24.02.2005
Sinn Féin rides the storm
The last month has seen the build-up of an increasingly strident joint propaganda offensive conducted by the British and Irish governments against Sinn Féin. It seems that London and Dublin have decided that now is the time to attempt a rebalancing of political forces in Ireland - both north and south of the border. The largest ever bank robbery on the island - that of the Northern Bank in Belfast on December 20 2004 - has provided the opportunity. As many, including the Weekly Worker, predicted, the Good Friday agreement, with its institutionalisation of sectarianism, had the effect of reinforcing the catholic-Irish/British-Irish divide and strengthening the most intransigent in both camps. Thus, while Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party has replaced the Ulster Unionist Party as the biggest recipient of British-Irish votes, Sinn Féin has become the largest catholic-Irish party in the north - a status which looks set to be confirmed at the forthcoming Westminster general election and the Six Counties local elections, also to be held on May 5. In the south, where SF support in opinion polls is running at over 10%, it is possible that the party will hold the balance of power after the next Irish general election. From the point of view of British imperialism, the promoting of Sinn Féin as a constitutional party was useful inasmuch as it might lead to the ending of all active resistance to the occupation and the consequent re-establishment of full imperialist control in republican working class centres of the Six Counties. But the disbandment of the Irish Republican Army and the complete removal of the features of an alternative state have not been achieved in the republican/nationalist areas of Belfast and Derry. The IRA is still regarded by many in republican enclaves as a legitimate force for protection and maintaining order - in preference to the official law enforcement body, even in its new, 'non-sectarian' form as the Police Service of Northern Ireland. It is against this backdrop that the anti-SF campaign has been undertaken. Not only has the IRA been, virtually unanimously, declared responsible for the £26.5 million robbery. Sinn Féin leaders Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams have been named by Irish justice minister Michael McDowell as current IRA leaders, who are members of its army council. At first it was alleged merely that the pair 'must have known' the robbery was being planned, but now, it seems, they actually sanctioned the bank raid. According to McDowell, there is a single, united Provisional movement: "There is no division among them. It's total and absolute control and it controls both their military and their political sides." He was backed up by Irish taoiseach Bertie Ahern and the so-called Independent Monitoring Commission, appointed by the two governments, which also 'confirmed' IRA guilt. Although, of course, armed robberies have most certainly been undertaken by the IRA in the past, and it is not impossible that the organisation, or an element within it, might have been behind the Northern Bank heist, the notion that the likes of McGuinness and Adams, the Sinn Féin president, were in on it is stretching credulity just too far. SF chief negotiator McGuinness said: "The people who robbed the Northern Bank didn't give a damn about the peace process; didn't give tuppence for the work Gerry Adams and I and others were involved in over the course of many years; they were obviously people out for self-gain," he said. "It was a criminal robbery. I don't know who was responsible for it but I do know the consequences have seen the taoiseach and others line up against us." We should believe him. The SF leaders now craves respectability in furtherance of their aim of transforming the party into a major all-Ireland constitutional force. It is true that they would deny IRA involvement even if they knew it to be a fact, but McGuinness's indignation at the rebuff from Ahern seems genuine enough. Adams now complains bitterly that the taoiseach no longer returns his phone calls - a devastating blow for someone who regards himself as a statesmanlike politician of the first order. What is more, although the IRA could have committed the crime, we should not rule out other possibilities. It is only necessary to recall a previous bank robbery - at the time the largest in Irish history - that was at first laid at the door of the IRA back in 1972. The following year, two brothers from England, Keith and Kenneth Littlejohn, were found guilty of carrying out the raid. They claimed during their trial that they were British agents working under the instructions of the intelligence service. Then there was the 2002 Castlereagh break-in. Noisy assertions that the IRA was responsible were quietly dropped and now seem absurd. Last weekend suspicions of underhand state activity were reinforced when £50,000 in cash was discovered in the Newforge Country Club, which is owned by the Royal Ulster Constabulary Athletic Association and used by former RUC officers and serving Police Service of Northern Ireland officers. It was confirmed that the notes were from the Northern Bank haul. A PSNI spokesperson said immediately that the cash had been planted in "an effort to distract police investigating the robbery". This seemed to be an unduly hasty conclusion, but, if it is true, security arrangements at this particular PSNI facility would seem to be strangely lacking. By way of contrast to the speedy identification of the Newforge loot, three days after the seizure of large amounts of cash at various locations south of the border, which were said to come from Northern Bank and were linked to