THE LIMERICK SOVIET, 1919 - when workers ran the city!

"We make bread not profits!" Bruree village Mill Soviet - following Limerick example

This year has a bumper crop of very significant centenaries for workers and socialists, but one that barely merits a mention in Scotland or Britain is the Limerick Soviet of April 1919.

This was a two-week general strike in Ireland's west-coast city, commencing Monday 14th April 1919, primarily against the declaration of martial law by the British government, with military occupation, which provoked outrage from most of the 40,000 population.
For at least ten days, the elected Strike Committee seized control of all the major decisions over production, transport, food supplies, law and order, energy supplies, propaganda – and even produced their own currency!

It was a movement that terrified the ruling capitalist class - not just of Britain, but also the aspiring native capitalists of Ireland, who were hell-bent on gaining the power and privileges of an independent Ireland for their own class.

In the sober but terrified editorial tones of the main mouthpiece of British capitalism, the Times newspaper:

“The internal control of the city has passed into the hands of the Strike Committee, who are adopting the most approved soviet methods. They regulate the opening of the shops and even direct sales. They are also endeavouring to decide prices... As money is running short among the strikers, they are about to issue an equivalent of promissory notes, of a value from one to ten shillings, guaranteed by ‘the Workers of Limerick’ and signed by the Limerick Trades and Labour Council.”

Their dread of “the most approved soviet methods" has to be understood in the context of the time. This was a mere five months after the workers and peasants of Russia had seized power, ruling through Councils of directly elected and immediately recallable delegates from the workplaces, military units and peasants.
It was pre-Stalinism, when the young workers’ state was a shining beacon for workers across the globe, Ireland and Britain included.
‘Soviet' was simply the Russian word for Council or Committee; the vibrant and democratic forum for decision-making by the toiling masses, in the early years after the 1917 socialist revolution.

The Times, military chiefs, capitalist overlords and their government puppets had every reason to look on in dread at equivalent developments in their own first colony, with the potential of the ‘contagion’ spreading to British cities. Especially those with large Irish populations, including those like Glasgow which had just been through the tumultuous battles of the Forty Hour Strike, mere weeks prior to the Limerick Soviet.

Limerick 1919 was a powerful link in the chain of revolutionary events that spread across the island of Ireland, particularly in the years 1918-23.
Prior to the First World War, a rash of strikes involved particularly newly-organised, super-exploited sections of workers, such as the Belfast dockers, women in the Belfast mills, Wexford foundry workers.

As the British government made parliamentary preparations for Irish Home Rule, native Irish capitalists fought ruthlessly to put Irish workers in their place, to stifle their demands and aspirations.
This culminated in the 1913 Dublin Lockout, orchestrated by William Martin (‘Murder') Murphy – described by Jim Larkin as “a soulless, money-grubbing tyrant” - and the Dublin Employers’ Federation, who starved and brutalised men, women and children, in their mission to smash the growing forces of trade unionism, led by the likes of Jim Larkin and James Connolly.

'Big Jim' Larkin during the 1913 Dublin Lockout

It was during that showdown between two Irish classes that the Irish Citizens Army (ICA) was formed, to defend the strikers. When the ICA went on to join forces with the nationalist Irish Volunteers in the 1916 Easter Rising, it was no accident that Murphy used his ownership of the Irish Independent to bay for the blood of Connolly in particular; he recognized the great Marxist workers’ leader as a mortal threat to the upstart capitalist class of Ireland.

Connolly’s execution by British imperialism, and Larkin’s departure to the USA (and subsequent jailing there on charges of sedition against the war) beheaded the Irish workers’ movement in the period after the War – the period of greatest potential for workers’ power and socialism, and the time of greatest need of experienced, capable socialist leadership in the workers’ movement. This was to be underlined in red in the events of Limerick, and indeed throughout the period 1918-23.

Those few years included 3 general strikes, hundreds of strikes and workplace occupations, widespread land seizures by land labourers, and several local Soviets – including early 1919 in Monaghan Asylum, and in particular a rash of Soviets after the example of Limerick set out a model for workers in other towns, villages, factories, creameries, the Arigna mines...

1919 kicked off with the Belfast general strike for a shorter working week, without loss of pay, during which Protestant and Catholic workers united and controlled the city for 4 weeks, in a momentous challenge to the ruling capitalists, their politicians and their state - which we have described elsewhere, in my pamphlet 1919 REVOLT.

