Introduction

It is worth remarking on the importance in Irish culture of political networking in the obtaining of jobs or contracts with State agencies. I found myself at the receiving end of what amounted to favours, engaged in a process of which I had been critical.

I pulled out from the Labour Party as a consequence of the way they handled the internal debate on the Single European Act. Ironically, just before leaving I happened to be lucky and to win a prize in a Party lottery, and this enabled me to buy my first personal computer, which enabled me to develop a more effective approach to techno-economic and socio-technical brokerage.

Attendance at conferences on the peace movement network (including the Kiev-Odessa 'Peace Cruise' of 1988), and also scientific consultancy for the UN FAO, had given me some first-hand insights into what was going on the the USSR, and this fuelled an assessment of the Gorbachev situation in 1989, which I wrote up and circulated to some people on the political network.

Contact with the Left

On November 20 1982 there was an Irish Sovereignty Movement seminar in the Shelbourne, addressed by Greaves, which I attended, perhaps nominally on behalf of the Labour Party International Affairs Committee, but I don't recollect what the impact was, if any. It would have had to do with the neutrality issue, in the context of the Falklands war.

During this time I was active with Irish CND, and according to Greaves in September 1983 I wrote to him to try to persuade AC to give priority to Irish CND, as I wanted to bow out, conscious of the impending ending of my TCD contract. Nothing came of this. I attended a CND Congress in Sheffield in or about November 1983, and I sent some stuff to the Democrat on it.

Labour and Northern Ireland(1)

Roy Johnston(2)

It is appropriate, in the aftermath of the disastrous Thatcher-Fitzgerald 'summit' of November 18-19 1984(3), to review Labour policies on the North, and to suggest ways in which they may be developed creatively in the new situation.

This is all the more urgent in the light of Mrs Thatcher's uncompromising role as recruiting-officer for the Provisionals: her contemptuous rejection of all three of the Forum 'options' must already have convinced many waverers that there is no way forward in constitutional politics. The abject failure of Dr Fitzgerald to convey any sense of national leadership, and his meek acceptance of the Thatcher position, may also perhaps help Labour activists to begin questioning their 'sherpa' role in the support of the present Government.

It is important that any re-thinking among Labour supporters of the present Government, and indeed among those who were opposed to participation and who are at present tagging along reluctantly while trying to build an independent Socialist position, should be illumined by an improved understanding of what Irish nationhood is all about.

The present article seeks to examine this, with the aid of some insights from Connolly(4), updated by some more recent documents: the 1972 Labour Northern Policy Statement, the 1981 Irish Trade Union leaders' appeal to British Labour, the Forum Report itself, some Northern Protestant responses to it, and finally some contributions to the current debate in Labour Left from the present writer, from Peter Archer MP(5), and from several others.

Historical Background

British reaction to the threat of Irish democracy was on the traditional 'divide et impera' pattern: in the same year (1795) as the northern landlords founded the Orange Order (dedicated to loyalty to the Crown for as long as the Crown supported the Protestant Ascendancy principle) Pitt funded the foundation of Maynooth College, staffed by emigre priests from France, who could be counted on to imbue an (as yet un-emancipated) Irish Catholicism with an anti-democratic tradition. Thus religious sectarianism is an artifact of British rule, a device for keeping Ireland tribally divided and preventing the development of the embryonic Irish nationhood.

Despite this, there were substantial contributions during the 19th century from Protestant scholars, entrepreneurs and politicians to the development of the 'intellectual infrastructure' of Irish nationhood, in the study of the Irish language and literature, science and its implications for the technology of industry and agriculture, and in the development of systems of political power with the potential for breaking the imperial constraints. Thus when the third(6) Home Rule Bill was beginning to be discussed in Ireland there was initial support for it in all parts of the country, including Ulster, which as a 9-county province was on balance in favour of it. Belfast itself was divided, but there was a demonstration in favour of Home Rule on October 30 1911 attended by many influential Protestants, who were prepared to throw in their lot with the emerging nation-state as part of an all-Ireland 'national bourgeoisie'.

This democratic process was along lines analogous to that which a decade previously had been followed in the process of secession of Norway from Sweden. There was by then in the European context an emerging tradition of constitutional reform, under the influence of the various national Labour movements organised in the Second International. The Irish Labour Party was part of this process; Connolly when organising in Belfast for the Transport Union in 1911 was in a position to lead the Belfast Labour movement into a position of political support for the Home Rule Bill. At the Whitsun Irish TUC of 1912, held in Clonmel, Connolly proposed the resolution that an Irish Labour Party be established, on the initiative of the Belfast Branch of the ITWU.

Thus the Irish Labour Party has its roots in the need, sensed by Connolly in the context of Belfast, to inject a Socialist component into Irish politics under Home Rule.

Just as democracy was the target in 1795 for Pitt's machinations, so the threat of a Socialist working-class in the most advanced industrial city in Ireland stimulated in 1912 a similar 'divide and rule' response. This time, however, the Tories, the real British ruling-class, were out of office, and the Liberal Government was about to implement the first steps of a process which the Tories regarded as treason. So with the substantial resources available to them, they set about subverting the Home Rule process with an armed conspiracy, using techniques later perfected by the Nazis. This armed subversion of the democratic process by a cabal of landlords, capitalists and military elite, using cannon-fodder from the Belfast slums, with arms brought in from Germany (in 1914!), a classic counter-revolutionary conspiracy, was the root cause of violence in Ireland in this century.

All this can be verified by reference to Connolly's contemporary writings (and indeed to Joe Johnston's(7) 'Civil War in Ulster', published in 1913), as well as in modern histories of the period such as Greaves 'Life and Times of James Connolly' and Farrell's 'Arming the Protestants'. The roots of violence in Ireland tend to be forgotten, under the flood of brainwashing from the British media.

Given this background, it should be clear that the so-called 'unionist identity' conceded by the Forum (this being its main weakness: see below), is an imperial artifact, by means of which the right of Protestants to contribute their rightful share to the nation-building process has been aborted.

Violence and Civil Rights

By 1968 in Derry a peaceful demonstration was attacked by the RUC, and Westminster MPs were batoned, thus breaking the conspiracy of silence of the British media. Then in August 1969, in response to further peaceful demonstrations, the epoch of violence was again initiated, as in 1914, by Orange arms(9). The B-Specials who stormed the unarmed Falls Road in 1969 with armoured cars and Browning machine-guns were directly descended, with organisational continuity, from the participants in the 1914 Tory armed conspiracy. Michael Farrell's book gives all the sordid details. Prior to this, the then united Republican movement was quietly and effectively evolving into a political movement of national democracy. The armed Orange counter-attack interrupted this process, triggering the genesis of the Provisionals(10).

After 1969, people in the Republic woke up to what was going on, but lacked orientation, apart from the resurrection of some national instincts. By 1972 the Labour Party had got around to producing a policy document, which we will now consider.

Labour Policy

This, on the whole, was a good policy. There were weaknesses, like a reference to 'the attainment of Socialism in the Six Counties' which suggests a lack of understanding of the nature of British sovereignty and the role of the State, and a failure to think through the role of the Dublin Government in the Anglo-Irish negotiations. However, if the party had begun to develop it, and to use it as a means of unifying the national-democratic forces(12), we would have had a New Ireland Forum process a decade earlier, and would have been able to put unified national pressure on Britain for a democratic political solution, with international support, giving some likelihood of the shreds of Unionist politics being swept into the political dustbin where they belong, liberating the Protestant sector of the working-class from the leadership of landlords, capitalists and demagogues for participation in an all-Ireland Labour movement.

What went wrong? There were, I think, two factors: the Common Market and Conor Cruise O'Brien(13). Labour attention was directed (somewhat half-heartedly, let it be said) at resisting the Gadarene rush into the New Act of Greater Union of 1972; certainly all those aware of the need to defend the right of a sovereign Irish State to make its own laws were engaged in this battle, which, to our eternal national discredit, was decisively lost in the referendum. Many thought, naively, that membership of the EEC would 'make the Border irrelevant'. So the 1972 policy remained on the shelf, and the political vacuum it left was filled, very astutely, by O'Brien with his 'two-nationism', fuelling a decade of confusion.

New Labour Movement Thinking

This letter welcomed the establishment of the Study Group on Northern Ireland and the emerging debate in the British Labour movement. It went on to explain the weakness of the ICTU(15) position (due to the political fragility of its all-Ireland status) on the constitutional question. Despite this, the ICTU has supported the idea of a Bill of Rights introduced from Westminster. The letter went on to urge British Labour, if it wants insights into Irish Labour movement thinking, to examine the resolutions of individual Unions rather than Congress, and went on to urge the ending of the 'guaranteed no change' attitude to the Unionists. The relevant policy statements of the ITGWU, FWUI(16) and Irish Labour Party were attached.

