'SOLDIER F' VERDICT: STATE COVER-UP ON BLOODY SUNDAY MASSACRE, DERRY 1972

Note the ages of the 14 shot dead, on this memorial

The acquittal of Soldier F in the Bloody Sunday Crown Court trial in Belfast is another outrageous chapter in the blood-soaked history of British state atrocities, dripping with the blood of innocents.

Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972, was one of the worst atrocities in the 30-year ‘Troubles’. A peaceful march in Derry, organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association against internment without trial - as introduced by the Ted Heath Tory government five months earlier - was gunned down by soldiers of the 1^st Battalion, Parachute regiment, slaughtering 14 unarmed civilians.

Carrying the first shot by the Paras, John Duddy

State lie-machine

State murder was followed immediately, within minutes that same January day, by ruthless, shameless state cover-up. The lie machine of army chiefs, Tory Cabinet ministers and their most reliable media mouthpieces went into overdrive, falsely claiming the Paras were obliged to open fire only after they came under attack by armed men, smearing the victims as terrorists.

Of course, these alleged gunmen could never be identified, because it was sheer state invention, to pave the road to a monumental cover-up for decades. A cover-up based on belief in state immunity from prosecution, whilst the same state terrorised whole communities with internment without trial, house raids, torture in police cells, H Block imprisonment, and shoot-to-kill policies.

Evidence destroyed

No evidence was gathered on the day by the RUC police. No forensics kept. No witnesses interviewed, no soldiers questioned as suspects, nor scenes of the crime quarantined to allow even the most basic investigation. Military police took statements from soldiers, without caution, as the army investigated itself. The guns used by the murderous Paras to kill 14 peaceful demonstrators were immediately destroyed!

Public outrage, protests, strikes and demonstrations across Ireland (including the British embassy in Dublin being burnt to the ground by an enraged crowd) and worldwide forced official inquiries to be held. The first, led by Lord Widgery in 1972, was an outright whitewash – although even it was obliged to concede the soldiers’ shootings “bordered on the reckless”.

The 'gentle attentions' of the Paras, on top of shoot to kill

‘Killings wholly unjustified and unjustifiable’

Then, after a quarter of a century, Blair’s Labour government set up the 1998 Saville Inquiry, which lasted until 2010 and cost £200m. It ruled that the victims were entirely innocent of the slanderous claims made against them and, to quote Lord Saville, “the killings were wholly unjustified and unjustifiable.”

Tory PM David Cameron was subsequently forced to make an official government apology – by the tenacity, in particular, of the working-class Derry families bereaved on Bloody Sunday.

Some of the truth was out, but still no justice for the victims or their families.

Soldier F trial

53 years after the event, after most of the potential forensic evidence had been consciously destroyed and ‘disappeared’, the Crown Court case against Soldier F for the murder of two of the innocent civilians reached the verdict that insufficient evidence was available, so this member of the Paras walked free of charge. In fact, as one of the accounts of the Bloody Sunday events stated:

“Then, while Doherty lay crying in agony, a 41-year-old man called Barney McGuigan stepped out from behind a block of flats to try to get help for the dying man. McGuigan was waving a white handkerchief. According to the testimony of numerous witnesses, including an officer from another regiment stationed on the city walls, soldier F – positioned on the other side of the road – got down on one knee and shot McGuigan through the head. No one who saw the mortuary photos of the exit wound in McGuigan’s face will forget what just that one bullet of Soldier F’s did.”

Army chiefs and government to blame

As Mickey McKinney - whose brother William was slaughtered that day – said after last week’s Crown Court judgement:

“Unlike his victims, there has been no declaration of Soldier F’s innocence. He created two young widows on Bloody Sunday, and he orphaned 12 children. And he deprived dozens of siblings of a loving brother.

“The Bloody Sunday families do not lay the blame for today’s decision with the trial judge. The blame lies firmly with the British state; with the RUC who failed to investigate the murders properly, or indeed at all; with the British army who shielded and enabled its soldiers to murder with impunity, and the office of the then Director of Public Prosecutions who, with a nod and a wink, complicitly signed off on decisions not to prosecute in 1972, without even raising an eyebrow.”

