First Bobby Sands and then Owen Carron have been elected to Westminster as H Block/Armagh MPs. The campaign in support of the Irish political prisoners has mobilised broader support than any previous stage of the anti-imperialist struggle over the last ten years. It has left British and Irish politicians desperately searching for a mechanism to ensure Britain's continued domination of Ireland.
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey has been a leading figure in the anti-imperialist and socialist movement in Ireland for over 10 years. Despite a recent assassination attempt she remains a leading activist in the National H Block Committee. Penny Duggan spoke to her at the end of July about the new stage of the movement.
How does the anti-imperialist movement today compare with that in the late 1960s?
The number of people involved in both small local demonstrations and the more major demonstrations is quantitatively bigger. But I think you also have to look at it qualitatively — going back to the time when people like myself, and John McAnulty and Fergus O'Hare (members of Peoples Democracy recently elected to Belfast City Council) were the young militants, with all the responsible people breathing down our necks, telling us we were driving the thing down the wrong road. What we honestly didn't know was where we were going, what effect our actions were going to have on the next ten years in this country. I can only speak for myself; but if somebody had taken us to a meeting and said, look, the next four or five years are going to be Bloody Sunday, internment, moving on to people dying in prison, women and children being shot off the streets — then I think some of us would have said that it was a reactionary plot to scare us off the streets, and others would have said, right, we quit, don't tell us any more!
The significant difference is that we are still there but with twelve, thirteen years of hard-gained experience. Not simply gained in theoretical terms, gained out there on the streets, gained by paying very dearly for mistakes we made in the past. The greater number of the 'old vanguard', if you like, the old Republican core, is out there on the streets; and behind us is a whole layer of militant youth that knows what we don't know — as kids who go right down to 14 years of age, who go out there marching, knowing the history of the past ten years, knowing the risks they take. So the militancy, the determination, the experience is much greater than it was ten years ago.
I think that the gut level of political understanding because of all those things is just incomparably higher than it was ten years ago. For instance, one of the problems that we always ran into in the early days was that we daren't have said 'imperialism'. But now it is impossible to argue against the use of words like imperialism, it is virtually impossible in this country to red-bait.
There is a level of commitment to ending British rule in the lifetime of this generation that's much broader than it has ever been before. But there is not a clear political understanding as to how that should be done.
Our problem now is that we are attempting to build a movement and deploy a strategy in the length of time it takes a man to die. And the pressures in that situation are unbelievable.
Six prisoners are dead, and two more are dying, and two more will take their place, and so you get the totally understandable frustration of the vanguard of the youth, the Republican youth. Because after six deaths you're still arguing with and pushing and pressurising the Paddy Duffys (an SDLP councillor), because we have to take that level with us before we make the price of not giving in bigger than the price of giving in. We have got to either push them in behind us or expose them for what they are. You can't just say, right, we're tired of asking them, don't bother, leave them be. Or take the short cut of intimidating the whole thing.
That's the crisis we find ourselves in at the minute. Many of the people who've campaigned for political status and then in the broad movement for the prisoners' five demands since 1976, but are not politically clued up as to why exactly they are following this particular road, are at a stage when they're saying it doesn't work.