This letter has not received the attention it deserves in the process of formation of Irish Labour movement policy on the North. Note that it directs attention to the 'unionist veto' as a key problem.

New Ireland Forum

The missing ingredient required is the drawing of a proper distinction between Protestantism as a component of Irish culture, and Unionism as an externally-imposed political ideology, an imperial contrivance, with its origins in blood and Tory armed conspiracy (see above). The Forum document, with its talk of 'accommodating the Unionist tradition', fudges this. Only the Labour movement can lead the rescue-operation(17) necessary for the Protestant component of the Northern working-class to be liberated from ideological bondage to landlords, capitalists and demagogues, enabling it to join the socialist component of the Irish national-democratic political process.

Protestant Response

A statement by the 'Northern Consensus Group' (Sept 84, privately published by a cross-community group of business people interested in a peaceful solution; there appears to be a significant Quaker input) concedes '.....that any attempted solution which consisted mainly or wholly of a strong law and order policy must fail...', although it echoes and amplifies the Forum confusion about the relative priorities of Protestantism and Unionism in peoples' thinking ('...unionists also have a particular Irish identity'). It concludes, positively, that '.....the publication of the New Ireland Forum Report may have started the process of untying the knot of Northern Ireland politics.'

Labour Left Discussion

Ken Livingstone spoke to a large audience of Dublin working-class, in the Francis Xavier Hall, from a platform sponsored by 10 leading trade unionists in their personal capacities, some of whom appear on the list who signed the 1981 letter, above. Conspicuous by their absence were the leaders of political Labour, whose eyes were with Brendan Halligan's on Brussels and Strasbourg. In the Labour Left article I urged that political Labour begin to fill the policy vacuum on the North left by O'Brien, and consider the Livingstone message.

This drew a positive response from Peter Archer MP in no 4 (April/May 84) which showed considerable grasp of the problem, but balked at the question of the distinction between the national identity of the Northern Protestants and the present political position of most (not all) of them.

I put in a rejoinder, in which I attempted to demolish the concept of 'British national identity' to which some Protestants under unionist political influence misguidedly cling: '...there are English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh nations. There is a British State, a British Army, a British ruling-class, constructed from the elites of the 4 nations brainwashed by the English public-school system.' (The concept of Britishness is an instrument of English hegemonism.) '...For a time, when the Empire was in business, it looked to most Irish Protestants (never all) that there was something in this system for them, and they bought it. This is no longer objectively true. They would get a better deal via a unified Irish democratic State, which they could help to construct, with the Irish Labour Party as their instrument.....'

Labour Left declined to publish it; they published instead some historical analysis of the North in the time of the Attlee Government by Bob Purdie of Queens, which concluded by urging greater attention to the problem from the Left in Ireland, with a view to ensuring that the British Labour movement was well briefed. They also published an article by Micheal O'Riordan(20) which reminded us about the role of the Unionist veto as '....the major weapon by which (the Unionist bourgeoisie maintains) the division of the working class...'.

I sent my unpublished rejoinder to Peter Archer, who replied expressing sympathy with my analysis of the origins but reiterating the status of unionism as a 'majority faith'. He does, however, admit that '...we can, and should, try to persuade them that they are being conned...'.

There the matter rests. Perhaps this article will take the discussion a stage further.

Summary and Conclusions

NOTES

2. The writer has been actively involved in Socialist politics one way or another since 1945, mostly concerned with the problem of linking mainstream European Marxist thinking into the politics of decoupling the Irish nation from the British imperial legacy. During the 1960s he was influential in the early build-up of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association on the basis of non-violent protest against anti-Catholic discrimination, which was and still remains the essential basis of Unionist politics in Northern Ireland. Currently he is a vice-president of the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a council member of the Irish United Nations Association and a co-opted member of the International Affairs Committee of the Irish Labour Party. This article is a personal contribution and does not represent the views of the latter committee.

3. Dr Fitzgerald on this occasion presented to Mrs Thatcher the '3 options' emerging from the Forum Report, which constituted an attempt by all Irish constitutional national-democratic parties (including the Social Democratic and Labour Party in the North) to develop a consensus which would be a positive alternative to the armed campaign of the Provisional IRA.

4. James Connolly (1876-1916) perhaps can be compared with Jean Jaures; he was a Marxist who opposed the 1914 war; his objective in leading the 1916 Rising was to assert Irish national independence and withdraw Ireland from the holocaust.

5. British Labour spokesman on Northern Ireland.

6. The First and Second Home Rule Bills were the fruits of the constitutional and agrarian struggles of the 1880s, led by Parnell, and their influence on British liberal democracy led by Gladstone. Parnell, a progressive Protestant landlord, scored a near miss. Had he succeeded, a united independent Ireland, with Protestants playing a leading role, would have joined the European nations by the 1900s. The third attempt became feasible after the Liberal victory of 1906.

7. The present writer's father (1888-1972) typified many national-minded Northern Protestants who made their careers in the relatively liberal environment provided by the South. The 'Rome Rule' bogey never worried him.

8. Theobald Wolfe Tone, a Dublin Protestant lawyer, negotiated French support in 1796, in the form of a military expedition under Hoche, for the abortive attempt to set up an Irish Republic. He is revered as the founding father of Irish revolutionary democracy.

9. This aspect of violence in Ireland cannot be emphasised enough; it always starts by armed provocation from the Right, in response non-violent attempts to assert democratic demands.

10. The name derives from a split in the IRA into 'officials' (who were evolving into political mode under progressive leadership) and 'provisionals' whose support depended on the gut-reaction of the beleaguered Belfast Catholics to the re-emergence of Orange violence.

11. This never got anywhere; the Irish Labour Party however has maintained friendly relations with the SDLP in the North, led by John Hume MEP.

12. These of course must include Fianna Fail, the party of de Valera. John Hume and the SDLP, who are on good terms with Fianna Fail, have a clearer perception of this than has the Irish Labour Party. Dr Fitzgerald's Fine Gael is the leading party of compromise with British interests. To Labour's discredit they regard Fianna Fail as the main enemy, and ally with Fine Gael. The present writer is totally opposed to this policy, and is working as best he can for its reversal.

13. Conor Cruise O'Brien had had a distinguished career with the United Nations; he was involved in the early 60s in attempting to implement UN policy in the Congo, incurring the wrath of the imperialist-dominated media, particularly the BBC. So when he returned to Ireland and entered Labour politics, he had an anti-imperialist image. His subsequent very negative and pro-British policy on the North therefore came as a surprise to many. As a Minister in a Fine Gael-dominated government he introduced strict State censorship over television; the situation which Mrs Thatcher tried to impose on the BBC in August 1985 has been standard practice in Ireland for over a decade. His Dublin electorate responded by voting him out; he subsequently was lionised by the British media, becoming Editor-in-Chief of the Observer. The damage he did to the Labour Party's understanding of the national question is incalculable.

14. Secretary of the Belfast Trades Council and leading member of the Irish Communist Party; Joe Cooper is also associated with the Belfast Trades Council. The only outlet for all-Ireland thinking among the Northern Protestant working-class is via the Trade Union movement and/or via the CP.

15. Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

16. Federated Workers' Union of Ireland (this subsequently amalgamated with the ITGWU to form the present-day SIPTU). 17. I must have had in mind at the time some specific attempt to reach out to the Protestant working-class in Belfast, perhaps the 'Campaign for Democracy' which used to meet, and still meets, in a neutral venue.

18. Surgeon John Robb, from Ballymoney, had been a Wolfe Tone Society contact in the 1960s; later he formed the New Ireland Group; he also interacted with Desmond Fennell's Constitution Club; for a time he was in the Seanad as a Taoiseach nominee. He was very much in the Protestant all-Ireland liberal tradition.

19. Brendan Halligan had been the General Secretary of the Labour Party in the 1960s. He subsequently became an MEP.

20. Secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland; a Spanish Civil War veteran.

21. The term 'Civil War Parties' accurately describes the origins of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael in the Irish Civil War of 1922-23 which followed the 1921 'Treaty'. The term is appropriately pejorative and needs to gain currency.

Some footnotes are missing, alas, in the version to hand. I have attempted to reconstruct notes 15 to 21.