Revolt on the Clyde, the Lagan, the Shannon... 

Limerick was a city of abject poverty, slum housing and grossly over-crowded conditions, but also with a working class population imbued with rebellion and resistance. The militant, growing ITGWU union had, by late 1918, over 3,000 members in the city, and its main organiser was a Marxist, Sean Dowling.
The Limerick United Trades and Labour Council had substantial authority, coordinating many protests and strikes.
The city had a very popular paper, edited by a baker and trade unionist, called The Bottom Dog. Though politically very confused, with strains of anti-Protestant bigotry and anti-Semitism, the paper strongly advocated union organisation of both men and women, and was self-described as “the voice of the oppressed whether by nation, class or sex.”
On May Day 1918, 15,000 rallied and passed resolutions with “greetings to our Russian comrades.”

Thousands at Robert Byrne's funeral

As the mostly rural guerilla-based War of Independence raged, an attempt was made by the IRA to rescue a local member and hunger-striker, Robert Byrne. In the melee, Byrne (and an RIC officer) were shot dead, provoking fury in the local population, who hated the RIC as the paid agents of Britain and the Irish capitalists.

About 10,000 assembled as Byrne’s body was removed. The British authorities feared an escalation of the unrest after his funeral and used the repressive Defence of the Realm Act to declare most of Limerick a Special Military Area (SMA). This meant martial law, with thousands of workers forced to show military passes to army patrols on their way to and from work, which inflamed people further.

On the day of the funeral, thousands marched and lined the streets, as British troops lined the route, bayonets fixed, accompanied by armoured cars and overhead military planes.

Immediately, the workers of Cleeves Condensed Milk factory pressed the Trades and Labour Council to meet the day before the SMA was set to take effect. After prolonged discussion, the meeting decided to call a general strike from the following day, Monday 14th April. About 14,000 workers responded the first day, with growing numbers later.

The Limerick Soviet leadership

What followed was a glimpse of how the future could have been. The Strike Committee and a series of Sub Committees took control of the city for ten days.

They organised picketing and propaganda, producing the daily Workers Bulletin. Production was halted, except where the Strike Committee decided otherwise. Vehicles were only allowed to move by displaying a sticker saying ‘Working under the authority of the Strike Committee.’
The workers’ committees exposed any attempts at profiteering by shops and shut them down. Red Guards were deployed to enforce the decisions of the Strike Committee, including price controls.
In defiance of blood-curdling predictions of famine in the city by the hostile capitalist press, the general strike organisers’ Food Control Committee set up a food depot outside the city, across the river Shannon, and got ample supplies from farmers in County Clare. These supplies of essential food were then smuggled past the army sentries in boats with muffled oars, and in hearses!
The people were fed at fixed, low prices through food depots inside the city – proving the social benefits of eliminating the profit motive!

Limerick, April 1919

And as bemoaned by the frightened Times editor, they printed their own currency during the second week of the Soviet, calling them Labour Notes, which were accepted in the shops. This act, perhaps above all others, symbolised the degree to which the working class had forged a rival power to that of the British government and its martial enforcers.
And for the Soviet’s duration, with the workers taking control of law and order, the city was a model crime-free, peaceful enclave. A glimpse of how society might become; an example the capitalist state couldn’t afford to allow to survive too long!

Workers confronted the troops and fraternised with the rank-and-file 

In contrast to the widespread hatred towards the RIC police, sound class instincts and creative leadership led to appeals towards the British soldiers, worrying the army top brass that they couldn't rely on the conscripts to mete out full frontal repression and assaults on the strikers and their working class army of supporters.
In one well-planned incident, 1,000 young men and women confronted the soldiers without carrying any military permits, asking to leave the city boundary for a GAA sporting event, later returning en masse in repeat defiance, the women especially fraternising in a conscious attempt to break the discipline and morale of the army. The Workers Bulletin even wondered if anyone had ever imagined a scenario where the soldiers’ guns were turned the opposite way (which can only have meant where soldiers turned their guns on their officers) and in a class appeal, openly declared “Our fellow trade unionists in khaki are refusing to do the dirty work.”

From the outset, the local Strike Committee looked towards the national trade union and Labour party leadership to spread the struggle, in particular by calling a national general strike.

