Part of the reason for the present debacle
I am going to argue that Green and Orange are incompatible, and that the traditional failure of Republican leaderships left and right to recognize this is part of the reason for the present debacle. If anyone says they are united in the local assembly, I would argue that Orange has triumphed over Green, and that what the Green stood for has disappeared. Only Republican socialist leaders such as Connolly and Costello were free of the illusion of their compatibility.
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The Irish national colour is green. It is the Green of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen. But the Republican flag is Green, White and Orange. Why this contradiction in colours? It reflects Republicanism's contradiction in its attitude to Irish loyalism. It was Thomas Davis who in 1848 put Orange in the "national colours". The Young Irelanders went to the revolutionary government in France, looking for money and arms. The French government was no longer revolutionary, and was afraid of provoking Queen Victoria. But they told the Republican delegation that as Republicans they must have a tricolour of the national colours. The Young Irelanders said that these were green and Orange. And so, instead of guns and money, they came back with a silk green, white and orange flag -- with tassels.
Loyalists are a Ku Klux Klan, with membership in the six counties at working-class level but also in the highest ranks of the law, police, civil service, farming and corporations. Until well into the 20th century Orange men (sic) dominated all 32 county Irish social and economic life, including the power of employment. That is why it would seem natural to Davis to name Orange as one of the national colours.
Davis completely romanticised the Orange order. In one of his poems he wrote "Great was the oath the Orangeman swore :... Orange, Orange, Green and Orange, Orange and Green will carry the day". He meant Republicans and Loyalists united in a national liberation struggle against England! His song was to be sung to the tune of The Protestant Boys (Lillybulero). Thus Davis confused the Irish Protestant patriots who resisted the Act of Union with the bully boys who organised to crush the very movement Davis belonged to. As well say "NAACP and KKK will carry the day!"
I would argue that part of the reason for the present debacle lies in that Republican attitude to loyalists, which is reflected in the colours of the Republican tricolour. By the way, I use the term "loyalists" as it was used during the American war of independence, to refer to pro-imperialists opposed to the national liberation struggle. There are other Irish people who are pro-imperialists opposed to the national liberation struggle, but for our purposes I confine the term to those in the Orange tradition. I am not referring just to so-called paramilitaries, whom I would call death squads, like the Contras, and would compare to the Ku Klux Klan. For me the paramilitaries were the RUC, an official adjunct to the British army.
In the term "loyalists" (loyal to the Imperial Crown etc) I include Unionists, including Paisley's voters. Their leaders were already seen in their unity in the UDA's headquarters Hawthornden House, where all Unionist politicians and paramilitaries met and plotted murder each day. They bore out the words of Basil Brooke at a dinner in Stormont in 1933: "Some people have told me that we need fascism. We have the Orange order. We have the B-Specials. What need have we of fascism?"
James Connolly saw the socialist struggle as a democratic struggle against imperialism, so when he came across examples, as he did frequently among the Republicans of his day, of the belief in an alliance of green and Orange against the British, his response in his working-class paper The Worker's Republic was "Greater claptrap was never heard" -- and many other furious things expressing righteous indignation and urgency. They can be found in the Cork Workers Club's Ireland Upon the Dissecting Table: James Connolly's Writings on Ulster and Partition, a collection of all but censored statements by Connolly, which has itself been all but censored. At that time the loyalists had no second thoughts about being Irish. The song Croppies Lie Down begins "Ye loyal sons of Erin... " Part of partition's carnival of reaction is their refusal now to recognize themselves as Irish. Some of us acquiesce in accepting the loyalists' claim to be "part of the British working-class".
Hero-worship of Orangemen can be found in many issues of Dublin-produced An Phoblacht around 1975. On the back pages there were large photographs of members of loyalist murder squads, with captions such as "Heirs of the 1798 radical tradition" in wilful denial of the transparent fact that they were heirs of the Orange tradition which was created to destroy the radical tradition.
Loyalists are referred to en masse as our misguided fellow countrymen, as though the most salient point about them was that in their travels they had taken a wrong turning. I have heard senior Republicans affirm forcefully that they would never fight their fellow countrymen, forgetting that they had already fought the official Republicans, and seemed ready to fight anyone who resisted the peace process in arms.
The former Republican Anthony McIntyre called a leader of those paramilitaries who presided over the Holy Cross outrage "a liberation theologian". That party was invited to meetings in Scotland to contribute to the formation of a socialist movement, which could only happen because they had been placed on a pedestal by Republicans.
The imperialists use the empiricist term "conflict" as a featureless blanket term to hide deeper essential realities, such as oppression and liberation, which produce the symptoms of conflict. Among themselves the imperialists refer to it all as "disturbances" (of their peace).
