, Irish Ferries unilaterally issued a 'proposal' to sack 543 directly employed seafarers and replace them with agency workers from Eastern Europe working 84 hours a week for £2.40 an hour. The ferries in question, the Isle of Inishmore and the Ulysses were occupied in protest by workers in Pembroke Dock and Holyhead in Wales. At the same time, solidarity strikes grounded...

Irish Ferries workers are fighting back against the “race to the bottom” as their bosses are trying to mount a major attack on workers’ rights, replacing them with cheap foreign labour. Two of the company’s flagship ferries, the Isle of Inishmore and Ulysses, have been occupied by workers in protest — they remain stranded in Welsh ports — while dock workers refuse to let the MV Normandy leave Dublin. The trigger for the occupation of the ships was Irish Ferries’ attempt to forcibly remove the workers with armed security staff who had boarded the ships dressed as passengers. The Irish...

by John O’Mahony This “historic” picture of Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, cat-that-got-the-cream grin fixed in place, schmoozing with the members of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, tells us what Sinn Fein is now and where its leaders are intent on going. It is a symbolic picture, too. The Irish bourgeoisie was very hostile to the Easter Rising of April 1916. Not only did their leading newspaper, the Irish Independent, urge the British to shoot the wounded Marxist socialist trade union leader, James Connolly, for his part in the Rising (too weak from his wounds to stand up, he was strapped...