We can, of course, only speculate what Connolly and Larkin would have done if they’d been alive or in Ireland, respectively. But their entire track record as fearless workers’ leaders suggests they would indeed have used their positions in the leadership of the large and growing ITGWU, and as key founders of the Irish Labour Party in 1912, to build for a national general strike.
Furthermore, their record of uniting Protestant and Catholic workers in the north east of the country would have been invaluable in such a workers’ movement, in sharp distinction from the suspicions, even hostility, the pro-capitalist, nationalist Sinn Fein leadership evoked amongst Protestant workers.

Mass workers' power on display 

Not so the leadership who took over from Connolly and Larkin.
Tom Johnston and William O'Brien had caved in to the appeals from the Sinn Fein leadership to stand aside in the December 1918 general election; to give Sinn Fein a clear run, and ‘not split the Home Rule vote’ - under the pernicious slogan ‘Labour must wait'.
In keeping with this collaboration with the anti-strike, pro-capitalist Sinn Fein leadership, the Labour and trade union leadership shrank from any suggestion of building a country-wide general strike in solidarity with the Limerick Soviet.
They had talked of calling a ‘national holiday’ on May Day 1919, but were terrified at the thought of the Limerick workers’ challenge to capitalism and its state forces feeding into such a national stoppage.
When one of the usually-moderate leaders of the Strike Committee, Sean Cronin, met with the national executive of the Irish Trade Union and Labour Party, six days into the Soviet, he reflected the far-reaching demands of the combatative Limerick strikers - by calling on them to replace the local Strike Committee and make Limerick the headquarters of Ireland’s national and social revolution!

Horrified at such a scheme for leading a challenge for power by an already-aroused and agitated working class – who were engaged in strikes in Dublin, Drogheda, Wexford, Dundalk and several other parts of the country at the time of Limerick – the Irish Trade Union and Labour executive deliberated a couple of days and instead brought forth the crackpot proposal of a total evacuation of the entire city as a means of protest. Where to? How? Why?!

In fact, this bizarre idea had first been raised by Sinn Fein in the Dail, as they wriggled to find a way of defusing the class showdown in Limerick, only then to be adopted by the Labour leadership.
It was a complete abdication of leadership, one strand to their betrayal of what could have been built into a mass workers’ movement on social issues taking leadership of the national struggle for self-determination, pursuing an independent socialist Ireland – with high prospects of uniting workers in the north east around this class-based struggle, hot on the heels of their own recent general strike in Belfast in January/February that year.

Given that 70% of Irish trade unionists were members of British-based unions then, such a socialist challenge for workers’ power would have undoubtedly fed into the agitated state of consciousness of millions of workers in Scotland, England and Wales in the same post-War upheaval.

Probably precisely because they had at least a glimmering of what was at stake, in their craven desire not to unleash a mass workers’ movement they couldn’t control - and not to upset the applecart of a capitalist system they were increasingly buying into, and had no vision of overthrowing - the leaderships of both the British and Irish trade unions and Labour parties made their tactical moves.
They openly declared opposition to the continuation of the Limerick general strike, around 22nd April.

British imperialism forced to abandon Military Permits in Limerick

This emboldened the military general staff, led by Brigadier General Griffin, and the Limerick Chamber of Commerce. From the very early days of the Soviet they'd been meeting, seeking a ‘solution’, at first offering the utterly unacceptable ‘concession' of employers issuing passes to their workers, instead of the army issuing military permits.
Griffin had played a waiting game, probably unsure of his troops’ loyalty if they were deployed prematurely against strikers; one Scottish regiment had been withdrawn when they refused to obey orders.
But when the British TUC leaders scandalously came out against Limerick on the 22nd, and the Irish trade union and Labour Executive arrived there the next day, Griffin made his move, offering that no military passes would be required for workers going to and from their meals.

This satisfied the other two forces who had been meeting with the military and business bosses, desperately seeking a way of ending the Soviet – the Catholic Bishop Hallinan, and Limerick’s first Sinn Fein Mayor, Alphonsus O'Mara.
These two piled renewed pressure on the Strike Committee to capitulate, whilst the Pontious Pilates of the Irish Trade Union and Labour ‘leadership’ – including O'Brien and Johnston – stood by in alleged neutrality.
On the 24th April, the Strike Committee issued a Proclamation instructing those workers without need of military permits to return to work - a partial end to the strike – and by 27th a complete end to the strike was reluctantly declared.

The power of this heroic and ingenious struggle by Limerick’s workers forced British imperialism into a rapid retreat; a week or so after the Soviet had ended, on 5th May, the military permits were entirely scrapped in the city.
The ruling powers had overreached themselves, provoking a general strike and workers’ seizure of control of the city - endangering the security of their own capitalist power and privilege, had there been a capable, resolute socialist party and leadership to give strategic and tactical guidance to workers in Ireland at the time.

