*The PD was created out of the initial response of the Queens University students to the October 5th 1968 events. As part of the reform programme the Unionists had already permitted a "British type higher education structure to be created in the Six Counties. Within Queens religious discrimination was merely a grim shadow of the world outside, a generation of young catholics went through a non-discriminatory education, and a generation of young protestants were educated alongside them. The sudden horrifying reality of Northern Ireland caught up with this generation on October 5th, 1968. In protest at the attack on the Civil Rights demonstration in Derry, 2.000 students marched from Queens University to the City Hall, but were blocked by a crowd of 50 Paisleyites who proved an immoveable obstacle for the RUC. Following this experience, the Peoples Democracy was born, in the type of intense, endless and all-embracing discussion which marked the emergence of student vanguard after student vanguard in the sixties, and has been the means by which they moved from a recoil against the reality of society, through a critique of society, to action."
(Bob Purdie: Ireland Unfree, chapter 6)
LITTLE RESEMBLANCE The PD of today bears little resemblance to the original PD. The radicalised milieu in Queens was only a temporary phenomenon. Although it gave a base for action, independently of the reformist and stalinist leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, it nevertheless had shallow roots in Northern Irish society, and could not correct some of the more utopian schemes of its leaders. And while these leaders had been trained in Marxism, the rapid growth of the student movement, combined with revulsion at the stale dogmatism of British Marxism, induced a deep-going spontanNevertheless they did carry over from their British mentors an "economist" method, Le. a concept that every aspect of the situation in the North of Ireland had been manipulated in the interests of profit. Some examples of this kind of thinking can be seen in Mike Farrell's pamphlet, Struggle in the North: "The history of the Northern State is this. At the end of the last century the industrialists and landowners of the North, fearing the economic consequences of Home Rule, formed an alliance with the Protestant workers and small farmers to oppose it. They bought their allies allegiance with a combination of preferential treatment in the disposal of jobs and land-leases and the cynical whipping-up of religious bigotry. When they got control of their own state the same money-grabbing crew set up an apparatus of gerrymandering, discrimination, thuggery and repression. This had two immediate purposes. One was to put down any activity by the anti-partitionists - mainly Catholics -and to force as many as possible to emigrate, leaving the rest in poverty and without any political leadership. The other purpose was to divide the working class by buying the allegiance of Protestant workers and gulling them into believing they held a privileged position when in fact they merely had a smaller share of the general poverty and exploitation. "Both immediate purposes had a common long-term aim: the perpetuation of the easy flow of money into the pockets of the Unionist ruling class. The conflict in N. Ireland is neither a religious nor a tribal war, but a struggle against those who have cynically used religious hatred to protect the profits of a privileged elite."
Two essential elements were missed in this analysis: the ultimate role of the strongest factor in the situation, British impenalism, the moving force behind the setting up of the state, and the role of the state itself, which had sufficient autonomy from British imperialism, and the top layers of Unionism, to defy any attempts at reform, forcing British imperialism to choose between the maintenance of an unreformed state, or the smashing of that state by the catholic minority.
In turn this led PD into a form of political myopia. They saw only the North, and applied a completely voluntarist approach to the struggle there; under the misapprehension that exposure of the vested interests behind Unionism, and proof that the Civil Rights Movement had their interests at heart, would win over the Protestant workers: *The support of these men can only be won by an honest movement which makes clear that civil rights are here to stay and tries to explain why they were denied, and then campaigns on economic issues and tries to build a united working-class movement." (Farrell - ibid) ABILITY TO LEARN But PD had one valuable asset, an ability to learn from experience, combined with a tenacity and seriousness of purpose which kept them going despite the drastic decline of their organisation, and their failure to maintain the political impact of 1968-9. While other tendencies talked, and still talk, about winning over the Protestant workers through economic demands, the PD actually tried it, not shrinking from the consequences of acting alone with small forces to support struggles like the Cement strike (which got some of them jailed). Their latter-day critique of economist and voluntarist approaches to the problem of working class disunity in the Six Counties is the more trenchant for having arisen from practical experience.