‘Authorised by men of far higher rank’

But this was about far more than Soldier F, murderous and indefensible as his actions were. He was intended as the ‘fall guy’ by a British military top brass and political establishment intent on a cover-up of their own responsibilities for the Bloody Sunday massacre.

As Kate Nash - sister of William, one of the two victims Soldier F was on trial for murdering - said in a statement:

“Soldier F and his kill-crazy comrades didn’t decide on their own to spray bullets into unarmed marchers demonstrating for civil rights. If justice were to be done there would be Cabinet Ministers, top civil servants and an array of generals standing shoulder-to-shoulder with F in court… The Bloody Sunday massacre was planned and authorised by men of far higher rank than the scruffs like Soldier F who pulled the triggers.”

Class not Creed, 1968 » Scottish Socialist Party

Background to Bloody Sunday

She’s spot on. During the previous few years, the British ruling class, their military top brass and governments had lost control of the rising revolt against their policies of discrimination, repression and enforced poverty for the working class of Northern Ireland. The potential for working-class unity and struggle for socialism shown in the civil rights movement of 1968/9 then turned into its sectarian opposite, for lack of a mass socialist party to channel the revolt against the system which meted out decades of poverty, discrimination and repression.

Increasingly repressive measures by the British army, after it was sent in by the Labour government in August 1969, led to further revolts – against the Falls Road curfew of 1970, internment without trial in 1971, and the ongoing failure of capitalist rulers to offer any kind of security, prosperity or peace to the working class – neither for the discriminated-against Catholic minority in particular, nor for the Protestant working class.

‘Shoot selected ringleaders’

Young rioters in Derry, who resisted invasion of the Bogside estate by sectarian mobs and state forces, were dubbed the ‘Derry Young Hooligans’.

In a particularly telling outburst, after his visit to Derry, the British Commander of Land Forces in Northern Ireland, General Robert Ford, said in a memo to the government:  “I am coming to the conclusion that the minimum force necessary to achieve a restoration of law and order is to shoot selected ringleaders among the Derry Young Hooligans.”

That was on 7 January 1972, three weeks before Bloody Sunday! It reveals that the upper echelons of the army and government were the ones who should have been in the dock, on trial for the Bloody Sunday massacre.

Bloody Sunday, 1972

Secret Cabinet Committee plotted cover-up

In fact, in the months prior to this state atrocity, a secret British Cabinet Committee named GEN 42 had been discussing what to do in the North. It was chaired by Prime Minister Ted Heath and involved senior army chiefs including British Army Chief of Staff Michael Carver, and Tory right-wing Lord Chancellor Quentin Hogg (Lord Hailsham).

Over 20 years later, Carver admitted Heath wanted soldiers to be able to shoot civilians, regardless of whether they were armed. At the GEN 42 meeting of 6 October 1971 – four months before the Paras shot 14 dead on Bloody Sunday – Heath said, “the first priority should be the defeat of the gunman by military means and that we would have to accept whatever political penalties were inevitable.”

The GEN 42 committee then debated at length how best to cover up any killings. Carver justified such plans by saying that in a colonial situation the army restores order, not law and order. Hailsham came up with the plan that as those rebelling against the government could be classified as guilty of treason, the state could legally do so.

In Derry on 30 January 1972, Brian Cashinelle, a senior reporter from the London Times, was standing beside the aforementioned General Ford. He reported how Ford, waving his swagger stick, was shouting, “Go on Paras, go and get them, go on, go and get them.”

Paras behind sandbagged barricades, Bloody Sunday

The bloody aftermath

The aftermath of that horrific execution of demonstrators fuelled 30 years of death, sectarian divisions, and cycles of state repression and recruitment of young, enraged Catholics into the dead-end methods of the Provos.

