Different views of the Irish elephant

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JO QUIGLEY (Writeback, SO 137) says many true things against Alistair Todd and others. But his view that what the Northern Ireland war is about is an "'irredentist' republican campaign to subjugate the Protestants into a nation they feel no part of" is, I think, perverse.

My dictionary defines irredentism as the belief that a state should include all those citizens of other states who speak its own' language and belong to "its' ethnic group. It usually has implications of chauvinism and expansionism, as with Germany in the 1930s.

That is what the Catholic revolt in Northern Ireland is about?

The 26 Counties' irredentist' claim that its territory includes the Six Counties has never been taken very seriously even by the Southern state. In practice they have always worked hand in hand with the Northern authorities and Britain to maintain the Border, and they do so now.

The Southern schools used to teach a variant of what is now Provisional IRA nationalism? Yes, but the state, especially during governments of Fianna Fail, the Republican Party' also used internment without trial, special courts and the firing squad against militant republicans who tried to act on it.

In fact, the threat that the Six County majority have felt has been the threat of the Northern Catholic minority, the main victims of partition.

In so far as there has been any Southern aid to the Northern Catholics - that is not 'irredentism', ', but an expression of the nationalism of an oppressed people. Lenin's dictum that the nationalism of the oppressed is not the same as the nationalism of the oppressors is frequently used by leftists to excuse their own wallowings in various nationalisms. It is nonetheless an important truth.

Any criticism of elements of Catholic chauvinism in the Republican movement, and of that movement's strategy and tactics, must be put in that context or you wind up with a back-tofront view of the world, unable to distinguish between the oppressed and their oppressors.

The abandonment of federalism by the Republicans is, I think, a step away from Republicanism and towards Catholic nationalism. It leaves them no policy, even notionally, except conquest of the Protestants. But the dropping of federalism came ten years into the war - a war that the IRA plainly is not winning. Federalism was adoptwhen the Republicans thought they would soon win and need a democratic Republican blueprint for the new Ireland.

The initiative to 'withdraw the hand of friendship offered to the Protestants in 1972' (as David O'Connell described the dropping of federalism) came from Northern Republican militants, and is, 1 believe, an expression of bitterness and despair at the prolonged deadlock in NorthernIreland, and their awareness that the Protestants are the decisive block to their progress.

It is a response to their experiences, an attempt to solve in words and definitions the intractable problem of Protestant hostility which they can't solve in practice, not a programme they started out with.

The present war came about not as a result of any force outside Northern Ireland driving for territorial expansion or for a blood " rain" one d "or one border.

Throughout the war the South has been virtually a foreign country. 60 years after partition, a recent poll shows that only 41% in the South even consider the Northerners 'Irish' The energy for the Republican upsurge - which nobody in the mid '60s expected, least of all the Republicans - came from the Northern. Catholic revolt. The Republicans superimposed themselves and their militarist strategy on a revolt which came from the social and political concerns of the Catholics, and from their will to break out of the Partition state.

The revolt of the Six County Catholics was a just and necessary revolt against the intolerable injustice of partition, and against its intolerable consequences for the Northern catholics.

Jo Quigley implies that the nation. The two-nationise prate Protestants stre separate tion is right now inextricably linked with the defence of the untenable and unjust status quo in Northern Ireland. Variants of it have for 100 years been a propaganda tool of Britain and the Irish Unionists against the claim of the majority of the Irish people to self-determination: how can there be Irish national independence when there is not one but two antagonistic Irish nations? The Irish need Britain to rule them: that was the original version.

Rubbish

As a definition of Irish reality the theory is rubbish. For Marxists a nation is a social complex embodying a common history, language, culture, economy, and territory. A fully distinct nation is most pointedly what the culturally and historically distinct Protestant community in Northern Ireland is not.

It is interlaced and intertwined in the same territory with the Catholic community in Northern Ireland, though the density of the interlacing varies from area to area.

'National minority' would be a possible description, but 'distinct community' is better, 1 think: it is a social formation with some of the features of a distinct nation which has failed to develop fully into one, and for which full autonomy of development has not been possible because it is enmeshed with nation. (And tragically it may prove to be the role in history of the present Republican movement - despite their intentions and most fervent wishes - to trigger such a development).

Jo is right to say that respect for the 'Protestant sense of cultural separateness" from what he calls 'the Catholic Irish nation" is irreplaceable. It is inconceivable that the N. Ireland Catholics could be won to that view if it means accepting the artificial Six County state within which they have been imprisoned these 60 years. The solution is to rearrange the connection between the Catholic and Protestant people of Ireland on democratic lines, reflecting the natural Irish majority and minority.

The only way the reasonable Protestant demand for recognition of their separate identity can be reconciled with the rights of the majority of the Irish people, of whom the oppressed Northern Catholics are part, would be a united Ireland with internal autonomy for the Protestants.

Perverse

It is perverse to blame the Catholics and demand that they accept the status quo: all experience has shown it to be unviable as well as unjust and destructive of the labour movement in Send letters to Socialist Organiser 28 Middle Lane, London N8. No longer than 400 words, please: longer letters are liable to be cut.