The tragic missing factor of a powerful, determined and conscious socialist party, rooted in the unions and working class, was made all the more painful and dire in its historic consequences in the years immediately following the Limerick Soviet.
A contagion of strikes, workplace occupations, and land seizures spread across the island – with at least a hundred local Soviets declared, in particular the Munster Soviets (Ireland's south-west province).

Irish Labour leaders tried to quell workers’ (including their own members’) revolutionary revolts, and met with and collaborated with the nationalist, pro-capitalist Sinn Fein leadership who ruled the Dail from its declaration in January 1919.
The latter nationalists routinely used Republican Courts and armed force – sections of the IRA (both those for and against the Treaty, during the Civil War) and then the Free State Army – to evict and smash up land seizures by land labourers, and workplace Soviets. On occasions they kidnapped their leaders and held them hostage to enforce return of the landed estates to the big landowners.
All this was an uncanny vindication of James Connolly’s warnings to his Irish Citizens Army, as they headed out to stage the 1916 Easter Rising, to hold onto their guns in the unlikely event of victory, as they would later have to deal with the very different class aims of the Irish Volunteers!

Workers' unity and socialism remain the key across a century

The Limerick Soviet – certainly for most workers in Scotland and Britain – is as little known of as the mighty, united general strike by Belfast workers in January/February 1919, which involved a massive 60,000 workers, lasted four weeks, involved Protestant and Catholic workers taking control of the city... and was likewise branded ‘a Soviet’ by many of its terrified capitalist enemies.

Both were part of a wave of workers in revolutionary challenges to their capitalist masters, British and Irish, that swept the land - particularly from 1918 to 1923.
How different Ireland and its subsequent history could have been, with a trained, experienced socialist leadership, deeply rooted in the workplaces and on the land. And how different this course of events could have been in Britain, and indeed Europe, had the spirited Irish workers been equipped with a socialist party in their midst that had been capable of seizing the opportunities for building workers' power and a socialist Ireland.
It would even have potentially ended the isolation of the young Russian workers' and peasants' state, preventing that isolation from breeding the cancerous tyranny of Stalinism a few years later.

So anyone who today is serious about wanting to challenge the poverty, inequality, repression and exploitation that is the very nature of the capitalist beast, should help lift the blanket of silence thrown over the Limerick Soviet and similar events.
Learn from them, be vastly encouraged by them, and rededicate themselves to helping create the organised socialist party required, a century on from Limerick, to help complete the socialist transformation that our predecessors caught a tantalising glimpse of in their heroic struggles.

NORTHERN IRELAND: for working class unity and socialism

The March 2017 Northern Ireland Assembly Elections have thrown up all manner of questions and crises.

Will the Assembly institutions collapse? Will there be another immediate election? Will Westminster have to impose Direct Rule and risk an almighty backlash from both Catholic and Protestant communities? How did the DUP cling on - just, by one seat - as the biggest party in the midst of the stink of corruption enveloping their leader, Arlene Foster? What does the 3.9% rise in Sinn Fein's vote share signify? Will they push for an Irish border poll? And above all, what should socialists - or even active trade unionists - think of all this?

CASH FOR ASH

The elections arose from the Cash for Ash scandal, which eventually led to Sinn Fein's Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness resigning, thereby collapsing the power-sharing Executive between the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and Sinn Fein (SF), triggering another Assembly election just 10 months after the previous one.

What is Cash for Ash? Rotten, stinking corruption of the highest order, costing £490million in overspend in subsidies to businesses and landowners, which will have to mean £490m additional cuts to other public services. This in a society where savage austerity is already being implemented by the outgoing DUP/Sinn Fein Executive - with, for instance, 75% of the GP surgeries in my native County Fermanagh facing closure!

The Renewable Heating Incentive (RHI) was introduced in 2012 by the then Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Investment, Arlene Foster - MLA for Fermanagh & South Tyrone, and subsequently Northern Ireland First Minister. The RHI is a scheme first introduced in Britain, with subsidies for non-domestic heating systems that are supposedly environmentally friendly. 

BURNING TAXPAYERS MONEY!