The media call it sectarian conflict. But religious sectarianism is properly speaking a dispute between rival Protestant sects over which has the road to salvation. Republicans have never seen the struggle as about religious salvation, therefore on their part there was nothing sectarian. It is the loyalists who see the connection with England as a sectarian goal, as is made clear by the aim of the Orange Order -- the Protestant succession. A gable painting I saw in the 60s said "The secret of England's greatness is the open Bible".
The Republican goal has for two centuries been liberation from Britain and an independent Irish republic. How has the anti-imperialist struggle degenerated into consensual bargaining about identity politics in the six counties -- with the inevitable outcome, given the power structure, the rule of this part of the UK by Ian Paisley DD (Bob Jones University)? Why is Elizabeth still our Queen and head of our established church? Why is the union Jack our national flag?
Part of the answer is the attitude of the Republicans to the loyalists, which is a schizoid oscillation -- a wishful-thinking love-in fantasy of fellow-Irish solidarity alternates with realistic fear. These two strands are expressed in the "Principle of consent", which is outrageously one-sided. It amounts to giving the Unionists whatever they want -- and that happens to be the union. This position is obviously inconsistent with the essential Irish republican attitude to British imperialism. Connolly saw this because he was a socialist -- and anti-imperialist.
Connolly's working-class activist experience and his attitude to the class and national questions left no room for Orangeism. For Connolly, as for Marx, concern for the Irish working class would inevitably lead to the struggle for national liberation as part of the international struggle against imperialism. He recognized the division of the Irish working class. I remember a very successful strike of lorry drivers which was broken when loyalists found that the leader was a Sinn Feiner -- he also had to leave his job. The harsh reality of the Protestant community's violent pro-imperialism may force retreat, but it does not justify dressing up a defeat like that Sinn Feiner's as respect for the Orange tradition -- thus abandoning anti-imperialism.
Connolly said that we must not adhere slavishly to everything Wolfe Tone said. For me, one of Tone's sayings should be reversed. Whereas he said "My aim was to break the connection with England; my means was to unite Catholic Protestant and Dissenter in the common name of Irishmen", in this round of the struggle we should have said, "Our aim is to unite Catholic Protestant and Dissenter in the common name of Irishmen; our means is to break the connection with England". Ends and means should have been reversed.
George Gilmore alleged there was a nine word spoken military order from James Connolly as he turned and moved away from the hearer: "Not a shot to be fired in the North". An argument based on a likely miscommunication is a bit of a flimsy foundation to be the basis of politics in the North for a century after. The alleged order is not in keeping with what Connolly wrote, which should have more authority.
Arguing the commonality of interest between Republicans and Loyalists, Gilmore quoted the anti-English stance of a farm worker in Portadown (in the murder triangle) who pointed out that his boss had married a BloodyEnglishwoman. I suggest that should be spelled all one word, like damnyankee, which was an American southerner expression for a northerner who didn't understand the necessity of slavery. Perhaps the Portadown boss's English wife didn't understand the necessity of Orangeism.
Loyalists have always had their own politics independent of the British government, and it has always been anti-Catholic and anti-nationalist. It should have been dealt with as such by Republican politicians. Instead, the slightest criticism of loyalists has been attacked from all sides as an example of sectarian bigotry, in the way critics of Israel and Zionism have been viciously attacked as anti-semites by the Zionist Anti Defamation League. Britain has been the only actor which Republicans were allowed to criticise.
Desmond Greaves's long Introduction to Thomas Jackson's Ireland Her Own gives all the arguments for independence and sovereignty, but in the middle suddenly switches to arguing that on the strength of these arguments we see clearly the need to restrict the struggle to one for civil rights in the North. We must delay national liberation until there is democracy in the North, because any other approach would lead to sectarian conflict. Thus we must unite the working-class in the North, and only then seek national liberation.
This approach divided the class and national question, and outlawed the national question, which came to be called at best green Hibernian nationalism, at worst "green fascist spawn of Hitler". (There was of course no orange fascist spawn of Hitler). The civil rights movement was taken to be a class issue which could be universalised and cross the "sectarian" barrier. So NICRA issued a television appeal to people south of the border to stay away from the Newry demonstration (fourteen miles from the border) of the week after Bloody Sunday because "It is a Northern Ireland issue".
The Official Republicans' failed fantasy of a Catholic and Protestant working class alliance to resist a proposed Ring Road for Belfast was described by Seamus Costello as "Ring Road socialism", alluding to Connolly's description of William Walker's politics as "Gas and water socialism". They had no understanding of the inevitable pre-emptive violence of loyalists faced with any raising of the oppressed community's heads.
It was thought only the national question would enrage the loyalists. Hence Conor Cruise O'Brien talked of the danger of a bloodbath and compared the situation to the Congo, which had broken out into civil war when the Belgians left "without first ensuring stability". It was not recognized that the Belgians never left -- their secret agents stayed to promote Belgian interests and provoke the civil war and the assassination of Lumumba.
