The six county

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After the destruction of Britain's overall strategy by the 1974-79. has many things to answer for, Ireland is somewhere at the top of a long list.

Let us retrace and sum up its record.

In the mid-'60s the Labour government had exerted great pressure for reform on the Six County state. When the sectarian state erupted into incipient civil war in 1969, it sent in the army.

The Labour government sought to have the British army act as a scaffolding to shore up the crumbling Six County edifice while the work of remoulding and reconstructing a political superstructure for it went on.

Senior civil servants were sent in to work in harness with, and in fact to act as commissars over, the Six County government departments.

Now the Marxists could have told the right and left reformists of the Labour Party who put the British army on the streets in Northern Ireland that nothing good could have come of it -and we did. They wouldn't have agreed with us and, by their political nature, probably couldn't have.

But as far as one can judge, they did have the intention, working within the Six County framework and Labour's 1949 Government of Ireland Act, which enshrined the Protestant veto on a united Ireland, to put an end to the decades of Catholic second class citizenship and oppression.

The great crime of the leaders of the Labour Party - within their own standpoint, perspectives and limitations - was their refusal to learn the lessons. what happened after 1969.

The army, an inevitably crude and brutal tool for police work, antagonised the Catholics. The Protestant backlash continued to gather force in the early 1970s. Then, as we saw last week, the Tories came to power and took control of the situation without Labour's good intentions and tied to their alliance with Orange politicians.

Between "Labour's leaving office in June 1970 and its return in March 1974 tremendous events had occurred in Ireland. The Provisional IRA offensive, internment, Bloody Sunday, the Tory government's turn to reform and its abolition of Stormont in 1972, the organisation of the mass UDA and Vanguard, the savage Orange backlash in the form of sectarian murders, the setting up of the powersharing executive at the end of 1973.

The election which brought Labour back to power simultaneously dealt a massive blow to the power-sharing executive by returning only one of its supporters to Westminster (the present Lord Fitt) out of a possible 12.

A new gale of Orange reaction was gathering as Labour returaed to office.

Out of office Harold Wilson had declared himself (in 1971) for movement towards a united Ireland encompassing a 15-year period. In 1972 he had had long discussions in Dublin with the Provisional IRA leaders.

What did Labour do when it got back in power? It continued on the Tory course. It dawdled and it dithered.

It surrendered to the Orange And then, having allowed the power-sharing structure to be smashed, it spent 18 months on the utterly hopeless Constitutional Assembly. It was a government that didn't want, didn't dare, to draw the obvious and necessary radical conclusions -that the Six County entity had failed. So had all the attempts to reform it from Britain, first Labour's, then the Tories' , and then again Labour's.

When the Protestant majority demanded majority - sectarian - rule in 1976 and the government declared the Assembly at an end, instead of drawing the necessary conclusions, Labour turned savagely on the Catholic community.

First Northern Ireland secretary Rees, and then his successor Roy Mason, decided that nothing was possible for Britain but to freeze all attempts to find a solution in Northern Ireland (and Ireland). They would just hold the ring. They would let the communities 'sweat it out'. '. They returned to the policy of beating down the Catholics abandoned by the Tories in early 1972.

Catholics

It was to be war to the death with the IRA - and that meant war on the Catholies, on whose active or passive support the IRA depended. As in 1970-2 it meant systematically "searching' - smashing up - tens of thousands of Catholic homes in raids designed as much to intimidate and terrorise the entire Catholic population as to find arms or fugitives. Things go so bad in the black year 1977 that Cardinal O'Fiaich, a constitutional nationalist and no friend of the IRA, protested vehemently on behalf of the Catholic people.

Political rights granted 1972 — effectively prisoner-ofwar status - were taken away from new political prisoners as from 1976, and the five year struggle that ended with the ten dead hunger-strikers in 1981 began.

The political effects of Rees's and Mason's 'sweating-it-out' policy were different in different sectors of the Catholic political spectrum. The policy was supposed to undercut the IRA militarists. In fact it undercut, and may yet be seen to have destroyed, the constitutional nationalists of the SDLP.

Today Mr Prior is visibly anxious to strengthen and preserve the SDLP and stop Sinn Fein, which got 43% of the Catholic vote in last June's elections from driving it to the wall and displacing it or marginalising it as the Catholic party.

A decade ago the SDLP was the very pillar on which the entire British strategy of creating a new Northern Ireland superstructure rested.

it was cobbled together in 1970 by seven members of Stormont, elected under a var-