But one profound amendment to the UK scheme was made by Foster and her DUP political advisers; a quite conscious, blatantly corrupt amendment. The cap on the subsidy available was removed. This means that for every £1 spent on biomass wooden pellets to heat up barns and outhouses the likes of big farmers enjoy a subsidy of £1.60! Hence the phrase Cash for Ash; the more they burn, the more money they get off the public purse - from working- and middle-class taxpayers. 

Empty factories and barns have been heated to harvest vast sums of money for businesses and landowners. The Audit Commission for N Ireland has warned it could eventually cost the public an astonishing £1billion in handouts to these corrupt, profiteering chancers.

DUP CORRUPTION 

When some of the DUP advisers raised concerns about the scheme as far back as 2013, Arlene Foster dismissed them. Not only that, but friends and families of the DUP hierarchy proceeded to speed up their applications for RHI subsidies, with a spike in applicants in the months and years following the concerns being raised and ignored by Foster and her cohort. 

To give one more example from my home county: Viscount Brookeborough - part of the Unionist family dynasty that included the longest-serving Prime Minister in the old, post-Partition, sectarian Stormont - owns a vast landed estate of 1,000 acres in Fermanagh. He has grabbed £1.6million for heating buildings on his estate, through this monumental scam.

NO ACTION TAKEN BY MAIN PARTIES 

But until very recently the DUP/SF power-sharing Executive did nothing to combat this crass corruption. The projected £490m overspend was known to all the parties in Stormont since early 2016, but nothing was done by any of the major parties, Sinn Fein included. As recently as December 2016, a motion for Foster's resignation was put to the Assembly; Sinn Fein abstained in the vote, rather than topple the corrupt First Minister and Executive. Only the eruption of growing disgust amongst the population, aired in the local media, led to SF's Martin McGuinness eventually taking a hardline stance, resigning as Deputy First Minister on 8th January, forcing out Foster and triggering the new elections.

VOTERS' REVULSION 

During the elections, SF made much of the RHI corruption scandal, with posters declaring RHI - Respect, Honesty, Integrity. Their calls for respect and equality particularly resonated with Catholic voters. 

Revulsion at Foster was by no means restricted to the Catholic community that SF are exclusively based in. Many Protestants were appalled, sickened into not turning out to vote, or in a minority of cases voting for 'others'. 

And at time of writing, rumblings within the inner sanctums of the DUP itself are growing louder, with reportedly a third of the DUP MLAs wanting Foster to resign as leader. 

This rumbling rebellion in the DUP reflects the disgust amongst their electoral base - as well as their desire to remove this human roadblock to them getting on with enjoying their over-paid positions, rather than run the risk of yet another election after the 3-week deadline for forming a Unionist-Nationalist power-sharing government.

HOW DID FOSTER CLING ON?

One of the remarkable facts of the election is that the DUP managed to cling onto its absolute vote, although its share fell compared to May 2016 - for the third election in a row. How?

Fundamentally because Foster endlessly recited warnings that Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams and 'the IRA' would become the biggest party unless Protestants turned out and voted DUP. Many will have cast their vote on this negative basis, whilst holding their noses at the stench of corruption surrounding Foster's DUP. Others didn't; hence their net loss of 10 MLAs, and slightly reduced share of the popular vote, in a greatly increased turnout compared to 2016. 

Underlying the success of that communal appeal rests the entire system of government established by the Peace Process in 1998. 

And it's also that governmental structure - the power-sharing arrangements between Unionists and Nationalists - that helped fuel the further advance of Sinn Fein as the biggest party in the Catholic community. In fact, SF were a minuscule 1,168 votes behind the DUP's First Preferences, winning 27.9% of all first preferences against the DUP's 28.1% - as they far more successfully mobilized than the DUP, as reflected in the increased overall turnout of voters - up 10 points from May 2016 to 64%.

POWER-SHARING AGREEMENT - FOR THE POLITICAL ELITE

The Peace Process, through both the 1998 Belfast Agreement and the 2006 St Andrew's Agreement, established a system of power-sharing that is purely between a political elite; it certainly doesn't open the door to working class people of either or both communities sharing power. 

And it's a system with a history in other nations also bedeviled by communal conflicts; divisions implanted by imperialist powers in the first place. 

It's an institutionalized arrangement between parties rooted in segregated communities that was infamously applied in the Lebanon, between parties based in the Christian, Sunni and Shia populations. A divisive political arrangement which only reinforced the communal divisions and eventually fell apart, leading to a savage civil war that decimated that country over 15 years of bloody conflict, from 1975 onwards.