Strasbourg

Socialism and the Nation

Communism in Modern Ireland; Mike Milotte; Gill/Macmillan £25 (H/B)
Guide to Political Parties in Ireland; ed Gerry Kennedy; Morrigan £1.85
Operation Brogue; JM Feehan; Mercier £4.50
Coalition? Derry Kelleher; Justice Books £1.50
The Secret War; Patsy McArdle; Mercier £4.50
The Informers; Andrew Boyd; Mercier £4.50

We have had many analyses of mainstream political parties by academic political scientists who try to work within the conventional sociological categories of Western bourgeois democracy, on the palpably false assumption that the 26-county Irish State embodies a nation which has evolved to some sort of national fulfilment on the European model, providing an arena within which a more or less Marxist process of class conflict leading to social change can be fought out. Mike Milotte, by digging in the undergrowth among the visionaries and 'misfits' who have attempted since 1916 to pick up the shreds of Connolly's mantle, has provided us with some glimpse of the factors (ignored in most conventional academic analyses) which motivated the more politically conscious elements of the Labour movement, particularly their struggles to understand the national question and the role of the Labour movement within it.

It is in the polemics of these pioneers that one finds hints of what the Labour movement 'ought to have done' (and indeed may yet get around to doing), namely bring the national revolution to completion, wresting leadership from the Fianna Fail 'verbal republicans' and taking over from Fianna Fail its working-class grass-roots, while providing simultaneously an acceptable lead for the Belfast working-class, alternative to that provided by the Unionist landlords and capitalists. The nearest the Irish Left ever got to this position was the 1934 Republican Congress, which met in the Rathmines Town Hall, and embodied a Belfast working-class component, then ephemerally united in the 'outdoor relief campaign', and prepared to send a contingent to commemorate Wolfe Tone at Bodenstown, under the banner 'Break the Connection with Capitalism'. However, they had a long way to go, and the movement fell apart, leaving 'mainstream' politics unchallenged.

Mike Milotte chronicles the events, sometimes putting a gloss of Trotskyist orthodoxy, but fails to uncover why it was like that, what went wrong.

Repeatedly, for example, in the 20s and 30s we are shown the spectacle of rival left-wing groups competing for the attention of the Communist International (this in the early days involved people like Larkin and, later, MacBride). The repetition of history is inevitable for those who fail to learn from it. More recently we have had contemporary rivals for the shreds of Connolly's mantle condemning nationalism in Czechoslovakia and supporting it in Korea, and I mean 'in' in the sense that resources are devoted to sending people to these places on the international network, so that when there they can make statements that are picked up by the media and reported back in Ireland.

Can our visionaries not recognise their own qualities, get stuck in and do the job here, building on the fact that given a chance Irish Marxist thinking, at least for Ireland, is in advance of anything the international movement can contribute? (One may seek God in Rome, but the God one finds is the God that one has brought from home, if I may paraphrase the classical Irish proverb.) Milotte hints at this when he credits the 1934 events as the forerunner of the Comintern anti-fascist 'Popular Front' which did not surface internationally as Marxist policy until 1936. Similarly Connolly's attempt in 1916 to withdraw Ireland from the slaughter of the imperialist war was the forerunner of Lenin's more successful 1917 attempt to withdraw Russia.

Perhaps the roots of our national lack of self-confidence are in that untouched relic of British rule, the educational system, dominated by rote-learning, dogma and received conventional wisdom, to the extent that even the visionaries of Irish Marxism, after breaking with Roman Catholic dogma (as in pre-Vatican II days they had to), felt they needed alternative certainties, in a hierarchical structure. Thus in the first CPI Congress in 1923, the main divisive arguments were not over the politics of the call to the IRA for a ceasefire, but whether this position had been sanctioned by the Comintern!

In the later chapters, where Milotte depends considerably on oral interview material, there are some errors of fact, like Sam Nolan (Dublin Trades Council) said to be the son of Sean Nolan (New Books) (he isn't), and the present writer said to have been a CPGB branch secretary in London (he wasn't). There probably are others, but despite the increasing Trotskyist gloss towards the end (this shows up in his inflated evaluation of 'Peoples Democracy') he does get some of the complexities of the cross-currents on record, to the extent that the key problem is stated (however unsatisfactorily and implicitly): how to get an effective unified Labour movement to emerge as a leading element in an embryonic nation divided between two States. There must be countless similar problems in Africa carved up by imperialism; we owe the emerging post-colonial nations of the world a good analysis of the Irish case as pioneer. Alas Milotte will not fulfil this need. I wonder who will?

The Morrigan Guide is published in the spirit of other consumer guides they produce: careers and jobs, emigration and working abroad (signs of the times?), boarding-schools. Politics is seen as a commodity or service purveyed by political parties. There is a minimal sense of history conveyed in the short outlines. The English media-label 'terrorist' is attributed to Sinn Fein and the IRSP; the former is said to be led by '....Gerard Adams, an MP in the British Parliament'. One could cover the whole of Irish history in an attempt to explain that to a sympathetic foreigner! Still, the Guide gives contact-points and a potted chronology. The European linkages of the Irish parties give grounds for reflection: they are in inverse ratio to the parties' strengths, Labour having the most linkages and Fianna Fail the least. This supplements what I have said in relation to Milotte. We are not related to European mainstream, we are probably closer to India, where the Congress Party is the perfect Fianna Fail analogue. The closest analogue in Europe to any Irish combination is the Swedish Labour Party, which, I am credibly informed, is Fianna Fail-like; our Labour Party perhaps could consider emulating it by taking over the Fianna Fail working-class grass-roots and emerging in the lead of a movement to take control over our national affairs again, and like Greenland to get out of the EEC and join Sweden among the independent national democracies on the fringe of that consortium of moribund empires!

Feehan, with Operation Brogue, makes a bid to establish the credibility of Haughey as an enlightened leader of a new wave of assertion of national independence, comparable to that of de Valera. This is good polemic, and should be read with more sympathy than most media reviewers have given it. Regrettably it is weak on hard evidence, to back the gut feeling. My instinct is to use the English media as litmus: if they like people one should be suspicious, while people whom they blacken are probably OK. In my review of Bruce Arnold's book (BI May 84) while I was critical of Arnold's blind spots I tended to accept his analysis of the flaws in middle FF leadership, particularly with Doherty and the Dowra case. I must say I feel I may owe Doherty an apology now that I have read Feehan, who makes out that the Dowra case was set up by British Intelligence using the RUC, as part of the overall plan to wreck Haughey's bid to lead a born-again Fianna Fail. I was alive to the probability of a British conspiracy to plant discreditable incidents, knowing their form from long experience, and said so in my May review. Feehan has tended to confirm me in this view, and suggested some points I may have missed.

Missing in Feehan's scenario are (a) a positive welcome for the embryonic Protestant component in the new wave of Irish nationality; he tends to be dismissive of Northern Protestants, not realising the extent to which their unionism is an artifact of force and fraud; once they realise the extent to which they have been conned out of their Irish aspirations they can become a formidable national asset; also (b) a positive role for the Labour Party, which he dismisses as an inconsequential Fine Gael appendage. If Feehan's Fianna Fail Forum Option One scenario is to have any reality, Haughey will need to decouple the Protestants from Unionism, and to do that he will need the help of a national-minded Labour Party decoupled from Fine Gael, and prepared to do business with him. It is a pity Feehan does not have the patience to strengthen to research basis of his analysis. He lends himself too easily to being discredited.

There is fuel for this transformation in Kelleher's pamphlet. Would that this was in as much depth, and as well researched, as Milotte's book! Feehan and Kelleher are however both higher-priority reading for Labour activists.

The other two books (Boyd and McArdle) hopefully will convey to readers in the 26 Counties some flavour of the reality of British rule in the 6 Counties. Why, indeed, should we divert national resources towards active co-operation with such a regime?

Greaves

In November 1984 there was an apparent thaw in the relations with Greaves; he spent an evening in our house in the company of a group which included the Heusaffs, Owen Bennett, Micheal O Loingsigh, Cathal Mac Liam and others. The purpose was to consider what was to be done with the Celtic League periodical Carn. Nothing came of this however.

On February 20 1986 there was a public meeting organised by the Irish Sovereignty Movement, chaired by Micheal O Loingsigh, in the ATGWU hall in Abbey St. There were about 200 present, and many new faces; the meeting had been announced on the radio, and was judged a great success. This would have been a contribution to, or perhaps the launch of, AC's campaign on the Single European Act.

Labour and the National Question, again:

In 1987 I got the opportunity to review a book by Priscilla Metscher Republicanism and Socialism in Ireland (Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 1986). This was a chance to remind readers of the need for the left to develop a policy on the role of science and technology, as well as the need to come to terms with the problem of the hijacking of the national independence movement by the 'physical force' republicans.