The ruling circles who issued the orders for the Bloody Sunday massacre have the blood of far more than the 14 innocent victims on their hands. They bear responsibility – along with their capitalist and landlord predecessors - for a system that relied on divide-and-rule, incitement of sectarian divisions within a super-exploited working class, state repression, brutal poverty and inequality, and which led to the deaths of 3,800 people during ‘the Troubles’.

Build workers’ unity and socialism

There should be outrage – but no surprise – at the continued cover-up by the capitalist state of its own actions, which the Soldier F court case epitomizes.

This latest chapter should motivate workers, trade unionists and socialists to aid those in Ireland fighting to build working-class unity and the struggle for socialist change, to abolish forever the oppression and injustices in the very DNA of capitalism.

Originally written (as a native of County Fermanagh) on 23 October 2025, for publication in the Online Scottish Socialist Voice. 

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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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WE DESERVE BETTER say people in N Ireland

The Portadown #wedeservebetter Rally 

Thousands turned out to protest rallies in 16 towns and cities in N Ireland yesterday, under the banner #wedeservebetter. They crowded into town centres; lined round lough-sides; even rallied on the beaches!

People from both communities combined in anger and frustration towards the elected but absentee politicians who have continued to draw their MLAs’ salaries but failed to form a government for 589 days, and counting! The rallies were called on 28^th August because that’s when N Ireland set a new world record for the length of time without a government – outstripping even Belgium!

The events were initiated by Dylan Quinn of Enniskillen, who captured the mood of a growing swathe of working class people – DUP and Sinn Fein voters alike. 
In my frequent visits to family in my native Fermanagh over recent years, I’ve witnessed the mounting rage at the MLAs from the two dominant parties – DUP and SF – who fail to reach compromises to form an Executive. People are increasingly furious at the failure of MLAs - whose combined salaries exceeded £9m in the 589 days of stalemate – to take any positive action on the horrendous NHS crisis; marriage equality; abortion rights; pay cuts for workers; or the looming upheaval of Brexit. 

NHS CRISIS - BUT £9M IN ABSENTEE MLAs SALARIES!

An illustration of the issues working class communities cry out for solutions to is the attacks on GP practices. Across the North the number of GP practices has fallen from 365 a few years ago to 336 now, which means fewer GPs per head of population than in the 1950s. But there’s much worse to come; government-initiated plans will slash this to an unbelievable 17 GP practices across the whole of N Ireland – with the monstrous consequence for access to treatment.

And no wonder Fermanagh was the birthplace of this #wedeservebetter protest: the planned ‘reforms’ in the NHS threaten to slash the number of GP practices in the county from 18 to 4 or 5 over the next two years – which is why the BMA describes this as the area of worst crisis in the whole of the UK. I know from first-hand family experience the terrible effect this has on the sick and elderly, in tandem with hospital cuts. 

Some of the crowd in Enniskillen 

Those who vented their anger at the politicians yesterday rightly linked the squandering of public funds on salaries for absentee MLAs with the need for investment in public services – for instance in speeches, and with home-made placards declaring “Get Back to Work”, “No Work, No Pay”, and “Take Back the £9m and Give it to the NHS”.

But the most nauseating spectacle was some of the very same politicians uttering how much they understand the protesters’ feelings and how ready they are to listen. Here lies the root problem; over two-thirds of votes cast in the last Assembly elections went to the DUP and Sinn Fein, each of whom relied on a brutal sectarian headcount to hold onto and even increase their votes – after previous years of decline in voters prepared to turn out for them. 

I’ve described the background to this in my blog of March 2017.  

These two parties have collaborated – during several years of power-sharing government -  in carrying out austerity cuts that devastate both communities; handed back powers to slash welfare benefits to the Westminster Tories; agreed on a monumental handout to big business in the form of cutting Corporation Tax to the 12% enjoyed by the capitalists in the South of Ireland; and actively practised (or at best, turned a blind eye to) the rampant corruption of the ‘Cash for Ash’ scam, the Renewable Heating Initiative... investigation into which is still ongoing.