INSTITUTIONALISED SECTARIAN DIVISION 

In the Northern Ireland Assembly, every elected MLA has to be designated as either a Unionist, Nationalist, or Other. Additionally, what's called the Petition of Concern gives a full-blown veto to any 30 MLAs - either Unionist or Nationalist - against anything the Assembly majority might vote for. In that built-in mechanism, the duly elected MLAs who refuse to define themselves as either Unionist or Nationalist, but are classified as Others, literally disappear from the voting process. So much for democracy! 

A recent case, before last Christmas, that illustrates this monstrously sectarian set-up was when a majority of Assembly members voted for a motion demanding the resignation of Arlene Foster over her handling of Cash for Ash, which 30 Unionist MLAs vetoed, turning the Assembly majority into its opposite. The same device was used by the DUP to block lifting the ban on same sex marriage. 

WE ARE DEFINED BY CLASS 

For socialists, class is primary. It's the key definition of the nature of capitalist society. It explains the roots of poverty and inequality. Working class people in Ireland (as in Scotland and worldwide) are exploited by capitalists, bankers and landowners regardless of which religious tag (or none) is attached to them. 

British imperialism has a particularly long, bloody, filthy history of exploitation in Ireland, through ruthless repression and naked incitement of sectarian divisions; the age-old trick of divide-and-rule, rehearsed in its first colony, then practiced across the globe as they conquered lands and labour for the enrichment of the British ruling class. 

Those who view the Assembly elections purely as an unavoidable contest between two irreconcilable tribes, resulting in the dog-fight between the DUP and SF, miss this critical factor entirely.

HIDDEN HISTORY OF WORKERS' UNITY 

Irish history is strewn with the tragic results of imperialism's divide-and-rule. But Ireland's hidden history - all too often unknown even to trade unionists and socialists in Scotland or beyond - also contains whole chapters of heroic working class unity in struggle. 

That's what Edinburgh-born James Connolly and Liverpool-born Jim Larkin strove to build in Ireland - with many glorious successes - over a century ago. 

That's what produced wave after wave of united strikes in N Ireland throughout the 30 years of 'the Troubles'. Not one single industrial action was broken by sectarian division throughout that terrible period. 

In fact, if it hadn't been for the fundamental unity in most workplaces, and several strikes against sectarian threats and killings from either sets of paramilitaries - with Catholic and Protestant trade unionists braving the dangers, striking, picketing and marching together - civil war would have engulfed the North in the 1970s or 1980s. 

WORKING CLASS ROOTS OF CEASEFIRES 

And what most commentators - including many self-defined socialists - utterly ignore, is that the Peace Process itself was at bottom the product of growing opposition to sectarian killings and continued armed struggle by the mass of the working class, both Catholic and Protestant. 

Working class communities became war-weary and sick of failed republican 'urban guerillaism' tarnished by sectarianism, and of the vicious killings of Catholics by the Loyalist paramilitaries. 

People marched in protest, made the armed volunteers aware of their feelings in their respective communities, and the British ruling class seized this opening - and the exhaustion of the armed volunteers - to isolate the paramilitaries and gradually broker a settlement that led to ceasefires and the power-sharing Assembly.

In the absence of a mass, united socialist movement that could bring that instinctive unity and desire for peace to a socialist conclusion, the Peace Process and all its institutions were formed, ensnaring the Republican movement in the ballot box rather than the bullet. 

FLAWED PEACE ASSUMES ETERNAL DIVISION 

But the fatal flaw of that settlement is that it leaves two interlinked features of Ireland entirely intact: sectarian division, and the capitalist system of exploitation that spawned sectarianism in the first place.

The NI Assembly and all its structures assume the working class will never be united, that they'll be forever politically divided, segregated. 

Hence the Unionist/Nationalist/Others categorization of elected MLAs, and the governing Executive being always made up of Unionists and Nationalists, the biggest of them nominating First Minister, the other choosing his/her Deputy. 

It institutionalizes sectarian division, rather than remove it. It segregates political parties, giving them a vested interest in keeping communities apart so they can retain their electoral base, scaring the living daylights out of voters about the risks of victory for 'the other side'. It consciously cuts across the emergence of class-based politics for the working class. 

YOUNG GENERATION SICK OF THE DINOSAURS 

A whole generation has grown up since the ceasefires of nearly 20 years ago. They're overwhelmingly sick of the dinosaurs who dominate political life - but still suffer the complications of the segregated political system. They're mostly in favour of equality on issues like same sex marriage and abortion rights - both blocked by the socially reactionary DUP in particular.

