Unionist-controlled, so there can be little fear of what the effects of one man-one vote will bring there. The official purpose for this procedure of course was to develop the Province's notoriously neglected second city. Any Catholic participation in this body will of course be on the terms of the rulers of the Six Counties and any threat that this might come about through an electoral victory of the people over the Unionist bloc has been removed.
REPRESSION AGAINST THE LEFT Repression continues fiercely against the Left. A new and particularly vicious piece of legislation is the Criminal Justice (Temporary Provisions) Act, which gives automatic imprisonment for various offences. Under this piece of legislation added to the armoury of repressive paraphernalia already in the Unionists' hands the jails of the Six Counties are overflowing. Already by the end of August more than 300 people had been charged with offences carrying an automatic sixmonth penalty. People's Democracy have suffered badly at the hands of this piece of legislation. While Catholics have received prison terms as the order of the day, Protestants arrested in street fighting have continued to receive small fines. In the recent street fighting, largely initiated by Protestant crowds returning from football matches and passing the Catholic Unity Flats, Chichester Clark has made noises about no section of society being above the law and the image of Ulster being damaged. However, having played the Orange card, the Catholics will always be the more easy to repress action against the Protestants presents far greater problems.
CHICHESTER CLARK'S ROLE Chichester Clark has had to perform a difficult balancing act. While playing the role of faithful puppet of British imperialism, he is at the same time constricted to very cautious steps in carrying out its dictates. To totally alienate the Orange masses would be to introduce a factor into the situation quite out of the control of Britain. Chichester Clark represented an attempt to keep the support of these masses already rejecting O'Neill out of hand. The pattern of rejection seems to be repeating itself, although this time the threat of direct rule is more strongly enunciated and little alternative to Chichester Clark exists, except possibly Faulkner, and he is already a discredited figure in the eyes of Craig and his supporters.
In the North the Belfast Telegraph has been quite explicit in its support for Chichester Clark and has even cast dark hints about the long-term future of the Unionist Party if its future remained tied to sectarian institutions such as the Orange lodges. Although the few indigenous capitalists in the North may be fully integrated into the English capitalist class and therefore amenable to control by Westminster, the bulk of the Unionist Party presents a much more difficult problem. On the resignation of Porter, the Minister responsible for Home Affairs, and a man known as not being among the most hard-line in the Party he was replaced by Clark himself. Taylor, a known hard-liner, moved up to Cabinet rank. The British-appointed Police Commissioner has been replaced by an Ulsterman, and the Army Chief, General Freeland, unpopular with the Craig faction for his alleged "softness", has also been replaced. However, these changes almost certainly represent attempts to manoeuvre on the part of Chichester Clark and the British in the face of pressure from Unionist dissidents rather than a shaking-out of the machine for a drastic change of policy. If the Unionist dissidents gain power, however, these changes cannot but strengthen their hand.
BRITISH IMPERIALISM & THE SIX COUNTIES Despite the repression against the Catholies and the reaction of the Protestants, the situation today is profoundly different from the '20s. Then it should be remembered the British did not have the political initiative at all in the struggle. They were fighting a rearguard action, attempting to salvage as much as they could out of the national struggle conducted by the Irish and to halt the revolution before it could develop into a thorough-going socialist revolution. In this situation they welcomed the opportunity of keeping a direct political control over the Six Counties. Today, however, it has been Britain that originally took the initiative (though it has lost it since) to bring about a rapprochement with the Southern Irish bourgeoisie because of the growing importance to it of the South relative to the North. To achieve this end, some move had to be made toward restructuring the political system of the North and integrating the Catholic Northern middle class. However, such a brittle structure as the Northern Unionist State could not be tampered with at will, and the situation went well beyond their control. The results are well known: the tremendous upsurge in militancy of the Northern Catholic masses (not like the 1920s when they were the most politically backward section of the Catholic working class) and the fissures in the Unionist bloc. The resistance of the Catholics posed the threat that the people of the North might take history into its own hands and embark on the road of solving their own problems. Accordingly, it has been a major task of British imperialism to attempt at first to limit this power with a view to later smashing it. (Cf. the attack on the Falls, the confiscation of arms, and latterly the driving of vigilantes off the streets). However, British imperialism has embarked on crushing this power not with a view to returning the situation to that of 1920, but to be able to impose its own historical solution. However, British imperialism has become enravelled in a mesh of contradictions of its own making. The structure that it set up to control Ulster, the Orange card that it played, cannot be easily altered: the danger exists too readily of bringing the whole house down on its head.
It caneneither go back to the pre-reform situation, but on the other hand every road forward is fraught with difficulties. For the working class the problem is clear: it is one of acting independently as a class and not being used as a token in the manoeuvres of other groups in society. The opportunities for the Left in such a situation are immense but cannot be seized without the needs and tasks of the class being clearly enunciated at every step and that will only occur in the course of construction of the Irish revolutionary vanguard party, able to synthesise the collective experience of the class. The absence of such an organisation has been the tragedy of the Irish in the 1920s.
However, although it is generally true to say that these are the needs of the class at this time, they are, of course, funda mentally problems for the Irish Left, they cannot be solved by pious wishes here in Britain.
The task in Britain is to build an effective solidarity movement. To this end revolutionary militants must fight for the adoption of principled positions towards the Irish struggle by the British Left, which has a lamentable record on this score. The Irish Solidarity Campaign must be an important step towards this end and and every revolutionary organisation should offer its active support.
SOLIDARITY WITH THE IRISH REVOLUTION!
SELF-DETERMINATION FOR IRE.
LAND!
WITHDRAW ALL BRITISH TROOPS NOW!
FREE ALL IRISH POLITICAL PRISONERS!