REJECT THE ORANGE AND GREEN DINOSUARS!

The unpleasant truth facing the decent people on the #wedeservebetter rallies is that asking these sectarian-based Orange and Green politicians to ‘get back to work’ is like asking an arsonist to get his act together, gather up supplies of petrol and matches and stop slacking in his fire-raising crimes!

They can’t be trusted to defend the NHS, GP services, education, marriage equality legislation, abortion rights for women, or an end to austerity and growing inequality. They are the political architects of all that is rotten about the society both Catholic and Protestant working class communities suffer under. They need to be replaced, not cajoled into ‘power-sharing’.

The unity and anger on display on the #wedeservebetter protests needs to be built into a grassroots struggle for united working-class action on the issues and united working-class political representation. In short, for working-class unity and socialism, to harness the desire for equality, fairness and an end to tribal divisions that I’ve especially witnessed amongst younger people. 

Yesterday’s protests were heart-warming in their display of unity and desire for change; I hope it can be part of a start to dump the dinosaurs who exploit and whip up sectarian divisions to hold onto their power and salaries. 

[for more background, have a read of my March 2017 blog here]

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. 

G8 SUMMIT:

Fracking Furious in Fermanagh 

by Richie Venton 

County Fermanagh, in the south west of Northern Ireland, is where I was born and brought up. 

Visiting my family there is always a tonic to the senses: the lush green rolling hills, the back roads bursting with birdsong, the stillness and glittering tranquility of Lough Erne. 

Stickers on a former butchers shop in Belcoo, Co Fermanagh, give the false impression of a thriving business!

Of course the price is almost guaranteed and persistent rain: as the local saying goes, half the year Lough Erne is in Fermanagh, the other six months Fermanagh is in Lough Erne! And at many points in the agricultural cycle, you get used to a powerful aroma of the most natural of all fertilizers, spread by the farmers to enrich the grass!
Not last week though! The all-too-rare glory of sunshine vastly enhanced the spectacular scenery, but instead of boosting the smell of manure, it increased the smell of fresh paint! Especially so in the county town of Enniskillen, where every street railing had a new black gloss to it; shop fronts boasted bright new colours; you could hardly turn a street corner without walking into painters up ladders or on cherrypickers. A family friend described in exasperation how he wanted to decorate his house but literally couldn't find a tin of paint for sale in any of the local shops!

Massive cosmetic cover-up

To say a full-blown cosmetic exercise has been launched would be a gross understatement: empty shops, idle work sites and derelict buildings are literally covered up with giant posters of idyllic Fermanagh scenery, in several villages and many approach roads. 

 The G8 invasion

Why? The 'masters of the universe' are coming to town!

David Cameron chose the luxurious Lough Erne Golf Resort hotel complex, on the scenic rural outskirts of Enniskillen, as the venue for this year's G8 summit of the leaders of eight of the capitalist world's biggest economies. 

Lough Erne Resort, venue for G8

Local people are generally glad to see the town and parts of some surrounding villages getting a paint job. They welcome the intensive road resurfacing that has been conducted over recent months, especially on the main Belfast to Enniskillen A4 route.

 An estimated £11m has been spent on road improvements, but mostly on the main routes that the G8 media circus might spot, not on rural roads most desperately in need of repair for those who live there. 

The short burst of employment this has created is welcome in an area of chronic unemployment; a family friend, a skilled tradesman, has had to turn away painting and decorating work because he can't cope with the demand, whereas he'd previously had to drive a tanker for a living. 
An English company has been handed the £450,000 contract by Fermanagh district council to mount vinyl pictures on shop-front shutters!

Behind the gloss

Lough Erne tranquility invaded by G8

But behind this gloss lurks a stark reality that will remain when the G8 caravan moves on, captured in one example: the luxurious Lough Erne Resort chosen to host the G8 exploiters' deliberations has until recently been put into administration, only temporarily re-opened for the G8 event, with workers taken back on... but on lower wages!