So I think our main task at the minute is to overlap on what we're doing with the basic political education of our supporters as to why we are doing it this way. That it's not enough to do it this way because Gerry Adams says so, or the leadership of Sinn Fein or the IRA says so, or because our backs are to the wall and we take help from wherever we can get it. That's not the right way, and that is the argument that we have to have. I think we can make the mistake [illegible] that we've got. What holds it together is the [illegible], what Thatcher is trying to do is not just to break the bodies of the prisoners, she is trying to break the heart of the whole resistance movement of this country. What that woman is actually doing is saying: 'I can watch every man, woman and child in Ireland die and it wouldn't cost me anything. How many can you watch die?' I think she really takes it down to that level, she really says to people in this country, 'how many people, what price can you pay?' And I think what we have to say is that we have no choice but to pay it, but that the price of what she is doing to us will in the end of the day be much higher than five demands for prison reform. Because what is happening is that while the movement is based on the five demands and winning support for the five demands, what is actually being raised is the true nature of Britain's role in this country, and where in particular the government of the Irish Republic fits in that relationship. And I think that that more than anything else explains the riot at the British Embassy in Dublin — which wasn't a riot, it was a battle. It was a battle between two sides in the country: those who back the prisoners, and those who refuse to back them and, by their protection of the embassy, backed the British government's policy in the eyes of the people. And I think that that will more and more become the state of play if the government of the Irish Republic does not make a move somewhere. They will be clearly identified by the mass of the people as a secondary target, to use the Republican phrase, because Westminster itself is remote, it's inaccessible, it's across the water. But if the Irish government is seen directly as playing the historic role of the Irishman doing the job of work for the absentee landlord, then the mass of the people will turn against the Irish government. And what will be at stake in this country will not simply be the external relationship with Britain in terms of imperialism, it will be the internal relationship, as to the social, political and economic organisation of this country. So in fact what Thatcher is doing is aiding and abetting that which she fears most. She is driving the whole struggle in this country into a position of questioning the role and authority of the Church, the role and authority of the Irish police, the Irish government, in fact the entire role of the state. And what many of us have always argued will be proved in effect: that the questions of national liberation and socialism are so closely intertwined here as to be inseparable one from the other.
The Labour Party in Britain has been having a discussion about policy on Ireland, and it's now come out and said it's in favour of a united Ireland. That's the beginning of a break in the bipartisan policy. Has that had any effect here?
Not in terms of the Labour Party. I think people here are more aware of the Troops Out Movement, and individual people like Ken Livingstone, Carol Turner who came over, Tony Benn. People are acutely aware of the division: Benn versus the obscenities of Concannon, Mason, Merlyn Rees, Hattersley. People know there's a major division in the Labour Party.
Some of us have been arguing for some time that we should take more seriously the question of the role of the British labour movement, and that we should be making a concerted effort, as we did in the South, to send speakers not simply to outdoor rallies — where all people want are a few rousing sentences to make them feel good.
What's needed is public indoor educational meetings. You've got to go for local Constituency Labour Parties, rank-and-file trade union people, go at areas where people can argue and ask the kind of questions that are annoying them — like what is the role of the British Army, and would there be a bloodbath if they pulled out, and why are the mad Irish not grateful for our peacekeeping efforts?
Those questions have to be rationally argued, and I think that we have to make a much more serious attempt to move in the British Labour Party, and, for example, to move in Wales and Scotland — I think that's particularly important.
We're not asking the British labour movement for a conscience commitment for the poor Irish. It's a political question for them. Some of us have argued for years that if they could not get the Irish question right it would be the destruction of their own party, because the time would come when it would come home: and if they couldn't get it right here, the chances of them getting it right when it came home were infinitely less true. And it's true: look at the whole spectacle of the Labour Party getting up in Parliament to congratulate Willie Whitelaw after the youth went out onto the streets in Britain.
They've never recognised that you're talking about two different problems. Our problem is how to assert our own democratic right to control our future without kicking up a fuss about it in every generation. There is no common solution to those two problems; and the problem with Benn and all those people is that they're still trying to find some middle ground between those two. It means they just don't understand what the whole thing's about. They may be well-meaning, but they have got to move a bit further and recognise the nature of their role.
And they've got to do more than talk about it. You know, we have heard lots of words from Tony Benn and very little action. I don't see him leading any of the international marches, I don't see him out asserting, for example, our right to the City Hall in Belfast, where he'd be most welcome to join the demonstration — and then get a taste of what the penalty is for asserting these democratic rights in this country. Then he might begin to see the reality of it. But right now he just wants to put the United Nations into do the same job. And whoever comes in to uphold the state will end up in the same position; because the problem is one of the state, not of the people who are upholding it.
You mentioned the link between national liberation and social liberation: the fact that the question of the Irish revolution as a whole is posed. Do you still believe in the necessity of building a vanguard workers party to lead that struggle?
It's one of those things you can't just quantify or say what would have been different — but in every crisis the biggest lack, the biggest vacuum that we feel is the non-existence of a vanguard workers party, a revolutionary party. And I think that the whole experience and process is towards building such a party.