The re-orientation of PD after internment led to involvement in the struggle of the catholic minority, and PD gained political influence and credibility quite out of proportion to its small size. PD was able to sink deep roots in the ghettoes relatively quickly, and having shed their student base, found another smaller, but more solid one. The majority of PD members are teachers, lecturers, lawyers, white collar workers. They are an important segment of the generation of young catholics which was best able to take advantage of the concessions made in the educational sphere. Such is the nature of the minority that there is no middle class for them to become integrated into. The choice is between the barren, and increasingly insecure heights of the Malone Road, or the catholic ghettoes. At the same time the bulk of their generation is involved in the struggle of the minority through the Republican organisations. Their links with this generation are strengthened by the influence of some of the most active and important young leaders in both the Officials and Provisionals who have gone through an initial political training in the PD.
Having made a turn to the struggle of the minority, PD was able to play an essential role in determining the form which the struggle took. The interdependence of the military struggle of the IRA and the Civil Resistance of the masses needs no elaboration, but it is necessary to stress that to a large extent it ran counter to Irish revolutionary traditions. For Republicanism the responsibility of those involved in the armed struggle was not directly to the people but to the Irish Republic. Of course, in the North the IRA had always had close links with the people, in its role as a catholic "home guard", but this had not included any concept of the people as an element in the struggle. Had the elitist concepts of traditional Republicanism determined the form of the struggle it would have very quickly been isolated and defeated. PD's intervention was not the sole element in breaking from the past (to a large extent the mould was broken by the early Civil Rights movement), but PD was able, through its own interpentions and through its influence within the Republican movement, to prevent a total re-assertion of the traditional forms of struggle. "INSTANT DEMOS"
But the other side of the coin is that PD is limited in its experience and outlook to the struggle in the North, and is essentially a product of that struggle. It has so far been unabi to relate to the all-Ireland struggle in the same way as it relates to the North. Since ultimate victory cannot be won in the North, this weakness must be overcome. Their activity in the last year has relied heavily on the "instant demo", North and South of the border. This technique is important; the willingness of PD to demonstrate when other, larger forces wanted to hold back action has enabled them to outflank them in action time after time. But such a technique has a very specific significance in a society like the North of Ireland. In a situation where the slightest flicker of independent action by only some hundreds of the minority population provoked a crisis in the whole of society such demonstrations were of historic importance. And today, when the catholics take to the streets in even limited numbers in face of the occupation forces, the inability of Btitish imperialism to crush their revolt is exposed.
Ahove: the sit-down which gave bith to PD But elsewhere demonstrations have a different significance. Specifically, they cannot play the same role in the South as they have in the North. It is true that from time to time demonstrations have rocked Leinster House, but these have been at times when the situation in the North has provoked a response in the South which has burst through the channels of Fianna Fail "Republicanism"". Also, given the right political situation even small demonstrations can have important political results; the PD mare to the Curragh, which was met with fixed bayonets, is an example of this. But the political significance of this action could not have been understood by PD, since they shortly afterwards made a call for demonstrations at the Curragh every weekend; needless to say these were neither effective nor long sustained. PD was running the risk of allowing a specific form of struggle to so pre-occupy their forces that they could not pay attention to the longer term tasks of creating a revolutionary movement.
A REVOLUTIONARY PARTY?