Most Fermanagh people aren't fooled by appearances, however pretty. In fact they are downright resentful at the hypocrisy of years of being ignored in their pleas for road improvements and investment in jobs and small independent businesses by the government - with pleas of poverty from the Stormont and Westminster regimes - now suddenly transformed into bottomless pots of gold to spruce up the place because eight capitalist heads of government and their entourage are descending on the county for a couple of days. 

 Armed occupation

But the G8 invasion of Fermanagh involves more than paint, pretty posters and pothole repairs. 

Lower Lough Erne

It includes an appalling extravaganza of taxpayers' money being splashed out on a 'security' operation that has many of the hallmarks of a police state, of an occupied, militarized zone.

Police boat patrol on Lough Erne

A massive ring of steel fencing round the Lough Erne Resort has cost over £4.2million. The Shore Road, that runs from Enniskillen past the venue, has been blocked off to general traffic from 1st to 26th June, with local residents having to show special passes to get home. This is part of a vast water and air exclusion zone - not just on 17-18th June when these imperialist lords land for their discussions on the carve-up of the world's resources and war plans, but for the entire period from 1st to 26th June.

School exams are being disrupted by the traffic exclusion zone, with students expected to get earlier buses on the days that heavily shape their futures. 

Non-emergency outpatient services are being suspended when Cameron's international cronies come.

A massive police operation is already underway, several weeks before Cameron, Obama, Merkel, Putin et al descend on Fermanagh for two days. On a short journey you will encounter at least two or three police patrols, on foot, in cars, with random checkpoints, people frequently stopped and searched, squads of motorbike cops on the streets, boats with police patrols on the lough, and police helicopters violating the tranquility of the county. 

Police dog handler checks car

CCTV cameras festoon every available lamppost or building. 
Already 730 police officers from England, Scotland and Wales have been trained to drive armoured Landrovers - a 'privilege' normally restricted to police in N Ireland - as part of an overall drafting in of 3,600 'mutual aid' police from Britain. 
Police armed with machine guns are patrolling the streets weeks before the G8, as are British soldiers.

G8 masters of violence 

The local media repeatedly pumps out the line they are being trained on 'how to deal with public disorder' - part of a massive propaganda hype about impending violence that is designed to demonise and demoralise the trade unionists, environmentalists, socialists, and human rights campaigners seeking to exercise their right to peaceful protest against the G8 jamboree.

Police training for G8

Water cannons are in position. Unmanned police drones, costing over £1million, have been bought to fly over and spy on people and protests.
The prestigious Killyhelvin hotel - normally reliant on weddings, family outings and tourists - has been literally taken over for weeks by a massive media horde there to report of the G8, no doubt on the prowl for any incident of violence by protestors that they can exaggerate, but very little exposé of the bloodcurdling violence perpetrated by the G8 leaders and their system of ruthless exploitation of people and planet.
By way of contrast, former British Army and RAF bases in Omagh and Enniskillen have been turned into 'custody facilities' for protesters - at a cost of £3.9million.

And the local council has declared itself unable to find a suitable camp site for protesters, whereas the bill for catering and cleaning alone at the G8 resort is £3million. 

Government Ministers have coyly declined to answer questions about plans to shut down internet access and social media at the height of the G8 - in stark contrast to the Department of Environment's fast-tracking of seven temporary new telecoms masts in the G8 conference centre itself and the main police barracks.

£50m police bill 

The British army has arrived to give back-up to the police, and army helicopters will fly the G8 entourage to and from the Lough Erne Resort. The place is crawling with hundreds of secret service operatives.
The Police Service Northern Ireland (PSNI) is spending an overall £50m in policing and so-called 'security'. That is an obscene squandering of public funds against the backdrop of vicious public service cuts, where the likes of my mother's home help service has been cut to the bone, and where charity volunteers collect on street corners and at stalls in the bigger Enniskillen supermarkets for life-saving services that are not rendered by the state.