In practical terms I think we have the same problems as everywhere else: at the one time suffering from the lack of a revolutionary party, and an over-abundance of organisations that think they are the revolutionary party and keep standing at the crossroads saying you're going the wrong way.
I see a whole series of practical problems. The biggest drawback is the history of organisations in this country, going right back throughout the whole struggle. Mostly a party has only been formed by that section which was about to sell us out. The first step in the sell-out was always to form a party. And I think that that comes from long peasant rather than industrial workers' struggle, without a history of democratic organisation.
I think one of the big differences between the National H Block campaign and the civil rights campaign was that the Civil Rights Association, the civil rights movement did not have a solid base of the kind that's been built throughout this campaign.
The local committee in this town is elected, we have a public meeting once a week — that's of all the supporters in a large hall — and we have a steering committee of eight people who keep this office and the work ticking over. We also have a picket and public meeting on the street every night. Essentially it is the broad support in the town which is the committee, [which] controls the situation, and they have a steering committee. Most other towns in the area follow that model. They send delegates to the [illegible] coordinating committee. We have about thirty committees in the county, and the county committee meets once a week, and it in turn sends delegates to the Six Counties to the Northern committee, and maintains that contact through with the National Committee.
I think that this is building in an organisational consciousness, which hitherto [was] done outside the Republican movement and certain small organisations.
I think in fairness, to talk about small organisations — I'm not a member of the Peoples Democracy, but that's been a significant difference in the whole campaign. Numerically the PD is not any bigger than some of the other organisations on the left. Yet the PD's attitude, role and work in the broad movement have not simply been shown in the tangible result of two members of the PD being elected by the mass movement to Belfast City Council, three members of the PD being on the National Committee. It's that the ability of the PD to argue the left perspective, with confidence, with credibility in the mass movement far outweighs its actual numerical strength. And that's a question of political credentials being forged in the battle. The vast majority of the other left-wing organisations stand on the sidelines and pontificate on our weakness in their newspapers, but they are not in fact by and large part of the mass movement. And since I personally believe that the revolutionary party is forged in the struggle, not formulated in the pub or the room above the pub, the emergence of the revolutionary party I believe will come out of that axis of the relationship between PD, the Republican movement, and the mass movement.
[illegible — question, would it be possible to come to an overall tactical, political line between the Republican movement and the PD?]
Oh yes. [illegible] makes for very interesting National Committee meetings.
[illegible — question]
Yes, I think that's a problem we have always had at every level.
I think what's important is what is arrived at. The imposition of one tactic over another isn't what matters. I think that one of the things we have learned to do is to be prepared to accept that somebody's going to do the thing the wrong way. It's something you couldn't do even five years ago — to go into a meeting and argue your tactics, and the political basis of them, and why you believe that it's better, and to lose that argument, but to recognise the difference between what is a tactical argument and what is a principle beyond shifting. And to stay with it and say, well alright, the majority have said [illegible] do it that [illegible] way, we do it, and we'll [illegible] both ways: to say at the end of it, well, we did it that way, [illegible] Fergus's way, for example, it might have been [illegible].
And I think we have been able on a number of occasions to [illegible]. One such instance, I think, is that the majority of the National Committee do recognise that it was a gross tactical error not to have taken on the Northern council elections on a mass scale and fought them. PD and myself argued for doing that, and we were defeated in the argument. So the PD accepted that, but under the auspices of its own organisation put two of its own members up and proved that they were right. The IRSP did the same; they had two members elected.
As I say, that way the political credibility of ideas and tactics are imprinted democratically in the mass movement, and it means that when we're arguing it the next time, although the PD is numerically much weaker than Sinn Fein, if its experience in battle has been that it chalks up more right roads, then more people say, right, these people here know what they're talking about.
It's that dynamic process that's at work, and equally there are times when it works the other way — when the Provos have tactically been right when I have disagreed with them. And that may seem small, but it is a major step forward in this country for people to be able to stay on the same committee having disagreed over tactics and not got their own way.
Even the last ten years are absolutely littered with defunct organisations that came and went on that basis. This is the longest lasting broad front that we have had.