The first “Brit” my mother encountered as a child was a squaddie. The introduction was abrupt; she had just landed in a heap on the bedroom floor, having been unceremoniously turfed out of bed during an early hour’s raid by the British Army. The shouts, English in accent, were unmistakable above the din of the house being ransacked.
This grim experience was typical for many children raised in working class, nationalist districts amidst The Troubles. Depending on how late the raids occurred or how long they lasted you might have gotten a day off school, my father half-fondly recalls.
Born in West Belfast at the onset of the conflict, my parents were still at school by the time of the 1981 Hunger Strike. Both remember the intense rioting and raging gun battles that swept the district following the death of Bobby Sands. A family friend – barely a teenager, an innocent bystander – was murdered by the British Army that same week. According to a recent interview, it was “amid the hunger strike chaos” that a teenage Micheál Martin first crossed the border.
Speaking last week to the Belfast Telegraph in his second term as Taoiseach, the Fianna Fáil leader offered a condescending overview of The Troubles, set out his conservative path to ‘reconciliation’, and kicked the can of Irish unity about 50 years down the road.
Martin was clearly at pains to present himself as the ‘mature statesman,’ and to offer up a rendering of the past that would not offend the Telegraph’s unionist, or middle-class readership. He claimed that a crash course in Northern politics – attended alongside the UUP’s McGimpsey brothers in 1989 – helped him form a “complex view” of the situation in the North. The Telegraph afforded the Taoiseach generous column space to trot out the egregious and well-worn narrative of a conflict waged over competing identities. Causal factors such as sectarian discrimination, imperialist interference, or the deep division wrought by partition itself seemingly did not figure at all.
On Irish unity the Fianna Fáil leader remains non-committal, even indifferent – providing a typically conservative, and mealy-mouthed response that evoked his proud engagement with the Orange Order. That Martin has no plans for a 2030 border poll – or any real interest in ending partition for that matter – should come as no surprise. Yet it must have given Belfast Telegraph NI Editor Sam McBride some satisfaction to hear the head of the Irish government put it on record.
The reason the Taoiseach is happy to do so is because Irish unity poses an existential threat to his party’s grip on power. The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin once wrote that socialist revolution may break out in a variety of circumstances, including in the context of “a referendum on the secession of an oppressed nation”. And while an imminent border poll in Ireland may not spark socialist revolution, it could certainly upend the regressive social and economic order ushered in by partition, and by now deeply embedded in the two rotten states on this island, North and South.
The Southern state is made in the image of the world’s ruling elites. A tax haven for major multinationals, its government rules in the interests of corporations and landlords. Its rulers boast of a new prosperity, but countless numbers of its citizens live in poverty: Tens of thousands are homeless, many cannot access basic healthcare, and emigration is again becoming the only option for young people. The southern state’s abject subservience to the US empire was on full display when Martin visited the White House last month, nodding along to Donald Trump’s accusations of the Irish state stealing American jobs and laughing away at his dismissal of the housing crisis.
After years of violence brought on by unionist misrule in the North, a power-sharing Executive representing the unionist and nationalist establishments now pits ordinary Catholics and Protestants against one another, while impoverishing both and decimating public services. The DUP and Sinn Féin play their part well, appearing to serve the interests of ‘their’ respective communities while implementing austerity at the behest of Westminster, and engaging in sectarian horse-trading.
This situation suits Micheál Martin and the southern elite, who pontificate about the need for greater ‘reconciliation’ before we can disturb this delicate equilibrium. For all the Taoiseach’s talk of reconciliation or ‘engagement’ with unionist elites, working class people should not and cannot be reconciled to reactionary institutions like the Orange Order. Martin may be happy to boast of rubbing shoulders with the likes of Orange Grand Secretary Mervyn Gibson, but this does nothing to improve the lot of working-class Protestants, never mind nationalists on the receiving end of Orange bigotry.
Likewise, workers should not be bought by the conservative agenda of nationalist elites – like those in Sinn Féin – who want to slash corporation tax to 15% or lower in their quest for a united Ireland. Of this broad method, James Connolly once warned that “you can only disarm their [the rich’s] hostility by assuring them that in a ‘free’ Ireland their privileges will not be interfered with”, adding that the “working class must emancipate itself, and in emancipating itself it must, perforce, free its country.”
To be clear, socialists are for reconciliation in its fullest sense. We aim to reconcile working class people of all backgrounds in struggle against governments who have failed them time and again on both sides of the border. The Taoiseach knows that such a challenge to the establishment view of partition and reconciliation would take aim at the century long-rule of the rotating, right-wing coalition of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael he now leads. And while he talks up his conservative vision of Ireland in 2075, our hope is that by then he and his cohorts will have no say in our affairs.
The precise blueprint for a united Ireland – insisted upon by the Taoiseach and others – is a red herring: one raised in the hope that ‘detailed policy discussions’ somewhere down the road will distract from practical task of building for a better future now, today. Such work must combine the daily struggles to uplift working people with the fight to end the misrule of elites in Dublin, Belfast and London. It must bring working class people together to demand housing for all, an All-Ireland NHS, greater workers’ rights, and a radical redistribution of wealth on this island.
In a headline-grabbing quote the Taoiseach told the Telegraph that he has long abandoned the seemingly asinine solution of “Brits out, 32 county Ireland”. Of course, the context has changed since the 1980s. However, the fact that the British government continues to play a nefarious role in our affairs is obvious to all except, perhaps, the Taoiseach and his ilk. The new Labour government under Keir Starmer pumps billions into arms manufacturing in Belfast, where missiles for Ukraine come at the expense of our crumbling NHS and education system.
Squaddies no longer tear homes apart in Belfast or the Bogside, but the quiet devastation wrought by British government economic policy remains. Years of British austerity have pushed public services to breaking point. The North has the worst health waiting lists in the UK, an acute and devastating housing crisis, and – as a post-conflict society – a large population of sick and disabled people soon to be pummelled by the Labour Party’s cuts to disability benefits. Successive Westminster administrations find a near-mirror-image in the Dáil, where the Taoiseach and his colleagues oversee a similar regime of cruelty.
Micheál Martin is lucky to have heard of shootings and bombings from a great distance, and to have formulated his ‘mature’ political perspective in the comfort of his living room in Cork. For people of my parents’ generation across the North, “Brits out” was a legitimate slogan in the context of daily oppressions suffered at the hands of the imperialist British state – routine harassment, shoot-to-kill, collusion and more. It had little to do with the identity of the young soldiers or other working-class people enlisted for these tasks.
Today, as ever, left-wing campaigners for Irish unity must continue to raise anti-imperialist slogans alongside those of working-class solidarity against sectarianism and against the ruling class: Britain out of Ireland, workers out of poverty, and conservative hucksters like Micheál Martin out of government. Genuine peace and reconciliation depends on it.
