Who Fears To Speak Of Ireland?

Foreword from Y Seren Goch

The following article was written by a Welsh comrade who lived for many years in Ireland and interacted deeply with the Irish Socialist Republican cause. The Welsh Underground Network and our Welsh Socialist Republican movement would like to extend our solidarity to the Irish Socialist Republican cause and in particular the Connolly Youth Movement – who have been incredibly generous in their support of our movement over the years, sharing vital knowledge and exchanging ideas with us.

The bravery of the volunteers of 1916 comes to the front of our minds each year, and we think of the struggle that they undertook and the struggle we undertake. In particular, we think of James Connolly, whose writing and practice on national liberation, workers’ struggle and anti-imperialist struggle would be mirrored in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Had the Easter Rising succeeded, had Connolly not been butchered by the British forces, his titanic contributions to the global struggle would be remembered directly alongside Lenin.

As always with revolutionary movements that end in defeat, it is often more palatable to uphold the line of thought of those defeated than those who were victorious – the chaotic and bloody nature of revolutions will turn the stomachs of many erstwhile well-meaning ‘leftists’, and this is true of the Easter Rising and of Connolly. To this, we say that the Easter Rising and the Russian Revolution are two parts of the same struggle, we cannot take one without the other, we cannot uphold one without the other.

Who Fears to Speak of Ireland?

One hundred and eight years ago, a small number of committed, brave, but ultimately doomed volunteers struck another blow of many in the protracted struggle for Irish freedom. While acts of anticolonial resistance were nothing new to Ireland, the rebellion of Easter 1916 was to provide the basis for the formation of the Irish Republic established three years later.  This republic would be betrayed in a few short years, giving way to the collaborationist comprador administration in Leinster House, along with the directly occupied statelet in north-east Ulster. 

However, in its brief period of existence, the Irish Republic enshrined in its democratic programme a model for a truly democratic, sovereign republic. A state which claimed sovereignty not only over the land of the nation, but over all the wealth and wealth-producing processes of that nation. A notion that was far too threatening to the profiteers of Ireland’s subjugation to be allowed to continue to exist. 

The Republic was smothered in its infancy not by British troops, but by a traitorous faction of the nationalist movement, a pattern that would repeat itself (first as tragedy, then as farce) a little under eight decades later. In the century since the Easter Rising, while the dynamics of Ireland’s exploitation have shifted, the primary beneficiaries of this exploitation have remained the same. The capital-exporting bourgeois class continue, through the triple-lock of imperialism and the foreign military presence in the six and twenty-six county states, to ensure Ireland continues to provide underpaid, highly-educated labour and cheap agricultural produce to the imperial core. 

The nominal independence of the twenty-six county free-state masks a continued subjugation of the productive forces in “the republic” to competing factions of the international capitalist class based in London, Brussels and Washington D.C. The Good Friday Agreement, through which the previously revolutionary Provisional Sinn Féin solidified their comprador character and accepted the position of colonial government in Belfast on behalf of the British, has provided a low-risk, low-cost investment opportunity for international finance organisations like Citibank and Deloitte. 

The price of this ‘freedom’ has been continued discriminatory policing practices and the state support of more than twelve-thousand unionist paramilitaries. While the coordinated revolutionary movement in Ireland is in a more dormant state at present, sporadic republican resistance to the violent persecution of nationalists prove the words of Pádraig Pearse remarkably foresighted – “Ireland unfree will never be at peace”.

What can be said about conditions on the ground in Ireland has already been written in Forward, the journal of the Connolly Youth Movement. In particular, their assessment of Ireland since the Easter Rising (and scathing condemnation of those comprador forces that use the name of Easter Week cynically) is especially valuable analysis.¹ Input that is conspicuously absent however, is that of the British left. This lack of attention on Irish affairs is nothing new of course. Very rarely have left-wing organisations in Britain cared to cast their gaze across the Irish Sea. If they had, the relationship between the continued exploitation of Ireland and their own state’s vast wealth may have become clear. On the rare occasion when organisations on the left in Britain do dare consider the Irish question, it is almost always in order to voice support for the comprador “nationalist” movement as the sole route to constitutional change, and their analysis is consistently done in a vacuum. 

From the perspective of these organisations and activities, the occupation of the twenty-six counties ended with the establishment of the free-state and the injustice of partition ended with the Good Friday Agreement. Little thought is given to why the British government has passed a law effectively pardoning murders committed by their occupation forces in Ireland and their informers. Why would the fifteen year imprisonment of the Craigavon Two come to their attention? The fact that there is a region of their nation where it is legal for people to be imprisoned for life by juryless courts doesn’t require discussion. For the left in Britain, there has been a deafening silence on issues relating to Ireland that cannot be excused. For the socialist and anti-imperialist movements of a nation whose government is directly involved in the subjugation and exploitation of another to be silent on the matter is an abdication of responsibility. With notable exception, the British left have abdicated this responsibility.

Ireland is not an issue on which we, Welsh Socialist Republicans, will ever waiver. We understand the role that the occupation and exploitation of Ireland plays in sustaining the British state at home and international imperialism globally. We understand the role international capital plays both in exporting capital to Ireland to exploit its economic position, and in using Ireland as a base from which to exploit capital, solidifying the oppression of nations in the global south. We understand the role which British soldiers recruited from Wales play in ensuring the continued position of Ireland as partitioned, occupied and subjugated to the will of the capital-exporting bourgeois class. It is because we understand the relationship of Britain to Ireland, understand that the wealth of the British state comes in part from the exploitation of Ireland, and understand that the Welsh working class and the Irish working class’ common enemy, the imperialist class, would be substantially weakened by the re-establishment of the Irish Republic, that we Welsh Socialist Republicans stand in firm solidarity with those who are working to see to that aim. If Ireland unfree will never be at peace, then Ireland unfree will always have friends in Wales.