My best information about Northern Ireland has a definite Orange hue to it!
Whatever happened to Jack Craddock the police chief of Northern Ireland? Didn't Thatcher bounce him at first opportunity. Is he still alive? From what I could gather he wanted even handed justice in Northern Ireland in the '70s.
Here is one you can tell your pals, my definition of an Irish Socialist: He is the fellow who wants to give everybody, a badge, a gun, a fire hose, and, put them on the city payroll.
Btw, what kind of a socialist organization is the Red Hand. Do they want to nationalize the banks?
Your email pal,
Tom L.
Jim heartfield wrote:
> In message <368D3111.FB57A4BB at lor.net>, Tom Lehman <TLEHMAN at lor.net>
> writes
>
> > As far a Arthur Scargill goes, I'm glad to
> >hear his gimmick is he was a "young communist".
>
> I wouldn't say 'gimmick'. The Communist Party was influential in the NUM
> in the fifties and sixties when Scargill was winning his spurs as a
> compensation agent for the Union. They organised the left minority in
> the Union. When Scargill won the presidency it was still the
> infrastructure that the CP had built up that was behind him (though
> later they stabbed him in the back because he was too close to the
> militants for their more bureaucratic tastes. CP members were the main
> sources for the anti-Scargill biography by New Labour hack Paul
> Routledge.).
>
> >Do you know him personally?
>
> No.
>
> >How many members does the NUM have?
> >
> Between 1983 and 1990 the mining workforce was reduced from 181 000 to
> 65 000, a reduction of 64%, through the pit closure programme. Before
> the strike, mining was a closed shop, so all of the 181 000 would have
> been members. During the 1984/5 strike a scab union the 'Union of
> Democratic Mineworkers' was set up, and British Coal was broken up and
> most of it privatised. According to Paul Routledge, in 1986 the NUM was
> 58 700 (less than a third of the pre-strike figure).
>
> In 1992 a further 30 000 miners were laid off, many of them UDM members.
> By my reckoning the maximum membership today could only be 35 000, but I
> would put the figure much, much lower. Routledge says that the union had
> by 1993 lost nearly ninety percent of its members.
>
> >I seem to remember seeing Bill Sirs name mentioned somewhere, maybe in
> >Steelabor. What's his gimmick? Is he still in charge. How many members do
> >the British steelworkers have.
>
> No, he's just the last leader of the steelworkers important enough to be
> remembered. More than the mineworkers, the steelworkers have been
> decimated.
>
> >The whole deal in Ireland is beyond me. The Sand's business was ugly. I was
> >told that Sands was a Protestant who wanted peace.
>
> Wendy is right, but it is probably more a case of chinese whispers than
> getting your chain pulled. Sands was a catholic born in the Protestant
> area of Rathcoole, and hounded out during the anti-catholic pogroms of
> the sixties.
>
> Sands was the leader of the Republican prisoners in the H-Blocks and
> started the second hunger strike in 1980 for the recognition of their
> status as political prisoners (a fact now acknowledged by the prisoner
> release scheme following the armistice). Fighting to free their country
> from British occupation - the source of the sectarian divide - the IRA
> were the only anti-sectarian force in Ireland at that time.
>
> The issue of Britain's occupation of Ireland was one that was important
> to the British working class. Substantial sections of the British
> working class were recruited from Ireland, as that country was reduced
> to an exporter of men and beef under the Crown. More importantly,
> conniving in the repression of the Irish it was unlikely that the
> British working class would be in much of a position to resist attacks
> on itself. But while there was considerable identification with Sands,
> the British workers remained generally in the grip of that petty
> nationalism that persuaded them to put 'the country''s interests before
> their own.
> --
> Jim heartfield