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John O'Mahony's epic 'Ireland - which way forward? attempted yet again to defend one of the British left's most venerable sacred cows, the peculiar idea that it is possible to unite Catholic and Protestant workers in the Six Counties around 'bread and butter issues' , a notion dismissed by Connolly as 'almost screamingly funny in its absurdity' To illustrate the bankruptcy of this strategy, I will select two key events from the many available: the 1932 'Outdoor Relief' strike, the case generally eited as the model for future attempts at 'working class unity' and the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council Strike which brought down the 'Power-Sharing' Executive, a case about which the left is (not surprisingly) silent.

Two factors were important in were taken to different lands, exposed to different climates creating the conditions for the 'Outdoor Relief' strike. Firstly, Protestant unemployment had risen rapidly. Between January 1930 and October 1932, when the strike broke out, employment had fallen by 87% in the Protestant dominated shipyards (see Isles and Cuthbert, 'An Economic Survey of Northern Ireland', HMSO Belfast p. 594). Secondly, the republican movement had been further disorientated and weakened by the election of De Valera's Fianna Fail (anti-Treaty) government in the South.

As a consequence there was no apparent threat to partition in the minds of the Protestant workers. The combination of extreme poverty and the security of Partition, the guarantee of Protestants' privileged position in the Six 'Counties' labour market, facilitated the united and soils, etc., these new factors influenced their choice of the 'best'. Nowadays, domestic varieties are frequently as different from their wild relatives as the pekinese is from the wolf.

With the dominance of monopoly capitalism in world agriculture has come a decrease in the number of varieties of food plants, as these have been standardised. And the standard varieties, obtainable from the big seed companies, usually require lots of fertilisers and pesticides!

This standardisation has brough with it the serious problem that food plant species are now often genetically impoverished.

Genetic

The ability of any species to survive and adapt to damaging conditions depends on its genetic resources. If a plant meets a disease it has not met before then its ability to survive depends on its potential to defend itself.

Genetic diversity makes it more likely that some plants already have some resistance. These plants will survive and multiply. A genetically poor species will only survive if the action.

However, the traditional Protestant response to rising unemployment was never far below the surface. In 1931 the 'Ulster Protestant League' was set up. to safeguard the employment of Protestants' • Unionist leaders like Craigavon made demagogic speeches encouraging Protestant employers not to employ any Catholics. With the economic upturn of the mid 1930s, incipient class unity was destroyed and by 1935 Protestant workers 'celebrated' the Jubilee of King George V by murdering Catholics, driving hundreds from their work and burning many out of their homes (see Michael Farrell, 'Northern Ireland; the Orange State' Pluto 1980, pp. 136-40).

Similarly with the Loyalist workers' response to what they perceived as a sellout of the link farmer can afford to it with pesticides.

Genetic poverty already exists - so what can be done about it? The obvious answer is to introduce more genetic variety into plant populations - but this can only be done by interbreeding the domestic plant with a closely related species with more genetic diversity. This will usually be a wild relative.

A case recently reported in New Scientist shows how this works.

The domestic potato (Solanum tuberosum) is ravaged by aphids, while its wild cousin S. berthaultii is immune (according to R.W. Gibson and J.A. Pickett of the Rothamsted Experimental Station).

Gibson and Pickett found that the wild spud had hairy leaves - while the tame spud was smooth. These hairs were of two types - long ones which exuded a sticky fluid, and short ones with lobes which burst when touched to produce a quick-setting glue.

Together, these would immobilise an unsuspecting aphid.

But S. berthaultii has an even more elegant defence. It produces •a smelly substance identical to the alarm pheromone* of the aphid. So most aphids would smell 'danger' and leave the hirsute 'tater alone.

The next step is to try to introduce this useful character into the domestic potato - and already hybrids have been produced.

So.. if need between the Six Counties and Britain, via the Power-Sharing Executive with its institutionalised Catholic representation and 'Irish dimension' John O'Mahony has failed to appreciate that it is the social position of the Protestant working class which has led it to line up with the Protestant bourgeoisie and with the British state, the guarantor of capitalist social relations in Ireland against any nationalist threat to the privileged position of the Loyalist working calss in the Loyalist state. The actions of the Protestant working class are neither those of 'dupes nor are they a threat to the Protestant ascendency. Their opposition to the Unionist establishment was motivated by the same force that drove them to chase Catholic workers out of the shipyards. In both conditions they were the genetic wealth of a food plant, tina a wild relative breed with it. What's the problem?

The problem is conserving the habitats where these wild relatives grow before they are made extinct. For example, the small area where the perennial maize grows is threatened with cultivation by subsistence farmers (who are frequently displaced from better land by agribusiness).

Further South, the vast Amazon jungle is being destroyed at a frightening pace, together with untold numbers of plant species potential benefit. A recent smal survey identitied 1,000 plants with economic potential as tood, drugs or industrial substances.

Capitalist agriculture is not ignorant of the value of wild genetic resources. In fact, there is quite a large industry in stealing resources from Third World countries. Two examples from America: 1. a gene for resistance to wheat stripe rust disease from a wild wheat in Turkey has been saving the US wheat industry $50 million per year since the '60s. 2. a gene for resistance to barley yellow dwarf disease from Ethiopia protects the Californian barley crop, worth $150 million per year.

No recompense has been made to either country.

Indeed, improved • varieties of seeds are sold back to Third World farmers at considerable profit. According to Earthscan, the international seed trade is worth £6,000 million per year. defending status.

Of course, the Protestant working class is exploited under capitalism, but its relative privileges, which form the very basis of Partition and the division of the Irish working class, mean that they cannot act as a working class so long as their privileges and Partition survive. The crucial modification of the wage labour/capital relationship produced by the sectarian working class can have nothing in common with the Catholic working class.

Any call for Protestant/ Catholic working class unity is a chimera which serves to mask the real issue: the political oppression of Ireland by British imperialism.

Alastair Todd, Cambridge Plant (and animal) species are being extinguished at a rate of one per year (perhaps a thousand times faster than during prehistory) as their habitats are chopped down, burnt off, cultivated for a few years and then abandoned to become deserts, all under the pressure of capitalism's search for resources. Our future is being squandered to let capitalism survive a little longer. And that's why socialists should be conservative!

Information from the New Scientist. *pheromone: a chemical with a message which travels through the air and is detected by smell.

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