Bear in mind this super-sized police and military operation is being conducted in an area where the biggest town, Enniskillen, has a population just under 15,000, which is roughly a quarter the population of the whole of Co Fermanagh. 

 Legacy of cuts and poverty

Much is being prattled about 'the G8 legacy' in Fermanagh. A crude reduction in people's civil rights is likely to be one actual legacy; they won't splash out on this monstrous 'security' exercise and then simply dismantle it.

Long term job creation it certainly will not bring. Two private security firms, including the notorious G4S, have been handed the contract for 650 staff for the G8 jamboree, but they don't even intend to recruit locally. 

The local RNLI has just launched a public appeal for £60,000 to build a proper shelter for this vital, life saving service, run by volunteers; not for them the bottomless well of public funding afforded 8 men and women who dominate our lives with their economic and social policies. Another local public appeal has just raised £15,000 for defibrillators, after a near-tragedy. 
Youth unemployment is officially 24 per cent, with low-paid retail jobs one of the few outlets. 

 Environmental carnage

One of the most outrageous 'legacies' of the G8, if they have their way, will be fracking in Fermanagh. The Fermanagh G8 Not Welcome coalition that is marching through Enniskillen on 17June has made opposition to fracking a central theme.

In 2001, the G8 endorsed High Volume Hydraulic Fracturing for shale gas, in support of the lobby of the oil and gas multinationals. Shattering rock, this releases gas, but also brings to the surface numerous toxins, such as benzene, lead, mercury and radioactive material. Fracking also contaminates water supplies along new fault lines in the rock, reaching into streams and lakes. As the lakelands of the north of Ireland, Fermanagh seems the last place on earth that fracking should be allowed. 
But the capitalists who lord it over us mere mortals couldn't give a frack about the well-being of Fermanagh - or anywhere else on the globe. 
The Belfast government has already granted permission to a company called Tamboran Resources to start work on two sites in Fermanagh, where they have plans for 60 'pads' - each a seven-acre site, concreted over, with heavy and noisy machinery, with air, water and noise pollution - a mere mile apart from one another.  

 Fracking mayhem

Scientists warn that more than half the water will be severely contaminated, with no means of decontaminating it. And the unusually shallow shale layers in the area - about a quarter the depth in other parts of the world - makes fracking in Fermanagh especially dangerous. 
And it can't even be sold to the local population with the cynical offer of jobs in an unemployment blackspot: Tamboran initially promised 600 jobs north of the border plus 600 in the south, but have now reduced their pledge to 3 jobs per pad, a miserable total of 180. 
Aside from the issue of dangerous and environmentally destructive jobs, that's hardly compensation for the 5,000 local jobs in farming or the 1,000 tourism jobs that will be jeopardized by this monstrous plan to frack Fermanagh. 

 Socialism at home and abroad

The G8 summit epitomizes all that is worst about the capitalist world we live in. 

Nauseating pomp and privilege for the powerful, alongside poverty, unemployment and outright hunger for the majority population. 
Food banks and charity collections for desperately needed services in the local community, alongside obscene gluttony, publicly funded, at this gathering of eight capitalist puppets. 

Over 3 billion people on the planet living below $2 a day, whilst 358 billionaires and a couple of hundred multinationals have a grip on the world's wealth. 

1.3 billion people subsisting on $1 a day, and somebody dying of hunger every 3.6 seconds.

Environmental destruction so that the giant energy corporations can make a fast buck. 

And deployment of state forces, armed to the teeth, to block the right of peaceful protest to people genuinely committed to a decent life, a living wage, public services, peace, and protection of the planet from destruction for short-term profit.

Capitalism means world starvation, poverty and war. Capitalism means the dictatorship of the rich, with the backup of armed forces prepared to deny the right to resist to the majority. 

The G8 occupation of Fermanagh is a brutal reminder of the world we need to change, of the need for socialism in Ireland, Scotland and around the globe these creatures are meeting to carve up. 

Join that fight now, before they lay waste to millions more people and the planet we share.