Links Europa

Single European Act

Coincidentally there happened to be an industrial dispute in Cork with the municipal workers, who manned the City Hall. This enabled Dick Spring to call off the Conference, in a pseudo-left act of 'solidarity'. He went on to make a personal television appearance, urging support for the SEA. This piece of political maneuvering I found absolutely sickening. If they had wanted to defend party democracy and run the conference in the City Hall despite the strike, it should have been possible to do a deal with the municipal workers to come in for the necessary few days, to oblige the party, or some suitable agreement could have been made, such as to use the conference as a lever in support of the workers' claims. So in effect the Labour Party went into the ensuing referendum without any agreed policy, and with Dick Spring's TV appearance used as the means of establishing one, by default.

Shortly afterwards I met with Roger Garland and a few others, and became convinced that the banner of non-violent social-reform politics was passing to the Greens, with the addition of long-term sustainability and environmental concern. This was a step in the direction of the type of integration of science with social concern which I had been seeking over the years, and which the traditional European Left, in all its forms, had ignored. So in the end I got around to joining the Green party, attending the local meetings in Rathmines. I became active in developing the use of the Internet in the Green context; I go into this further below.

Regional Government

I contributed a paper to it on November 5 1986, entitled 'Innovation, Employment and Regional Government' in which I made a case for building a regional governmental structure around the existing distribution of regional colleges. I was very much involved at the time with my Regional College analysis, with the 'Business Innovation Centre (BIC) process, and with the work that led to the subsequent 'inter-regional linkage' projects, and I rather think the paper did not connect with the critical political type of audience. The paper is however worth reproducing, and it is accessible here. It led on to some subsequent contacts with the Regional Studies Association, as below, and also to a contribution to their 1990 AGM, which tried to push forward the political frontier.

Comments on Regional Studies Association AGM

This is not to be taken as a summary report; it is to be regarded as a commentary on certain aspects judged by the writer to be of particular concern to the NBST in the context of its interest in "RTD in Regional Development".

1. Participation in the Conference was mainly confined to local authority people and Regional Development Organisations. The latter are without significant resources, and lack technological insights. There were no participants from any RTC, or NIHE (apart from Dr O'Hare, whose invited contribution showed some appreciation of the realities of the Dublin regional problem; the main concrete proposal he made was however targeted at people who were absent).

2. Regional Development people having a potential relationship with an "RTD node" were present from Sligo, Limerick, the Udaras, Waterford, Galway, Athlone, Donegal, Kerry; add Monaghan if we relate it to Dundalk. Strong groups were there from the Midwest and from South-East; Cork was conspicuous by its absence. There was a strong group from Dublin, including the Dublin BIC (Business Innovation Centre) activist Brian Flanagan. Conversation over lunch with members of the Dublin group suggested however that there was little appreciation in it of the role of the 3rd-level centres as RTD nodes.

3. There would appear to be a considerable culture-gap between the participants and the concepts outlined in Tom Higgins' paper. Even with the Midwest participants it is questionable if the role of RTD was understood. Such understanding as exists resides in Shannon Development rather than in the Midwest RDO; the one Shannon participant was a community enterprise activist (ie low-technology, on current thinking) who does not look to NIHE with priority.

4. The EEC contributions showed a welcome indication of positive thinking regarding a pro-active integrated approach at regional level, but were not prepared to answer for us the question "what organisation prepares the integrated programme?". This question we must organise to answer ourselves. The problem of "Ireland as one Region" kept popping up; many seemed to think this was an EEC decision; no-one seemed anxious to contradict this erroneous impression; in fact it is our own decision, at governmental level, based on a (possibly false) impression that we get more money that way.

5. Frank Convery's identification of the 'limiting nutrient' problem is insightful. He appeared to home in on the supply of enterprising individuals at regional level. I would go further and pin it down to the combination of capital, market knowledge and technological competence; these in general reside in different people; the missing ingredient is team-work. It should not be necessary for all these ingredients to reside in one person who mortgages his house and risks personal bankruptcy. This constitutes a significant barrier. How, for example, can the necessary conclusions from the Tottenham model for commercial forestry development be propagated effectively? The answer would appear to be teamwork, including ACOT people, and agriculture students having potential access to land, along with their supervisors.

6. While the Udaras spokesman showed a welcome understanding of the potential of marine resources, it is doubtful if there is in the Udaras adequate appreciation of the potential of the 3rd-level for marine R&D. There is some appreciation emerging via Taighde Mara; this developing industry should be taking a leading role in funding the UCG marine research people, and ensuring a steady flow of young entrepreneurial talent. The UCG people should not have to go abroad for primary funding, as it seems they have to do, at least in the case of marine algae, while the Irish-based (and largely state-owned) marine algae firms remain as low-grade raw material suppliers to multinationals which do their research abroad. There is an important potential interaction between marine algae and mariculture; this needs to be researched in the specific context of the Irish industry, if full value is to be got out of the resource.

7. The Greer paper related to a totally pathological and hopefully exceptional situation, where is was necessary for political reasons to marginalise local democracy. It conveyed an impression of top-down housing-led development, without RTD component. Such of the latter as exists (drawn out by the writer's question) would appear to be somewhat of an afterthought, and by no means integral with the plan.

8. The Tom Higgins paper was so far ahead of the rest of the contributions as to be almost from a different planet. It is doubtful if 2% of the audience would have any significant appreciation of the "RTD potential" and its significance as a measure. The "contours of the RTD landscape" would appear to be somewhat ominous for SW and SE, while the Midwest and Dublin would appear to be "in hand". The Northwest as a "bootstrap" region would also appear to be "in hand" thanks to the initiatives of the Letterkenny RTC, Hugh Logue etc. I have been aware of this "map" in qualitative terms, and have been working on Cork to get them to appreciate it, but so far without success. The Connell Fanning book on the Cork regional problem is good but must be counted a near miss. There is no evidence of any integrated thinking, with RTD as the growing-point, between the several relevant agencies (UCC, RTC, CEB, BIC, IDA). There is loose talk in Waterford about the need for a "university" but no appreciation of the positive potential role of the RTC.

9. I consider that there is need for some sort of "mission" to get over the Tom Higgins message (ie the long-term dangers inherent in having high productivity without high RTD potential) in the SE and SW regions.

10. The Foras Forbartha contribution touched on an important developmental area to which the agricultural research people would appear to be blind, namely, the developing European movement for 'biological agriculture'. This is worth investigation in some depth, by someone without vested interest in the traditional (ie pesticides and antibiotics etc) paradigm. An RTD programme pointing in this direction might just catch on in the SE Region, where there is a residual culture of agriculture in the broad sense (ie not just milk and meat, but apples, honey, strawberries, flax etc) waiting to be turned around under the CAP replacement policy. Presumably the RTD potential of the SE Region is taken as including the various AFT centres there.

11. Dan O'Hare's contribution contained the concept of a voluntary network of institutions in a region, which he appeared to conceive in Dublin terms. This is positive, but the activation of such a network is going to require time and motivation. The Dublin BIC could activate an all-Dublin institutional network, provided it employs people fit to do so. It won't happen if left to the institutions themselves. If however a voluntary network were to emerge, it could put pressure on for the servicing the network to be professionalised. It is not an HEA function, as the network should include the VEC Colleges. The BIC is the obvious prime mover. I have put this to Brian Flanagan, and would be in a position to help to do the job, if they will have me.

12. The type of "mission" suggested above might be implemented on NBST initiative in association with an RDO. It would require significant dedicated effort over a long period; possibly part-time, but long-term. I am not talking about producing another report; we need action.

How to End the War

Reviews: Northern Ireland: The International Perspective, Adrian Guelke, Gill-Macmillan £IR27.50 hb; Northern Ireland: The Political Economy of Conflict, Bob Rowthorne Naomi Wayne; Polity Press £UK29.50 hb, £UK8.95 pb.

The unresolved problem of how to build an independent Irish nation-State in the European democratic tradition continues to stimulate academic research, some of which may turn out to be useful to practitioners of European 'perestroika'.

These two books complement each other, the first providing an academic background to the second, in which the emphasis is on practical ways forward.

Guelke is based in the Queens Political Science Department, which has understandably been prolific in this area. It would be hard to pin him to a theoretical position, but one cannot fault him for this, in that a good theory of the nation-State remains to be developed. He does try to make a theoretical distinction between 'violence' (illegitimate) and 'force' (legitimate) in an early chapter. The intractability of the problem derives from perceptions of legitimacy on both sides.

He goes on to trace the implications in widening circle: in Britain, in the Republic, in the USA and on mainland Europe. In the British chapter there are references to Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Scotland and Wales, the Falklands; a rich mine of possible precedents, in both directions.

In the Republic chapter, after a potted history which takes as starting-point the 1937 Constitution and then moves rapidly to the 1968 crisis, the emphasis is on the Forum and the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The suggestion is that the latter gives the Republic an equal status with Britain; a curious conclusion: whose are the troops?