PD, has understood this; a political statement issued at the start of this year states: "By the end of 1973 there must be active branches in every city and major town in Ireland .......Without a revolutionary Party there can be no revolution. It is our task to build that party. To that we dedi cate ourselves." (Unfree Citizen, 15 January 1973) This statement is correct, but it contains a potential danger. The building of a revolutionary party does not consist of creating "active branches", but of leading revolutionary struggle; the organisational tasks of party-building are of secondary importance. So far the PD has not begun the job of extending itself outside the catholic ghettoes in the North - the Dublin branch consists mainly of Northern exiles, and has not been able to intervene in any meaningful way in the situation there. The task before PD, if it is to build a revolutionary party, must be re-formulated or it will prove a pious and misleading platitude. That task consists of linking the struggle of the ghettoes to the other struggles going on in Ireland, and centralising them around the main contradiction in Irish society, the unresolved national question, which is the springboard of the Irish revolution. Although this task has to be accomplished through leading struggle, it is interlinked with another task which at present has first place - the theoretical work of developing a strategy for the Irish revolution. NEW OPPORTUNITIES Since the mid-Sixties Irish revolutionaries have been confronted by a series of strategic opportunities, which were related to the new crisis then opening up. Their inability to grasp these opportunities was the direct consequence of their failure to understand that new conjuncture. While this was fairly inevitable, their failure has meant that the struggle is less advanced now than was objectively possible. The nature of this new conjuncture can be sketched rapidly. The re-orientation of British capitalism from the American alliance towards Europe meant a re-structuring of relationships with Ireland North and South. In Norther Ireland the decline of traditional industry, and the failure of any alternative industrial take-off meant that the statele was not only now politically outmoded, but a financial drain on the British exchequer. In the South the high point of Sean Lemass's economic miracle served only to point up the fact that the economic relationship between Britain and Ireland, outside North East Ulster, had not changed in any qualitative way since the Act of Union. Despite an important growth of industry, despite a growth of non-British investment, the area still depended on the export and processing of agricultural goods for the British market.
In the North this was to lead to the first substantial challenge to British imperialism and Orange supremacy since the foundation of the state: the Civil Rights struggle, growing over into an armed anti-imperialist struggle. In the South the bourgeoisie had to choose once and for all to accept their relationship with British imperialism and make the best of it. Thus the crisis in the North was merel the sharpest and most immediate aspect of a crisis which was gripping Ireland as a whole - any perspective for struggle in such a situation had to be an all-Ireland one. The factor which gave the Northern crisis such depth and power, the uneven development of North and South, is now turning into its opposite, isolating the struggle in the Northern ghettoes. The development of a strategy for the struggle in the South is of prime importance now. The crisis in the South is developing on a more heterogeneous basis, and at a slower rate than in the North. Already experience has shown that forms of struggle drawn from the Northern experience are quite inadequate for the South. For example, the Dundalk and Mountjoy "riots" last year, far from polarising society in the South and weakening the bas of Fianna Fail, strengthened the hands of the Lynchs and Colleys.
THE GENERAL ELECTION IN THE SOUTH A more recent example is the General Election in the South. Here the lines of PD and the Revolutionary Marxist Group (Irish supporters of the Fourth International) were very different. The RMG put forward the slogan "Against Repression, Vote Republican", while the PD had a totally abstentionist position, not even supporting the Official Republican candidates.
For PD the main task in relation to the election was to break the electoralist illusions of the masses in the South. This was another example of failure to transcend the North ern experience. Electoral illusions are practically nonexistent in the Northern ghettoes: a gerrymandered parliament and a permanent minority status do not breed trust in the possibility of change through the ballot-box. But in the South the experience of the masses is quite different. The abstentionist position of the Republicans in the early years of the state was an expression of weakness and futility: with the election of Fianna Fail in 1933 important changes did take place, and the continued abstentionism of Sinn Fein ensured that it was effectively by-passed by
First of all, can you say something about the vote for the candidates of the Ligue? You have to remember that we decided to field only 92 candidates out of a possible total of more than 450. We stood in places where we already have a group of militants. Our purpose was to increase our influence and strengthen our forces so as to be able to organise new *Red Committees' after the campaign. The big difference with the result of the presidential campaign [in which Krivine stood in 1969] is first of all the figures. This time we Alain Krivine, a leader of the Ligue Communiste (French section of the Fourth International) and one of meeting of interviewed him for The Red Mole. On Wednesday, 7 March, between the first and second rounds of voting in the French elections, its candidates in the elections, came over to London to speak at a public 400 people organised by the IMG. After the meeting, Oliver Macdonald "way of life' in the factory and in the housing estates, the question of transport facilities and similar problems.
All these things taken together lead us to expect big struggles, especially because in the last few months the CP has attempted to block all strikes. In each strike it has explained the need for a "peaceful climate', that we mustn't frighten the bourgeoisie and so on. The workers have been told that all their demands will finally be settled by a new government. And