31,000 say: 31,000 say. SMASH H-BLOCK

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by John O'Mahony TEN DEAD men. And still the grim reaper in Downing Street continues to hone the edge of the scythe.

Still more hunger strikers, in single file, edge painfully towards death.

Still the official British labour movement continues to support the Irish policy of bloody Margaret Thatcher.

And more and more completely, as death follows death, the Catholics of Northern Ireland commit themselves to the hunger strikers - and the youth, no doubt, to the hunger strikers' army.

On the day Micky Devine of the Irish Republican Socialist Party died, Owen Carron held the Fermanagh/ South Tyrone seat won for the H-Block campaign by hunger striker Bobby Sands in April.

The hunger-strikers, captured prisoners of war, have found a terrible but most powerful way to continue their military struggle by other means. As part of her war effort Mrs Thatcher like Wilson and Callaghan before her - brands them as mere criminals, but their deeds in captivity prove them to be what they say they are - political militants and soldiers.

Now two elections have proved that they have mass popular backing in the Catholic community.

The massive support for INSIDE IRELAND Micky Devine 195481 page 10 Behind the by-election page BENN CAMPAIGN Letter to the unions paye Who pays for the AES? page the hunger strike prepares the conditions for a new military offensive by the Provisional IRA.

Mrs Thatcher may find that if she breaks the hunger strike, she will have unleashed a new large-scale, and probably more bitter, military campaign, in which the spirit of the dead of Long Kesh will still confront the British government, but as armed men, hundreds of young Republican soldiers for every one of the prisoners of war allowed to starve to death in Long Kesh.

Simultaneously, sectarian hostility is hardening in the Protestant community. The grim risk of large-scale bloody communal conflict mounts.

The only way out is for Britain to abandon its attempt to beat down the Catholics who are in open rebellion against being an artificially created minority within an artificial sub-state where they have been politically, socially & militarily oppressed for 60 years. (The Catholics are a bigger minority in the Six Counties than the Protestants of all Ireland would be in a 32 County state).

Britain must end its occupation and abandon its commitment to maintain the partition of Ireland From any point that policy is a manifest failure. Even the exercise of majority rule by the artificially created Protestant majority within the Six Counties had to scrapped by the British overlord - a full decade ago!

Still Britain refuses to seek and negotiate a new settlement in the only place it can be found - in the broader framework of a united Ireland.

The Provisional Republicans, shaped by the experience of 50 years of Orange rule and by a decade of war against Britain, fight in the best way they can according to their tradition in the just cause of breaking the communal-sectarian of Northern Ireland.

Britain was responsible for the original 1920 gerrymander that locked the people of Northern Ireland, Protestant and Catholic alike, into that statelet.

Britain fights now to preserve partition.

Britain, especially by its refusal to grant the prisoners' five demands, is responsible for letting the communal antagonisms boil towards lethal heat.

The British labour movement must understand what is happening, and what can happen, betore it is too late, and insist on the granting ot the five demands.

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iocialist Organiser, Thursday 27 August, 1981 Page 2