Subsequent chapters cover the US (a guide to the various Irish lobbies) and the EC (the Haagerup report, PR in European elections etc).

In the international comparisons chapter he looks briefly at Cyprus, the Lebanon, Israel, Puerto Rico and Corsica. He discounts the possibility of the problem becoming as extreme as the Lebanon. The strongest parallel is with Israel; in both cases the State was founded on the basis of priority rights for one religious group over another in a local minority, the whole being embedded in a wider region where the local minority itself enjoys hegemony.

What is missing (and this is the main theme of the second book) is any sense that there exists an alternative to ethnic, religious or racial nationalism, in the form of democratic territorial nationalism in the European and American pluralistic tradition (Tom Paine and the Rights of Man etc).

In the final chapter Guelke castigates English nationalism ('contempt for foreigners, assumptions of racial superiority, and an essentially English ethnocentrism') and credits Irish nationalism with being in the mainstream of post-imperial world politics. The problem is intensified by Northern Ireland's 'lack of international legitimacy'. Unionists are 'unable to articulate their opposition to a united Ireland in terms capable of being understood outside the British Isles... to the outside world the Unionist stance seems to involve a demeaning acceptance of a semi-colonial status..'

Guelke concludes by suggesting that '..the resolution of the conflict is most likely to occur in the context of far-reaching change in global politics..'. This may be nearer than we think, given the increased attention being given by the global superpowers to the resolution of regional conflicts.

The second book benefits from being the joint work of an academic economist and a trade-union activist with hands-on experience of work in the Republic, the North and Britain. It is simply written, and avoids academic jargon. In the chapter on the origins of the problem they correctly home in on the Tory armed conspiracy for subverting the liberal democratic Home Rule process, but omit to remind readers that the arms were smuggled from Germany at a time when World War I was imminent, a fact that cannot be repeated often enough. The legitimacy of the Partition process is totally discredited once its roots in out-of-office Tory adventurism is understood.

The analysis of the nature of Northern Ireland during its 50-year period of stagnation is short and to the point, with relevant extracts from Sir Basil Brooke and the Special Powers Act. There is a summary of events since 1968, again culminating in the Forum and the Anglo-Irish Agreement. There is an incisive chapter on the erosion of civil liberties.

The core of the book is a comparative analysis of the economies of Northern Ireland, the Republic and Britain. Manufacturing output in NI follows that of Britain into managed Thatcherite decline, while that in the Republic remains buoyant. NI is increasingly a 'branch plant' economy, and increasingly dependent on massive subsidies via Government services. In fact, the effect of the armed conflict is quantified as a direct switch of some 40,000 jobs from manufacturing industry to Government services. They label it a 'workhouse economy', being supported by taxes levied on British citizens, while providing little in return.

In the Republic on the other hand, some 40% more transportable goods per inhabitant are produced, helping to strengthen the Irish position as an exporting nation. Estimated trade surplus per inhabitant is £100, while the NI deficit per inhabitant is £1100.

In the analysis of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the authors argue that economically it is 'circular': the only way to advance the lot of Catholics is to create more jobs, and this can never be achieved for as long as the conflict continues. Improvement of the economy on the scale necessary is only possible after peace has been achieved; peace is impossible as long as the Catholic community remains deprived.

They then go on to spell out concisely four possible options: negotiated independence, UDI, repartition and Irish unification. The first three they dismiss rapidly as disastrous, in economic, political and human terms. The fourth they develop in a series of stages, including a constitutional conference, with its mind sharpened by the imminent withdrawal of the British. They stress the importance of the new State giving a positive welcome to its Protestant component.

They attempt to quantify several economic scenarios: in the context of total immediate cessation of all subsidy from Britain, there would be 3 options:

(a) the South to take over the British role completely, maintaining the £1000 per inhabitant subsidy, and giving a 22% drop to the southern living standard;

(b) equalising living standards north and south, giving a 27% drop in the North and a 6% drop in the South:

(c) no drop for the South, giving a 38% drop in the North. All these scenarios would be politically malign, and likely to be worsened by the continuation of violence from the Protestant side. There is however a possible benign economic scenario, in which the British deploy their economic resources actively to help the new unified State get its act together. This would be administered by the new unified State in such a way as to ensure that there was no drop in the living standards of anyone, while the Northern economy was reconstructed and integrated with that of the island as a whole. This subsidy would continue, at a declining rate, over a 15 to 20 year period. The initial level of the subsidy would be substantially less than the present outgoings, as there would be immediate savings due to the withdrawal of the troops.

The authors have spelled out a scenario in which both sides win, a rare situation in politics, to be valued when it is met with. On the Irish side, the task of drawing up a new constitution emphasising the creative aspects of a pluralistic society presents an exciting challenge. The obvious way to go is towards a strongly decentralised cantonal or regional system, with real regional governments, united in a federal capital, which should be outside Dublin, Dublin and Belfast being regional capitals. On the British side they would see a cost declining to zero in the foreseeable future, instead of escalating; they would gain a friendly neighbour into the bargain.

To get this book widely read and accepted in Britain, where it needs to make the impact, it is important that it should be read and understood in Ireland, especially in the North, where significant numbers of Protestants are likely to welcome it.

The USSR

Redefining Irish Identity

The Raven Arts Press, to which poetry reviewers are more accustomed than the present writer, has ventured into political philosophy with what promises to become a series, inspired by Swift's Drapier's Letters. They have produced slim volumes, pamphlet-scale, 20-30 pages, between stiff covers, so that they can end up vertical on the bookshelf, although there is no room for a title on the spine. Perhaps their quality (and, indeed, their price) will earn them this treatment by serious readers.

Fintan O'Toole is perhaps best known as the theatre critic of the Sunday Tribune. In this genre he has done a perceptive review of the Non-Stop Charlie Haughey Show, with background infill on the history of the Fianna Fail Theatre. It works; he has produced a valid and trenchant political critique, asking good questions. The key tension which emerges is the rural-urban split, exemplified in the virtual excision of Dublin and its problems from the dream-reality of the TV-show "Charlie Haughey's Ireland": "...When Christ Church appears it is in a shot carefully framed to avoid the flats on the left, the car-park to the right and, above all, Sam Stephenson's Civic Offices behind..."; again: "..if real political power is founded on cities, then the writing-out of cities from Irish political culture is crucial to the majority of Irish people to exercise political power..."

Colm Toibin (of "Walking along the Border" fame) has kept closer to the Raven Press tradition, with a review essay covering several works touching on politics and national identity: Joyce, Frank O'Connor, Kate O'Brien, McGahern, Michael O'Loughlin, Anne Devlin. This I found diffuse; the least satisfactory of the three. On a criterion which I tend to apply to such works, with which Swift would I think have agreed, we have here a total failure. The criterion is the existence of an answer to the question "what does one go and do next, having read this pamphlet?". Fintan O'Toole succeeds, because he brings out the need to develop proper civic political existence, via real local government, as the alternative to tribalism and clientelism.

Michael O'Loughlin (one of Toibin's poets) is now in exile in Amsterdam. He contributes a perceptive essay on the significance of Frank Ryan, who fought in Spain for the Republic and died in Dresden during the war. The Germans kept him on ice as a possible pawn for use in the event of an invasion: "...a nightmare re-run of Wolfe Tone in Napoleon's Paris..." (There is here a historical slip: the Directory was in power and Napoleon was still in the wings RJ).

He goes on to reflect on the phenomenon of emigration, the marginalisation of the exile, who "...cannot even vote in Irish elections, the radio does not broadcast to listeners abroad...". Exile from what? "..Joyce... by leaving Ireland found readers... a sympathetic milieu... if he had stayed... that would have been true exile: exile from himself."

O'Loughlin's conclusion is that Frank Ryan "..died in the grip of a dead narrative" but "..was also consciously involved with another narrative, one which led through loss of historical innocence to maturity... he is a footnote to Irish history of the past 50 years...". And the punch-line: "..,an Ireland which could not accommodate men like Frank Ryan, Joyce and Beckett was a country in exile from itself... Irish culture took a wrong turning in the 1920s.." His message: "...people stand on a shore, about to turn inland, to colonise their own country. They have pushed a burning ship, an ark, an emigrant ship, out to sea. Perhaps on board is the body of the last Irish hero."

If Raven keep this up, and if the products are bought and read, they may yet generate the intellectual ferment necessary for re-inventing Irish national consciousness as a positive and inclusive political force.

