Irish history

Ireland: blame the British ruling class!

(Published in 1993) Dear brothers and sisters, Like everyone else whose human feelings are not blocked or numbed by national hatred or chauvinistic self-righteousness, you are horrified and angry over the IRA bomb in Warrington which exploded in a crowed of weekend shoppers and killed two children. I understand those feelings, and I share them. So, evidently, do most Irish people, here and in the two parts of Ireland. Upwards of 20,000 people marched through Dublin last Sunday to condemn the IRA’s bombing campaign. What happened in Warrington was monstrous and unforgivable. The so-called Irish...

40 Years of the IRA: Where the Hillside Men Have Sown [IWG 1967]

James Connolly wrote: “Ireland occupies a position among the nations of the earth unique … in the possession of what is known as a ‘physical force party’ – a party, that is to say, whose members are united upon no one point, and agree upon no single principle, except upon the use of physical force as the sole means of settling the dispute between the people of this country and the governing power of Great Britain. Click here to download this article as pdf . "The latter-day high falutin ‘hillside’ man, on the other hand, exalts into a principle that which the revolutionsists of other countries...

Warrington Bombing: The roots of the deadlock in Northern Ireland - Blame the British ruling class! [1993]

An open letter to British trade unionists, from an Irish socialist living in England, after the killing of two children by an IRA bomb in Warrington, in March 1993. Socialist Organiser 557, 1 April 1993 Dear Brothers and Sisters: Like everyone else whose human feelings are not blocked or numbed by national hatred or chauvinistic self righteousness, you are horrified and angry over the IRA bomb in Warrington which exploded in a crowed of weekend shoppers and killed two children. I understand those feelings, and I share them. So, evidently, do most Irish people, here and in the two parts of...

Should Socialists Celebrate "Sixteen Eighty-Eight"?

Anti-fascist activists are picketing every meeting of Exeter City Council in protest at the council's decision to celebrate William of Orange's landing in Devon in 1688 on his way to London to become King. The council, say the activists, is pandering to the Orange Order and to the National Front. Briefing and Workers Press have voiced their opposition to any celebration of 1688. There has been a long debate in the columns of Workers Press on the issue, focusing on what William's landing meant for the Catholics of Ireland. This is all very strange, but highly symptomatic. The left should...

The theory of Permanent Revolution and Ireland: is there a socialist quintessence in Irish nationalism?

[This is a copy-edited and slightly expanded version of the text in Solidarity replying to Lysaght .] A dozen years on from the “Good Friday Agreement” (GFA) things in Northern Ireland are far from settled. The Good Friday system is far from stable. The political system set up by the GFA is an intricate network of bureaucratised Catholic-Protestant sectarianism. Communal antagonism is still so strong that it takes 60 or so permanent walls to keep active communalism from erupting into violence across Belfast. Militarist republican activity is still a major factor in Northern Ireland. It is a...

A permanent revolution for Ireland: a Provo-IRA socialist revolution? Part 2

...Continued... Mick: It's a central part of the ideology - in Karl Marx's sense of 'false consciousness' - of nationalist populism in Ireland that you conflate or collapse into each other the distinct questions of imperialism and anti-imperialism on the one side, and the intra-lrish conflict on the other. Most leftists in Britain, for example, talk and try to act as if only the question of British Imperialism exists in the Northern Ireland situation. The fact is that the intra-lrish conflict is massively the bigger question, and one could argue that imperialism exists, if at all, as a legacy...

"Irish Marxist rebuts internet slander"; "Comments on a smear job"

Entitled, "Irish Marxist rebuts internet slander", and "Comments on a smear job", this article by Rayner Lysaght appeared on the website of "Socialist Democracy", the Irish Mandelites. In an abusive introductory paragraph, they say that they themselves are unwilling "to join in this arcane discussion, but we do recognise Raynor’s right to defend himself and publish the letter in that spirit." Surfing the net the other day, this writer was surprised to see his name taken in vain as being a “second-hand-tale-spinning adoptive Irish nationalist”. Further on, he was intrigued further by a...

Working Class Life in Ennis in the Mid-Twentieth Century: Sean Matgamna Examines His Own "Roots and Branches"

[See also Savage violence in Irish schools - why did people stand for it?, Mary plays nuns' schools and Schoolbooks ] Like many revolutionary activists over the ages, Sean Matgamna was an immigrant, someone shaped in his thinking by the shifts and contrasts from living in one culture to living in another. The differences in the 1940s and 50s between life in Ennis, the small west of Ireland town I grew up in, and in a city like Manchester, were immense. To travel from Ennis to Manchester was to travel between different worlds. Ennis then was nearer to Thomas Hardy’s mid-19th century England...

Sean Matgamna: finding my way to Trotskyism, part 1: the "manacles" of nations and classes

Sean Matgamna founded the Workers’ Fight group after political battles with and within the bigger Trotskyist groups that existed in the mid-1960s, the SLL and the Militant. How did he come to do that? Or to become a Trotskyist at all? I’d considered myself a communist from when I was between 15 and 16, early in 1957. In 1959 I became politically active as a would-be revolutionary trade unionist, and I decided to join the Young Communist League. I was working in a timber yard in Salford where was no union for the labourers. I decided to join the union and see if I could get the others to join...

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