When elections occur, it's almost like two parallel elections happening simultaneously; one for the biggest Unionist party, the other for the biggest Nationalist party. 

For a good 20 years, both of the smaller Unionist and Nationalist parties - the Ulster Unionist Party and the SDLP - have been discarded by a majority of voters in the respective communities as being useless, untrustworthy, or ineffective - although they both still hold onto seats in certain areas.

GLIMPSES OF A DIFFERENT FUTURE 

But the modest glimpse of the potential for an entirely different future, free of communal politics, sectarian camps, are to be seen in two distinct forms in recent years. 

One is the growing number who refuse to go out and vote, despite all the pressure to do so in communities that often feel under siege, or on the brink of winning what they want - because they are 'sick of the lot of them'. 

Last May a full 46% of registered voters stayed at home. Disaffection expressed in falling turnouts featured in five elections in a row since 2000. The latest election bucked that trend, as Catholics in particular turned out to avenge the corruption and disrespect they felt from Foster's DUP. 

The other, more positive feature is the modest but important vote for parties and formations that refuse to be pigeon-holed as nationalist or unionist, the 'Others'.

The Alliance Party is non-sectarian, but screamingly middle class. It's vote comes especially from more liberal-minded, well-off layers of the population.

The Green Party is also non-sectarian, and critical of austerity - unlike its sister party in the South who entered an axe-wielding coalition government with FIne Gael and suffered the retribution of voters they so richly deserved! It held onto its two MLAs. 

NEITHER ORANGE OR GREEN, BUT SOCIALIST 

More significant still, though only at an embryonic stage of development, are the votes for two avowedly anti-sectarian, anti-austerity, left-wing, pro-socialist formations: the People Before Profit Alliance and the Cross Community Labour Alternative.

The PBPA openly declares itself 'neither Orange or Green', has been active in anti-cuts campaigns, and in 2016 won two MLAs - veteran socialist and well-known journalist Eamonn McCann in Derry, and young West Belfast city councillor Gerry Carroll. 

In the recent elections, McCann lost his seat in the final count,  and although he retained his place in the Assembly, Carroll's vote was squeezed from over 8,000 First Preferences last year to over 4,000. 

Other socialists and trade unionists have established Cross Community Labour Alternative in the wake of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership election. They won 644 votes in Fermanagh & South Tyrone, standing a well-known trade union activist who has been involved in numerous local campaigns against cuts and fracking - and lesser votes in three other seats, straddling both communities in East, West and South Belfast.

MASS STRUGGLES REQUIRED TO END THE DIVIDE 

The juggernauts of Unionism and Nationalism, based on a sectarian Orange versus Green headcount, mostly crushed the challenge of these smaller forces - in part because the fear remains that voting for them would 'let the other side in'. 

Until such time as more sweeping, generalized struggles of workers and communities erupt on social, economic, class questions, the tendency for polarized voting between two communal camps will prevail; in large measure because that's how the Peace Process institutions are designed. Deliberately!

THE LEFT AND SINN FEIN 

Nobody on 'the left' in Scotland or beyond needs any time spent convincing them the DUP is a bigoted, conservative, anti-equality, reactionary party of neo-liberalism - steeped in corruption to boot - that exploits the allegiance of rural and working class Protestants to fill their own pockets, and those of rich landowners and capitalists.

But some of those who see themselves as 'lefts', even 'socialists', would do well to pause and ponder their uncritical excitement at the 3.9% rise in Sinn Fein's share of the vote compared with 2016. 

SINN FEIN IS NOT A SOCIALIST PARTY

Sinn Fein is not a socialist party and never has been - though some of its members see themselves as such. At most, SF do what the SNP also do in a very different political context; they face both ways at once, depending on their audience. The SNP tries to appeal to left-leaning former Old Labour voters in Scotland's urban Central Belt, with radical-sounding phrases. But they also woo and soothe the tartan Tory voters of the well-heeled, rural north of Scotland, refusing to tax the rich, diluting even their calls for Scottish independence. 

Sinn Fein has a long history of sounding semi-socialist, certainly anti-Tory, in their working class heartlands, especially West Belfast. But they punt more nakedly sectarian appeals to 'Catholic voters' and 'the nationalist people' in areas such as rural Fermanagh.