Tim Pat Coogan offers a contemporary history, a blow-by-blow account of the decline of things from the blissful 60s, to which we all look back with nostalgia. There is some critical analysis in passing (the IDA as a PR operation, the Dowra Affair, the Haughey Factor...) but this is at the level of contemporary journalism rather than historical analysis. He offers a Hong Kong-type solution to the Northern question, in the aftermath of which, in the words of an un-named Cabinet Minister in the present Government, "they" will be running "us", and why not?...

He consistently underestimates or ignores the role of the "illegal wing" of the British Government. Where he had opportunity to make use of memoirs published since (eg on the killing of Sunningdale by the so-called Ulster Workers' Council in 1974, or the Dublin bombings), which pointed the finger at the "dirty tricks department", he passes.

There is mounting evidence that the British are actively conspiring to keep the violence going, to keep it a so-called "military problem" and to prevent politics from developing. The events of the last week of January 1988 reinforce this feeling, which began in the mind of the present writer in the 60s, when following the development of an embryonic political left-republicanism which sought to transcend the tribal boundaries, the British response included the release of a series of consignments of remains of the martyred dead, around whose funerals the fires of traditional tribalism could be stoked, and the organisational basis of the split laid. If the Provisionals did not exist, it would be necessary for the British to invent them, in pursuance of the grand long-term strategy for keeping Ireland weak, divided, and under military control for NATO. Coogan's insights into this episode are superficial in the extreme; his references to the present writer are unchecked and repeat earlier journalistic canards.

On the whole a disappointing book, but useful for reference in establishing a time-frame when researching an event in the past, so therefore worth buying.

Ireland and the French Revolution

Our failure as a nation to celebrate our origins and existence, with heavyweight scholarship tracing our historical roots in one of the key events in the history of European democracy, perhaps reflects an uneasy feeling that as a nation in the European sense our existence is somewhat marginal.

There was something ironic, almost pathetic, in the gesture made by our Taoiseach when he presented a Wolfe Tone memorial to the Paris Irish College.

I don't recollect anyone in Ireland, officially or otherwise, questioning the right of the British Army to march down the Champs Elysees, celebrating an event which their predecessors had attempted to drown in blood.

There is time, in the stream of bicentenaries to come, for the contemporary Irish to build up some sort of historical appreciation of the significance for us now of that cataclysmic 26 years from which stems so much European history. The books under review will constitute raw material for this purpose.

Of these by far the best is Gwyn Williams, whose Marxist approach to Welsh history has established him as an important critic of conventional Anglo- centred labour and radical historians. There was more to England in democratic revolutionary terms than Tom Paine. Jacobinism penetrated to the remotest villages in England and Wales; democracy was becoming a real threat to the established order, not only in London where Francis Place and the Corresponding Societies flourished, but throughout the land. Modelled on the United Irishmen, there was an embryonic federation of United Britons whose components included the United Englishmen and United Scotsmen, all looking to France as the model for the democratic republic to which they aspired.

This is a second edition of a book first written in 1968, when the objective was to demolish the old simplistic Marxist version of the French revolution as an occasion on which 'capitalism' replaced 'feudalism', replacing it with a more dynamic analysis of the social forces at work in a situation where 'classes' in the Marxist theoretical sense had yet to define themselves. He has re-published it with a lengthy introduction, evoking Mary Shelley and the Frankenstein Monster, John Dee and the Hermetic tradition, John Toland, William Blake and others, in an attempt to explore the philosophical dimension.

(John Toland, by the way, he claims as English, thus exhibiting some of the cultural imperialism of which he as a Welsh radical is forever accusing the English. Toland was born in Derry, on the Inishowen peninsula, in the early 1600s; he became a priest, but dropped out, being accused of atheism; he went to Holland on the run. I remember John Hewitt celebrating him in a Humanist Sunday-morning sermon, in Warrenpoint in the 60s. But I digress.)

The Sansculottes were converted into the Napoleonic war machine in the Italian campaign, rendered necessary because the Republic had no money to pay them. Thus the democratic revolution was subverted into an external threat, and democracy in England became treason. There will be plenty of opportunities for Williams to explore the Irish dimensions of this process: dare we hope that he will turn his attention in our direction for the '98 becentenary?

Clifford's book is based largely on study of the Belfast newspapers, primarily the Northern Star, which gave largely exultant and complete coverage of French revolutionary politics up to 1797, when its presses were smashed by the military. Belfast republican radicalism, when demanding Catholic emancipation as part of the United Irishmen's reform package, felt no threat from Catholicism as such, largely because they saw it being pulverised in France. The role of northern radicalism in Catholic-rooted republican mythology needs some re-assessment. Clifford nods in the direction of this need in a reference to Canon Sheehan, who attempted to promote a secular nationalism, modelled on the French civil constitution: '...this sort of Catholicism is unknown in modern Ireland because Peter Walsh, theologian to the Confederation of Kilkenny, has been made unknown; and because Canon Sheehan, theologian of the abortive popular movement in Munster around 1910 to prevent nationalism from being Catholic-nationalism, has been made unknown...' Can we have more of this, Brendan? 'Separation of Church and State' activists need ammunition.

Liam Swords looks at the role of the Irish in the French Revolution from the angle of the Irish College in Paris. A highly complex picture emerges, from which episodes cry out for integration into the national historical record; the latter however gets lost behind the concentration on the history of the survival of the College as an institution during the revolutionary and Bonapartist periods. Names like Duckett and Madgett are familiar from Wolfe Tone's diaries. One gets a feel for the culture-gap that must have existed between the raw Catholic peasant-rooted students-priests and Tone the urbane Dublin Protestant radical. Pitt must have been aware of this, and recruited several of the former as spies. There are some insights given into the politics of the foundation of Maynooth, and the integration of the Catholic Church in Ireland into Pitt's system of national ideological repression.

Vivienne Abbott takes the Abbe Edgeworth, Louis XVI's confessor, as her window into the the scene, not without a whiff of royalist nostalgia, and, like Swords, firmly within the Catholic-nationalist paradigm. This perspective however opens up the need for a re-assessment of the Vendee and the Chouans, both movements prominent in Republican demonology. Did the French nation have to be so centralist? Is the bourgeois nation-building process not intrinsically imperialist, to the extent that it has always to assert itself at its fringes? And does this process not inevitably lead to Bonapartist (or indeed Stalinist) reaction?

All these books are 'good reads' for anyone interested in Irish history and its European linkages, but don't expect an integrated picture; this has yet to come. Who will do it? It will have to be a collaboration. If people like Gwyn Williams, E P Thompson, Priscilla Mettscher and Gearoid O Tuathaigh could be persuaded to work together as a team, to write the history of the interaction between the French revolution and the radical democratic republican movements in Britain and Ireland, we might get some genuine fuel for the unfinished business of post-imperial nation-building.

On the Greaves Summer School Concept

Background

This needs critical and scholarly attention, and the Irish are peculiarly well placed to pioneer a Marxist understanding of the nation-building process in the aftermath of imperial interference.

The output of such scholarship must be Gramscian, in that books produced must get read and understood by the intelligent activists who are in a position to lead the working people into the promised land. And also some if not all of the authors of the books themselves must turn their hands to praxis, as Desmond did.

Let us also expand on the Stalin aspect. It is our belief that a significant aspect of Desmond's motivation to devote himself to the national-democratic revolution in Ireland was an instinctive desire to distance himself from what was going on in the arena of Marxist orthodoxy. He understood the nature of the mess being created in Eastern Europe and wanted no hand act or part in it.

The isolation of the 'hard left' in the West from the philosophical battlegrounds of the intellectuals is an aspect of Stalin's legacy. As a result the academic arena is an ideological wilderness.

Desmond was aware of this need, and in the 40s cultivated the student radicals. Of that generation there are few survivors, but you can count RJ, Paul O'Higgins and Toni Curran; also, in a sense, Justin Keating. Toni was an activist, but P O'H and RJ can claim to have kept some intellectual standing among our peers. RJ personally has been in the past, and remains currently to some extent, in a position to influence the kind of problems that post-graduate students address. The overall effect however has been miniscule. There were too few of us, and we were scattered to the winds.

The Problem as we see it

Unless we can somehow develop the 'think-tank' aspect of this seminar, and provoke in-depth study of the key problem areas by contacts in the academic system whom we stimulate to do so, then we are wasting our time. We are not in the business of providing a weekend relaxation and drinking for a handful of tired middle-aged trade unionists. We are in the business of trying to set up a process for re-asserting Irish nationhood in a new political environment, in a form appropriate to the political opportunities, and possibly differently from the processes that were at work in the 19th century.

Given that there are only a handful of academics of any standing who are prepared to stand on ISM platforms (McCaughey, O Tuathaigh, Asmal, Crotty), let us state the problem in the form of how we get a seminar going in such a way as to augment this supply, by asking the right questions, and stimulating people to work on problem-areas which will be of help to us in our task.