Once the civil rights demands were seen to be already enough to provoke a bloodbath, the Provisionals came to explicitly share O'Brien's analysis of the Congolese and Irish situations. Their position therefore implicitly relied on the British to preside over an assembly, which they wanted to go to, "for the better government of Northern Ireland". (During the campaign for election to that assembly Austen Currie remarked that the best known candidate was Mr Boycott).
Provisional PRO's were given the strictest orders that they were never to use the term United Ireland; they could use the terms United Ulster or Greater Ulster (they never did). (At this time also the word "revolutionary" was dropped, and replaced by "radical", a usage dear to the moneyed Quaker peace interest and the then federalist British Liberal party).
The leadership explicitly supported the UWC strike as showing the admirable resoluteness of loyalists, and they collaborated with the UWC, for instance in the distribution of petrol. There was no criticism of the atrocities of loyalism, even of the Dublin and Monaghan bombing, which was a part of the UWC strike as John Taylor, from his Hawthornden House base, made clear, saying on television prior to the bombing that appropriate action in support of the UWC strike would be taken in the Republic.
Was the military campaign, as it is sometimes alleged, "doomed militarism"? Against it certainly was the slow and gradual growth of repression and censorship especially in the South. But another factor was that all Republican leaderships, left and right, confined the issue to the six counties.
The first Provisional Republican leadership would not allow northern members to cross the border into the south to organise educational meetings, demonstrations, etc., and point out the 32 county nature of the issue. Dissent on this issue was not allowed. They pursued remedies for the situation among experts in "conflict resolution" with a six county orientation . Theoretically there was a figleaf of rhetoric about the nine counties of Ulster, but even there it was recognized -- with enthusiasm -- that "Unionists" would have a majority in government. They forgot what unionism means; with a majority, unionists would vote for the union -- to be part of the UK.
The Irish people has not spoken, they have been coerced into giving up their territorial rights. They now have to love not only the loyalist sinner, but the sin. Responding to the maudlin self-pity of loyalists who claimed that the Ulsterman was an endangered species, they have rushed to reassure them that they only want a union of hearts not of territory, a position in which the Republicans have adopted the sentimentality of John Hume. The loyalists have no such illusions. It was always a question not of what we will do with the loyalists but what the loyalists will do with us. They have treated the few demands of republicanism with the contempt that the Israelis have shown to the Oslo agreement.
What was needed was all Ireland unity in demanding the national territory. The giving away of articles 2 and 3 was surely something unprecedented in recent peacetime history -- but of course it was a war, and loyalism is on a permanent wartime footing. No party was demanding the return of the six counties to the whole Irish people. Leaders in the South used the power of the state to suppress that demand. But they could only do this because they leadership of both wings of the Republicans were also effectively suppressing it, among their members and among the population of the island. Their demand was so oriented to the wishes of the loyalists that it inevitably led to the stabilising and strengthening of the position of the six counties in the UK. Everybody except the loyalists set their sights at professional conflict resolution, in the course of which they gave up more and more to unyielding loyalism. This process of emboldening loyalism had great support from American governments, and that was welcomed by Republican leaders as "internationalising" the Irish question.
It wasn't always like that. In the earliest days a British Tory minister Quintin Hogg said the only trouble uniting the two parts of Ireland was that the English sixpenny piece did not work in Irish public telephones. Garret Fitzgerald talked about the responsibility Ireland would have to assume, to ensure a federal solution. He spoke of community police, a codename for employing Republicans as police in Republican areas. This was part of the ongoing conflict resolution.
This phase culminated in a joint presentation in the Europa Hotel, by Republican sympathiser Frank McManus and Ian Paisley's trusted colleague Desmond Boal, of a plan for a federal Ireland. There were to be local parliaments in Belfast and Dublin, with a central parliament in Dundalk. This event shows how low loyalist stock was at the time.
In polls taken at the time the plan was rejected by a majority. The loyalist community rejected it as a sell-out to Republicans. For nationalists a British presence seemed necessary for protection from loyalism. The plan did not have a guarantee that the Northern local government could behave responsibly and not at worst instigate ethnic cleansing pogroms. There were ominous statements by loyalist "paramilitaries", announcing that slackers (idle, feckless, unemployable people -- no doubt with large families, due to the ban on contraception) would not be tolerated in an independent Ulster (which is the name under which the conflict resolution solution, called federalism on the Falls, was sold on the Shankill).
The only political leader to oppose this process in the short time left to him was the Republican socialist Seamus Costello. A full treatment of his position would take too long for the present occasion, but the essence is in the document he presented to the Broad Front Conference. However, not everyone in the movement he founded has been as clear on the subject as Seamus. Residues of attitudes inherited from Official Sinn Fein persist. It has been said at Ard Comhairle level that Orangeism is no longer a landlord and business class culture, but a working-class culture and therefore to be respected.