SF/IRA supporters, it was still "too early to say" whether the recovered notes were from the robbery. There was huge publicity over the arrests in the republic of seven people, including a Sinn Féin member, but all were released accept one man, who was charged with membership of the Real IRA. The arrests coincided with a well choreographed campaign claiming to expose IRA money-laundering, which complemented the Northern Bank allegations: "The IRA has a large and sophisticated finance department dedicated to raising money by whatever means possible and this has meant a headlong plunge into criminality and the parallel acquisition of property and businesses to launder the proceeds," wrote Ed Moloney in an 'Analysis' piece (Irish Independent February 19). The same paper reported justice minister McDowell's 'outing' of Adams and McGuinness as army council members and his revelations of a "colossal crime machine" that was laundering "huge sums" of IRA money. The previous week's Sunday Independent asserted that the IRA "is now the biggest pub-owner in the state" (February 13). Added to this were stories of attempts to buy a Bulgarian bank for the same purpose. These involved Phil Flynn, former SF vice-president, former president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, entrepreneur and up till last week official trouble-shooter. He announced his resignation from the government's decentralisation committee and as chairman of the Bank of Scotland in Ireland when one of his business associates was linked with the laundering accusations. Helpfully for reporters seeking an IRA link, Flynn told them he had always been a republican and always would be. While both SF and the IRA continued to deny any connection with criminality, anti-IRA scaremongering by "security sources" was continuing apace. The Irish republic was said to be on 'alert status' "following intelligence that the Provisionals had made preparations to hit police, army or prison personnel". The same unnamed "sources" went on: "IRA targeting is going on at the moment against all members of the security forces." Meanwhile, the Irish state broadcasting corporation, the RTE, was "seeking legal advice" about the advisability of broadcasting the Sinn Féin ard fheis (conference) in March. On the other side of the Irish Sea Northern Ireland secretary Paul Murphy proposed as punishment for the bank robbery the withdrawal of parliamentary allowances from Sinn Féin's four Westminster MPs, worth around £500,000 a year, and announced a further withholding of the £120,000 annual allowances to SF representatives in the Northern Ireland assembly. None of this seems to have affected Sinn Féin's core support in the north (although in the Republic things could be rather different). Working class republicans are used to all manner of allegations being hurled at SF/IRA, but they know full well from bitter experience who their enemy is: the state and its armed forces. Compared to the crimes of the British, the misdeeds of the IRA are petty indeed. Except for the murder of lifelong republican supporter Robert McCartney, who was stabbed and battered to death in a Belfast bar used by IRA/SF men on January 30 following an argument. In an unusually strong reaction, those who would normally regard themselves as republican loyalists demanded action against the perpetrators. Anti-Provisional graffiti, "PIRA scum out", appeared on a wall that had previously carried pro-republican slogans. Paula McCartney, Robert's sister, said: "I never thought IRA men would do this to a nationalist in Belfast in the 21st century", while his aunt, Margaret Quinn, talked of "the growing psychopathic element within the IRA "¦ cowards disguised as our so-called protectors". She referred to "the scum in the IRA who, by association, disgrace that entire organisation". While the outrage at the murder - and what appeared to be an attempted cover-up and threats against witnesses - was eagerly seized upon by the British and Irish media, the press was rather less keen to highlight the underlying loyalty to the republican leadership the comments revealed. But the joint Irish-British campaign looks set to continue, aimed at eventually relaunching the peace process after a realignment of forces. The two governments would dearly love to see the loss of SF support and a revival of the fortunes of the traditional party of Six County nationalists, the Social Democratic Labour Party. Perhaps a parallel development on the other side of the divide, with the 'moderate' UUP regaining ground from Paisley, would be too much to hope for in view of the current anti-IRA hysteria. Demonstrating that cross-border ties have not ended despite the crisis, the two police forces announced a new protocol on February 21, taking their cooperation to a new level. Officers from both sides of the border would work in each other's services. This is the sort of 'Irish unity' that both sides love to promote - to the disapproval, for different reasons, of both Sinn Féin and the DUP. For the DUP any such link-up is an anathema - although Paisley can hardly complain about moves against his arch-enemy. For SF/IRA, it is the wrong sort of unity, driven in the interests of the British state. For us communists, what matters is the unity that comes from below - unity around a common programme for democracy that recognises both the national rights of the catholic-Irish majority and the British-Irish right to self-determination within a united, federal Ireland. The anti-SF/IRA drive serves to bring nearer a settlement in the interests of both British imperialism and the Irish establishment. Such a settlement would have nothing to do with the democratic interests of our class. Peter Manson
Worker