Steps towards the solution

If this approach is adopted, the people concerned should not be approached until the briefings are written and a cohesive philosophy for the seminar has emerged. This must be done on paper, not off the top of the head at a committee meeting.

An alternative approach is is first to define the topics, and then see if we can find names to allocate to them. This, in the present situation, is more difficult; there are few un-compromised intellectual resources to choose from.

(This is not a reason for dismissing them. The current practice of allocating disparaging labels and dismissing someone if they are not 100% in agreement with the AC world-view is not conducive to development of the resource. Better to look for the areas of agreement, and build on them by actions in that area, thus possibly extending them.)

Names we can do without: Eoin O Murchu, who had little or no rapport with CGD ever, and who is an unrepentant supporter of the Zhdanov approach to culture, and Stalin's methods in politics.

The other names on the list quoted at the meeting fall into 2 groups:

(a) those who interacted with CDG, and might have personal insights to contribute in the aftermath of AC's biographical paper, and

(b) those who might be helpful in developing the 'think tank' aspect.

Both groups are important; the former to provide the energy necessary and organising ability necessary for filling a hall, the latter also as a source of ideas.

Of the names mentioned I would include in the latter group Devine, O Caollai, O Snodaigh and O Tuathaigh. This is the group which needs extension.

When we sat down in August 1987 to circulate our 'Note on the Need for National Democratic Policy Development' document, we wrote down a list of names which included AC, Kader Asmal, Derry Kelleher, Terence McCaughey, Ray Crotty, Brian Leonard, John Montague, Paul O'Higgins, Seamus O Buachalla, Declan Kiberd, Breandan O h-Eithir, Richard Kearney, Brian Falloon, Michael D Higgins, Emmett Stagg, John Maguire, Donnchadh O h-Ealaithe, Alan Matthews, Helena Sheehan, Padraig O Snodaigh, Deaglan de Breadun, Peadar Kirby, Fintan O'Toole. We had discussed the document in draft at length with Shay Courtney, who is now a professional historian.

Of this lot the only ones to respond were McCaughey, Leonard, Kiberd, Kearney, Falloon, Michael D H and Helena Sheehan. We didn't pursue it.

When subsequently in Sept 88 we wrote around to a few people about the 89 bicentenary, the following additional names came to mind as people with a practical scholarly contribution to make: de Courcy Ireland, Risteard Mac Annraoi, Tom Graham (a Courtney contact), Desmond Fennell, Tom Barrington, Mike McKillen, Bill Hyland, Joy Rudd, Norman McMillen, Connie Ramillon, Eamonn O Ciosain, Patrick Faveraux etc etc.

We can see AC exuding disapproval of some of these. Let him. You have to build on what you have got. Let's find the positive areas.

If you want potted biographies of all of these people, it is another night's work, and if there is the demand we will do it. The point is that they are all people who in our opinion have some contribution to make in the assessment of the current national situation, and in the development of new thinking in this area, such as to cause the necessary ferment. No one will have the type of revealed certainty which the Christian Brother/Stalinist mind seems to want. We are in a sea of doubt and confusion, and the most we can hope to do is create one or two islands of reduced uncertainty. There are no simplistic answers written in books. We will have to write the books, or stimulate them to be written.

If we are not in a position to develop the CDG event as a focus and stimulus for creative work by the kind of people listed, and as an opportunity for them to interact creatively with activists, catalysing the development of ideas into reality, then we may as well give up.

No revolution can take place without an intellectual core.

Theses for a Greened Euro-Left

Introduction

Opposition to the SEA in the 1997 referendum amounted to a third of the votes cast. Opposition to EEC entry in 1972 amounted to one eighth. There is therefore clearly a trend toward disillusion, and a developing consciousness of the need to question the working of the EC under the SEA from the angle of small fringe nations such as Ireland, who see their ability to make independent decisions continually eroded.

In the above context, it is necessary to consider whether the Left should (a) accept the SEA as a 'fait accompli' and turn its mind to how the overall EC democratic structures might he reformed in the interests of fringe national communities, or (b) attempt to load a rearguard action against every sovereignty-undermining implication of the SEA as it arises.

The consensus in the in the Irish Labour Party would appear to be for (a), though not without some gut feeling that (b) should also be done. They are not inconsistent position.

The following ideas, which have the status of 'notes towards development' from an individual, rather than the agreed position of an organisation, have arisen in the above context, and also under the stimulus of the democratic revolution currently in progress in the USSR under the leadership of Gorbachev, and the accompanying thaw in East-West relations.

The writer is a co-opted member of the international affairs committee of the ILP; he is also a vice-president of Irish CND and on the council of the Irish UNA.

The Single European Act

If this process is allowed to complete itself with the present political structures, the unified EC will be dominated by centralist imperial states, primarily Britain and France (nuclear armed), together with Germany (less centralist, and not as yet nuclear-armed, but industrially the most powerful of the EC States). The fringe States, and indeed the fringe communities of the core-States, will be subject to economic and cultural erosion on an unprecedented scale, in the manner which has already been demonstrated historically wherever capitalism has been allowed untrammeled freedom of investment decision within a political boundary. (Under the Act of Union with Britain, the Irish population halved).

If on the other hand it is accompanied by some political process which allows the internal boundaries to be reviewed, enabling a democratic federation of European peoples to he developed without domination by the old central imperial bureaucracies, then there is hope that both fringe and core may participate in interactive dynamic development.

Perestroika in the USSR

East-West Relations

The opportunity now exists for total reform of defence policy, with the winding down of NATO, and the generalisation of non-nuclear non-aggressive territorial-based defence. In this context neutrality as regards the 2 global superpowers could become the norm among the EC member-states, rather than the uneasy exception it now is in the case of Ireland.

Problems for the Left

A key problem is: on what scale does this transformation take place? What is the minimum-sized national-democratic unit which can enable a socialist transformation to be viable'? In the post-1992 EC are we talking of a total transformation consequent on a majority in the European parliament, or are we dealing with partial transformation by component units of the EC on a pilot basis? If the latter, how can the transformation be planned, given free movement of goods, labour and capital? If, as is projected, 80% of all key economic decisions will be made by the Commission, what room is there for manoeuvre?

A possible approach to the solution, which might be operated within a relatively small national community having the necessary political will, would be to make intelligent use of the remaining 20% of economic decision-making potential in such a way as to maximise the social control over investment decisions within the jurisdiction, while accepting the EC constraints. There is here a parallel with the current approach to autonomising Estonian decisions within the Soviet command economic system.

One can imagine transitional situations with socialist enclaves depending on private-sector mobile EC capital, attempting to implement laws governing composition of boards of directors, which would have to make investment decisions in a situation where labour was cheap (under the 'social wage' principle) and capital taxed. What sort of anomalies would emerge? Would the socialist enclave destabilise the surrounding capitalist environment, or would it be corrupted by the latter?

An alternative transitional situation might be a majority in the European Parliament attempting to impose socialist regulation, via the Commission, on right-wing governments in one or more of the archaeo-imperial States. We have seen the resistance on the part of the British to progressive attempts at environmental regulation by Brussels.

These are the sort of problems that European Socialists are going to have to address. Curiously analogous problems are beginning to emerge in the reconstructing USSR.

Opportunities

There is thus a window of opportunity for the Left to gain decision-making power at regional level, which can be used for progressive purposes. There will be an unstable transitional period when power will he in process of transfer from the intermediate level (the old imperial centralist States) upwards to the federal level, and downwards to regional level.

It will be necessary for the united and greened European Left to see to it that European federal institutions (ie Strasbourg and Brussels, or whatever structure replaces them in the reconstructed situation) do not assume total centralist power, and are influenced primarily from the regional level, rather than from the old imperial centralist States. These must in effect he dismantled, or allowed to atrophy to an appropriate level of ritual or nostalgia, so as no longer to constitute a threat to their smaller and weaker peripheral neighbours.

The rejection of the old western European Left by the Green movement was a consequence of the neglect by the former of environmental issues, and the failure to he critical of centralist State structures as being harriers to democracy. If the process of development of democratic reconstructionist policies emphasises the dismantling of the old centralist bureaucracies and the development of democratic nation-States on a human scale, and on respecting conservationist and environmental issues, then the reconstructed Left must include the Greens, either embedded or in alliance.

Threats

The Way Forward

1. Tax and social welfare reform along the lines of a tax on productive property to pay for a social wage for all, to which an economic wage for work done would be supplementary. (ie low marginal cost of employment combined with high incomes.)

