15.02.1996

New fight for Ireland

The ending of the IRA ceasefire with the Docklands bomb may have temporarily stalled negotiations, but all parties are committed to getting them back on track

Discontent in the republican ranks over the ‘peace’ negotiations had become clear in November last year. “The IRA has not gone away,” Gerry Adams told a rally. Hurriedly the big guns of the US were brought in, in the shape of Mitchell.

One element of his report was seized upon by Major and the unionists - elections in the north. This was the last straw for many republicans.

Nevertheless it seems increasingly clear that this bomb and the IRA statement to end the ceasefire were part and parcel of the strategy of negotiations and commitment to the ‘peace’ process.

This was not a breakaway aimed at restarting the war against British imperialism.

Republicans in the north, left isolated by the lack of solidarity of workers in Britain, now see little alternative. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, liberation struggles and hot spots throughout the world are being resolved in imperialism’s favour. Such processes in South Africa, Nicaragua, Palestine and Bosnia were not without their own false starts and violent interruptions.

The failure of Irish republicans to take any other course is a failure of the whole of the working class oppressed under the same British state. It was the duty of the working class to win support for those fighting imperialism and stand unconditionally for the IRA against British imperialism. It is this failure that has left republicans in the north facing monolithic opposition, with all bourgeois parties singing with one voice, and no independent working class voice to be heard.

This failure has meant that it is not just the republican struggle upon which imperialism is wreaked its revenge. The British state has wielded its weapons of oppression, steeled in the north of Ireland, against the working class on its mainland. Troops against the miners in 1984-85, police tactics against anything from anti-poll tax demonstrators to anti-road and even anti-live animal export demonstrators. Repressive legislation, honed against revolutionaries in the Six Counties, has been brought home in the Criminal Justice Act.

But republicans have not surrendered: their organisation remains intact. Though all struggle is for the moment directed towards what can only be an imperialist-brokered ‘peace’, the battle is far from over.

The new situation makes new demands and places new responsibilities on all revolutionaries. To take our common fight for liberation forward demands a unity capable of destroying once and for all the British imperialist state which keeps us all in chains. Revolutionaries in Britain and Ireland need to be organised for that task now.