SHARING CUTS COALITION WITH DUP 

More fundamentally, SF are happy to power-share with the monstrous Orange Tory DUP.

SF are currently playing hardball in demanding the corrupt, corroded Arlene Foster must go as DUP leader and therefore First Minister. But it seems absolutely certain that if Nigel Dodds or some other DUP figure replaces Foster, Sinn Fein will readily embrace the DUP in a new power-sharing Executive, again.

SF did nothing noticeable to expose the Cash for Ash scandal for years, including the years of sharing government responsibility with the DUP, and moreover abstained in the December vote demanding Foster's resignation over this poisonous corruption. 

And beyond the immediate Cash for Ash outrage, SF has jointly implemented savage cuts to welfare benefits that will slash the incomes of 100,000 people by up to £2,000. That's on top of previous years of austerity cuts, and privatisation of services, whether in their role in the NI Executive or in local councils. And it's as well as Sinn Fein's support for cuts to Corporation Tax which they share with the Orange Tories - Arlene Foster included - which will actually rob the public purse of at least as much every year as the Cash for Ash scam does! 

FAILURES OF LABOUR MOVEMENT LEADERSHIPS 

SF has conquered deep roots in working class Catholic districts as their perceived defenders from decades of state repression, and in the absence of determined, militant resistance being organised by the leadership of the trade union and labour movement over those same decades. 

In particular, labour and trade union movement leaders' failure to build a united political voice of the working class, based on the unions and communities, taking up all the issues of repression, poverty, austerity, sectarianism and the complex issue of Irish partition on a firm class basis. 

But that is still no excuse for pretending Sinn Fein is a socialist party, or of hiding from their baleful track record in government alongside - in coalition with - the DUP.

IRISH WORKING CLASS DESERVE BETTER 

The working class of Northern Ireland deserves better than two political tribes going to war for votes, so they can then go to war on the living conditions of the working class. 

A united, anti-sectarian socialist party is easier wished for than created and made into a mass force. But that makes it none the less necessary and urgent. Working class unity and socialism go hand-in-hand, and are the only route to solutions to poverty, inequality, austerity, corruption, equal rights for women and minorities, or indeed the vestiges of the national question. 

NO RETURN TO THE PAST!

Even if frustration at the current deadlock in the institutions of post-Troubles N Ireland erupts, there is no appetite for a return to the past, to the days of armed struggle and sectarian killings. The mass of the working class were instrumental in enforcing the ceasefires of the past 20 years and are not about to give support to any resumption of those methods. 

But the peace has always been fragile, flawed, prone to flare-ups on unresolved issues such as flags and emblems, parades, the Irish language and the century-old issue of the border created by British imperialist partition.

BORDER POLL?

Loose talk by some on 'the left' in Scotland about the case for a border poll in Ireland  - as mooted by Sinn Fein in the context of both Brexit and the first ever majority vote for nationalist parties in Northern Ireland's Assembly - is dangerous and divisive. 

It was brutally wrong that Ireland was partitioned by imperialism in the 1920s; it ushered in the 'carnival of reaction' predicted by James Connolly over a century ago. It was entirely unacceptable that the Catholic minority in the North were imprisoned in a statelet that meant systematic discrimination, repression and abject poverty for them. 

But it would be equally wrong to try to force the Protestants into a united capitalist Ireland, just because Catholics may outnumber them in the North in the years ahead. And in any case a big minority of northern Catholics (including Sinn Fein voters) are also opposed to joining the capitalist South, as it today exists, according to various opinion polls. 

A SOCIALIST IRELAND 

The vision of a socialist Ireland - a world apart from the type of societies that currently exist, North and South - is what's required to unite working class people, by convincing  them not only of the social and economic advantages, but that guarantees for all minorities would be embedded in such a socialist democracy. 

Consent, through patient explanation and above all years of united struggle by working class people on common, class questions is the route to a socialist Ireland - not the ultimatum of a border poll, let alone armed force. 

HELP BUILD WORKERS' UNITY AND SOCIALISM 

Working class unity and socialism may not be the prevailing state of affairs in Ireland in 2017. But it's the watchword for progress, the cause worth fighting for, the route map to a future free of exploitation, repression and division in Britain's first colony. 

And instead of reinforcing illusions in forces like Sinn Fein - just because they're electorally powerful - Irish working class unity and socialism is the aim that trade unionists and socialists in Scotland should bend their efforts towards helping fellow workers and socialists in Ireland achieve.