2. Cantonisation in natural units ranging (say) from 0.5M to 5M population, with total local autonomy of legislation, within broad federal constraints. (There would, for example, he room for possibly 4 to 6 cantons in Ireland, and maybe 8 to 10 in Britain, including classical political units like Scotland and Wales. Germany is already federal. Italy and Spain halve strong regional structures. France presents problems due to the Napoleonic legacy but there are good regional poles, with autonomous growth dynamics (eg Rennes, Toulouse, Grenoble). Cantons embodying the centralist imperial capitals, eg Anglia and the Ile de France embodying London and Paris, would be likely to present features analogous to contemporary Austria, ie ie imperial Austria shorn of its empire: they would remain cultural centres, stabilize their populations with the evaporation of their housing problems.

3. Transforming the Brussels Commission into a small federal policy-oriented civil service, located In Strasbourg. (The federal capital should not he identified with any of the old imperial capitals: Strasbourg rather than Brussels. Plans currently afoot to move the Parliament to Brussels are part of the process of domination of the EC by centralist imperial powers.) 4. Cantons should be defined on the basis of local wishes, irrespective of old imperial boundaries (eg Catalans and Basques should if they wish form unified cantons from land currently labelled France and Spain; one of the Irish cantons would be likely to be centred on Belfast and to have a Protestant majority.

5. A Federal Bill of Rights to protect the rights of minorities within cantons (eg Catholics in Belfast), and to protect cantonal identity against erosion by migration (eg Wales from immigrant monoglot anglophones; the canton would have the right to legislate to protect its language and culture).

Concluding Remarks

(b) If a system can be established within which the democratic principle is extensible into economic life (this is the meaning of socialism) by the rule of law, there should he no obstacle to its converging totally with the perestroika process in the USSR. Europe, after all, extends to the Urals.

(c) Unless reconstruction along these lines is top of the political agenda in the post-SEA EC, then small States like Ireland or Denmark have no independent future in it; they should begin seriously to evaluate withdrawal options.

A Radio Eireann World Service?

Introduction

It is (intended to be) circulated as follows: [A] State bodies: IDA, CTT and Eolas..... [B] bodies servicing expatriate workers: APSO, DEVCO, HEDCO, CONGOOD... [C] bodies concerned with the social and political consequences of emigration: the Churches, the ICTU.... [D] business lobbies: CII.... (can anyone think of any more?)

Those receiving it (will perhaps be, at an appropriate time) urged to consider circulating it, or extracts from it, to their members and supporters, via newsletters etc, with the suggestion that they might raise the matter with their TDs, so as to place the matter on the national political agenda. (This type of open lobbying however may not turn out to be necessary, if the initial reaction of key centres of influence is positive.)

Historical Background

In the 40s and 50s SW listeners would have been (a) amateur radio enthusiasts (b) communications specialists feeding the media.

It probably was argued in de Valera's time that the Irish ethnic media abroad were not technically competent enough to be in a position to monitor an RE world service, and our only listeners would have been a handful of 'radio buffs'.

On the other hand, it could equally well have been argued that if the service had been provided, the Irish media in the USA, Australia and elsewhere would have risen to the occasion and equipped themselves to monitor the service.

It could also have been argued that our many expatriates in the missions in Africa might have been encouraged to become 'radio buffs' to keep in touch with home, thus helping to upgrade the level of technical expertise taught in the mission schools, an important factor in 3rd-world development. So on the whole we can record an episode of national capitulation, and look back with shame.

Contemporary SW Technology

RTE attitudes to SW broadcasting appear to be dominated by concern about signal quality. This aspect was taken up in an RTE interview with the present writer, shortly after the Irish Times article was published (..SW is an obsolescent technology...'); it was also mentioned in the response by Eilish Pearce in a letter to the IT on Nov 30: '...SW can't compete with satellites in quality of reception...'. This attitude is irrelevant and misses the point. As long as an intelligible signal is available, for the conveying of news and feature material, the purpose is served. If our expatriates, emigrants and business people want hi-fi music, they can get it from local sources where they are.

In fact, satellite broadcasting will not compete with SW technology for a very long time. (Eilish Pearce suggests at least 10 years.) The travelling individual is not in a position to mount a fixed directional device. A signal strength from a satellite, such as not to require a directional receiver, is a long way in the future. Short-wave, on the other hand, is a mature technology, with well-tried and ow-cost hardware.

I have adapted my pocket receiver to run in the car. When travelling to Limerick or Galway I can get English-language programmes from all European countries (major and minor), from the US, the USSR, China, Australia. There is a thriving world communications culture out there. I aspire to get the German special-purpose car SW radio, but no-one here imports it, because (as yet) there is no demand.

Contemporary SW Audiences

The contemporary audiences for an REWS would be:

(a) Recent emigrants, who need to keep in touch, possibly with a view to timing their return, or picking up opportunities for returning, with skills acquired abroad. Older, long-term emigrants, with views coloured by the politics of the situation when they left, would perhaps welcome the opportunity for an ongoing update service. This is particularly relevant to the developing situation in the North, and the need to develop a politics for a peaceful all-Ireland settlement, taking up the positive opportunities presented under the Anglo-Irish Agreement, in the context of the EC Regional and Structural Programmes.

(b) Expatriate workers, usually in 3rd-world countries, working in relative isolation, in need of reassurance that their country cares about them, and indeed is proud of their work. (This is an important aspect of the Devco and Hedco work).

(c) Business travellers abroad, whose occasional long-distance phone-calls to head office are unlikely to give much background information on the developing situation in the country at large, such as is normally obtained from news-bulletins.

(d) Listeners to English-language programmes whose motivation is to improve their English, in the context of the emergence of English as the main world language of business, science and technology. This is probably the main motivation for the English-language broadcasting from the world radio services of the European minor-language countries.

This latter type of European business person would normally drive a car, and have a car radio. There is on the market, again in Germany, a band-spread SW car radio converter, which is mass-produced; it can be installed so as to adapt to an existing car radio, using the existing medium-waveband as a first heterodyne stage.

At least some of the people who constitute this potential audience for an RE World Service are likely to be business decision-makers; the very type of people on whom it is Irish government policy to attempt to project a positive Irish image.

Yet when such people attempt to brush up their English while at the wheel, their principal channel is likely to be the BBC World Service, which projects a view of Ireland totally dominated by the 'troubles in the North'. It is not surprising therefore that the image of Ireland held by informed Europeans is negative, dominated by violence.

This view will be confirmed by expatriate Irish who have worked abroad, particularly in the Middle East; one such, known to the writer, has reported receiving sympathy from a Lebanese, regarding the danger of going home to Ireland on vacation! The present writer has on several occasions been eating in restaurants in France, and when identified by the waiter as Irish in casual conversation, the reaction of the latter was 'Irish: bang bang!'

If however there were an RE world service, everyone travelling on the continent on business could equip themselves with their pocket short-wave set, or SW car radio, and keep in touch with what was going on at home in their absence, without having to depend on the slanted versions of selected events that the BBC World Service occasionally condescends to give.

Our embassies abroad, and our development co-operation missions, would be kept in touch. Our emigrant communities and their media would be rescued from domination by nostalgia and brought up to date.

Cost Estimates

The 1985 budget came to 15M swiss francs; some 130 staff are employed and broadcasts are made in 7 languages. There are 12 transmitters in 5 locations, ranging in power from 100 kW to 500 kW.

An adequate Irish service devoted to the needs of our expatriates, and to contributing something to the national image-building necessary for an exporting nation, could probably be done for about a fifth of this amount. The cost-effectiveness of the project could perhaps be assessed in relation to the promotional budgets of bodies such as the IDA and CTT.

Many of the programmes could be edited and rescheduled from existing RE material. It would be appropriate to de-parochialise the news service and have some input from the Department of Foreign Affairs. It need not be a de-luxe high-cost operation.

Eilish Pearse from RTE suggests a capital cost of the order of £10M, and a running cost of from £0.5M to £1.5M, depending on the amount of special-purpose programming.

The 1989 Green Party Manifesto

In this context I got hold of an ASCII version of the 1989 Green Manifesto, which was some 90 Kbytes in length, thus deserving in this context a separate file. It is entitled the 'July 1989 Political Manifesto of the Irish Green Party (Comhaontas Glas)'. I uploaded it to the GreenNet conferencing system, in view of the interest expressed through GreenNet from Green Parties elsewhere.

Reading it critically in the light of my own experience, and that of my father, I found a very high degree of empathy, while being aware of its weakness in addressing the issue of ownership of productive resources. It does however suggest an approach to co-operative ownership via legislation which could perhaps be developed to the extent necessary for the necessary revolutionary transformation of contemporary capitalism. It certainly sets a challenging agenda for the next decade.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 1999