What happened to the Officials

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THE WORKERS' Party formerly Official Sinn Feil is a very important organ isation now much neglected by the British left.

The pro-Republican left dismisses it with curses, and the Communist Party treats it as a rival with its sister Communist Party of Ireland.

The Workers Party may deserve the curses, but it does not deserve to be neglected.

It is an increasingly important party in the 26 Counties, and it retains a sizeable core of activists and voters in Northern Ireland. It has two deputies in Dail Eireann (the Dublin parliament). Its vote in Dublin is now respectably close to that of the Labour Party. It is an important and maybe growing force in the trade unions.

And it could scarcely ask for more favourable conditions in which to develop and grow than the present conditions in the 26 Counties. The slump has hit Ireland very severely, creating mass unemployment especially_among youth. The small Labour Party is in the increasingly unpopular coalition government which has the responsibility of running Irish capitalism in these conditions.

Important trade unionists already talk publicly about unions disaffiliating from the coalitionist Not the least of the Workers Party's assets is a core of disciplined and dedicated members who -like the men and women who founded De Valera's Fianna Fail in the 1920s - carry the discipline and seriousness of former revolutionaries over into constitutional politics.

For all these reasons the Workers Party could become a very big force in Irish politics.

The Workers Party is also of great importance in understanding Republicanism and the discussions now going on in the Provisional organisations.

Those who lead the Workers Party - Tomas MacGiolla, Sean Garland, Cathal Goulding, etc. -tried to turn the Republican movement away from militarism and towards politics in the '60s. influenced by Stalinism and the tradition of populist Jeft-wing Republicanism.

They preached class unity. But their efforts to campaign for civil rights and other immediate demands, and the Paisleyite reaction to them, only prized open the chasm that exists between the communities in the Six Counties.

The decisive divisions that opened up were not along the horizontal lines of class, but along the age-old vertical lines dividing community from community. Communal antagonisms re-emerged in 1969 with a violence unknown for decades.

The horizontal split along class lines which did occur in the Prot-. estant community in the early i70s saw the Protestant workers being led by Protestant-communalist bigots like lan Paisley who used populist demagogy.

And' the Protestant backlash in 1969 threw sections of the Catholic community and of the Republican movement back on their own militant traditions. The IRA split in December 1969 and a year later the Provisionals' offensive started to get under way.

The Official Sinn Fein got drawn into the war in response to British military aggression in areas like the Falls, fighting the first big gun battle with_the British Army in the Lower Falls in July 1970g In 1972 the Official IRA declared a ceasefire, which has held since. The organisation continued its political evolution in conditions where much of Northern Ireland political life has been dominated by the Provisionals' military campaign.

A second bloody split occurred in 1975, with the Irish Republican Socialist Party.

Nearly two decades after mid-'60s turn to politics, the Workers Party is today a st ange political mixture. Partly from alarm at what they see as the logic ot the Provisionals' campaign, and in face of watershed events like the Orange general strike in mid "74, and partly from hostility towards the Provisionals, it does not now support the Catholic revolt that it helped to trigger.

It tells the Northern Catholics to accept the six Counties, and preaches the democratic validity of the Six County state.

It denounces Irish nationalism and starkly counterposes to it a iather narrow workerism. It plays the parliamentary game in Dail Eireann, where it supported the short-lived 1982 coalition.

It is 'socialist' , with a recognisable Stalinist strain (towards the Stalinist states, for example. But in immediate politics it is explicitly, even extravagantly, reformist and 'responsible' Yet to dismiss them as just "selling out' is to miss some of the essential points about the Workers Party and its evolution. It is not the first Republican group to develop like this. The most important previous travellers on th road were Fianna Fail and Clann na Poblachta.

Clann na Poblachta was made up of 1930s Republicans, led by former IRA Chief of Staff Sean MacBride (later of Amnesty International). It got 10 seats in the Dail in 1948 and was the nub of a coalition in which the major partner was Fine Gael - Fine Gael which 15 years earlier had been the quasi-fascist Blueshirt movement with which the Republicans traded blows and bullets rather tan places in the Free State cabinet.

Reaction against the Provisionals' war has shaped the Workers' Party, and it is bravely explicit about certain things which Fianna Fail and Clann na Poblachta modestly left implicit, relying on their deeds in government to speak for them.

Nevertheless, the Workers Party too, like Fianna Fail and Clann na Poblachta before it, embodies the second, hidden, soul of Irish Republicanism. They are the latest ex-physical-force-on-principle revolutionaries to reveal that they are not revolutionaries socially as soon as they abandon sterile abstention from politics and try to use tools other than military hardware.

In fact the Wörkers Party is still recognisably Republican -and. not only because some remnant: of the Official IRA still exist (it surfaced briefly last year). Their coats have been turned, but the materiai Is recognisable.

For example, as Stalinist-influenced populists they talked of completing the Irish bourgeois revolution and the Irish national revolution as the necessary first stage of the revolution, and then preparing for the second stage -socialism. Now they denounce the Irish bourgeoisie for not having industrialised the country and pose as the immediate task, the prerequisite for socialism, the Irish industrial revolution' - by way of reformist pressure and Parliamentary deals. Kissinger (on left in right hand picture)

ETE A says: if stopping 'Marxist-Lenini. ah - ai-. ictory' means death squads, then so be

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