N Ireland Explodes - 50 years ago

Fifty years ago, Northern Ireland exploded. 

On 5 October 1968, about 500 people assembled in Duke Street, in Derry, to march for civil rights, in defiance of a ban imposed by the Unionist government that had ruled the roost since the partition of Ireland in 1921. 

The ensuing brutal police violence that cracked skulls and hospitalised at least 100 protesters was televised across the world. That was the day most commentators designate the start of 'the Troubles'. 

Many myths surround this whole period of history, and many rich lessons for today need to be unearthed. 

This was a period of vast opportunities for working class unity in Ireland - which then turned into the bloody conflict for nearly 30 years, marked by deepened sectarian division and 3,700 deaths. 

But could history have been different? What were the roots of sectarianism? What did the civil rights movement signify and achieve? What role did the trade union and labour movement play 50 years ago? Was workers' unity possible? Why were British troops sent in by a Labour government in August 1969? And have the claims by Sinn Fein today, that they are the modern inheritors of the civil rights struggle of 50 years ago any basis in the historic facts?

We don't study history for the hell of it; we do so to learn from success and failure, in order to apply the lessons to the current world - including Ireland. The biggest crime of much that is written on Irish history is the way it excludes the many glorious displays of workers' unity in struggle. 

Below is the opening section of Chapter 1 of a 110-page book I wrote in 1989, entitled Socialism - not Sectarianism. This chapter deals with the main events of 1968-9. 

If you would like the full chapter (the book is now out of print), please pay a modest £3 via PayPal, to the account with the email address jim.sspfinance@gmail.com 

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LESSONS OF THE 1968 CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE [Chapter 1 of Socialism - Not Sectarianism]

Twenty years ago, British and Irish capitalism was rocked to its foundations by the social explosions surrounding the civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland.

Mass demonstrations, significant signs of Catholic and Protestant unity, police thuggery, barricades, no-go areas and pogroms against the Catholic minority - were features dominating events from the first big Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) march on 5 October 1968 to the entry of British troops on 14 August 1969.

What were the roots of these social convulsions?

British imperialism mastered the arts of exploitation, bloody suppression of revolts and the cynical use of divide and rule tactics, in its centuries of rule in Ireland. By the early 1900s, it faced its most powerful foe: the young Irish working class, united in movements threatening socialist revolution. Despite the poisons of sectarianism, Catholic and Protestant workers combined against their common enemy in the 1907 Belfast docks strike, led by Jim Larkin, during which Belfast police mutinied. The 1913 eight-month Dublin lockout involved Protestant Belfast workers giving solidarity to Catholic Dublin workers in their showdown with Catholic Dublin bosses. 

Workers unite

Under the shadow of the 1917 Russian revolution, the capitalists faced a mobilized Irish working class in 1918-21. 

In 1919, Belfast engineering workers, whose majority were Protestant, formed a united Protestant-Catholic strike committee, with a Catholic elected as chairman. They led a virtual general strike which involved mass trade union patrols. Belfast was temporarily in the workers' hands, and even the capitalist media were forced to admit 'law and order' was better than when the police were in control.

The 1919 Limerick Soviet involved price controls by the workers' committees and production of their own currency - 'Labour Notes' - distinct from the national currency. 

Arigna miners occupied their pits and forced compensation from the bosses at the end of their action for the improved productivity during the period of workers' control of the mine. 

Creamery workers seized their workplaces, hoisted red flags, and declared on banners "We make cream, not profits". 

Land labourers, road workers and numerous other layers were involved in a wave of strikes, sit-ins and embryonic soviets throughout every corner of Ireland.

This workers' movement was met by military savagery and pogroms against Catholic and Protestant socialists in Belfast. The latter were orchestrated by big business, executed by the UVF thugs, and encouraged by the British Tories. In the period June 1920 to June 1922, a total of 428 died and 1,766 were injured in these pogroms. And 25% of the 9,000 driven from their jobs, in four days in August 1920, were Protestants: trade unionists and socialists, including those involved in the 1919 general strike. 

Partition 

In 1921, British imperialism was guilty of the crime of partition - the culmination of their divide and rule tactics in the face of a workers' movement threatening their power and privileges. Two unviable, poverty-stricken, undemocratic, capitalist statelets were thus born. 

Partition met the naked cash calculations of the capitalist class. It allowed them to maintain the most industrialized region around Belfast, and vital naval bases to help 'Britannia rule the waves'. Above all, it threw back the workers' movement for decades.

However, the capitalists in the South were incapable of developing a healthy, independent economy. Neither tariffs nor free trade could end the miserable conditions that blighted the population. For instance, by 1946, 46% of the population still depended on agriculture for an income! As writer Tim Pat Coogan put it: "Had it not been for the safety valve of emigration (400,000 in round figures 1950-60), the frustration and desperation of these years must have led to mass riots."

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