FRFI 152 December 1999 / January 2000
After over ten weeks of the Mitchell Review, Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) finally agreed on a process that would lead to the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement. Central to this was the acceptance by Sinn Fein that ‘decommissioning is an essential part of the peace process’.
In crossing this Rubicon, Sinn Fein and the Republican movement are seen to pose no real threat to the interests of British imperialism in the Six Counties. The only potential opposition to the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement came from a section of the Ulster Unionist Party led by its deputy leader John Taylor. As a gesture to this section of Unionism – and an indication of the contempt Labour has for the nationalist working class – on 24 November the RUC was awarded the George Cross for ‘gallantry’. Part of the citation described the RUC as ‘a recognised world-class police service that has given professional and impartial service to all the people of Northern Ireland since its inception’!
Let us remind ourselves of that gallant, professional and impartial service. This is the same police force who:
- batoned Civil Rights demonstrators off the streets in the 1960s;
- killed and maimed nationalists with plastic bullets;
- colluded with fascist loyalist groups in murder and the terrorising of the nationalist community;
- colluded in the murder of Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson
- sat and watched as a loyalist mob kicked Robert Hamill to death in Portadown.
As Peter Mandelson said of the award, ‘it is right, it is deserved’.
On 16 November, at the end of the Mitchell Review, Sinn Fein spelled out its position:
‘We are totally opposed to any use of force or threat of force by others for any political purpose…In the executive the two Sinn Fein ministers will make and honour the pledge of office which includes a commitment to nonviolence and exclusively peaceful and democratic means…We reiterate our total commitment to doing everything in our power to maintain the peace process and to removing the gun forever from the politics of our country’.
This was followed the next day by a statement from the IRA which acknowledged ‘the leadership given by Sinn Fein throughout this process’. Following the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, ‘the IRA leadership will appoint a representative to enter into discussions with General John de Chastelain and the International Commission on Decommissioning’.
George Mitchell then spelled out the sequence of events that would lead to the implementation of the Agreement and the beginning of the decommissioning process in his concluding statement: ‘Devolution should take effect, then the executive should meet, and then the paramilitary groups should appoint their authorised representatives all on the same day, in that order’.
The decision by Trimble and the UUP negotiating team to accept this sequence of events was finally ratified by the Ulster Unionist Council on 27 November. It marks a retreat from their long-held position of no seats on the executive before decommissioning, and has opened up major disagreements within the UUP. But the Unionist ‘retreat’ is a reflection of the confidence imperialism has that Sinn Fein is no longer a threat. This reality, reflected in cosy meals and chats in the US embassy in London during the review, was summed up by a comment from one of Trimble’s advisers: ‘Do you really think that, having hung out in the White House and dined in the best restaurants, they will be going back to safe houses and fry-ups?’
Sinn Fein is committed to the Good Friday Agreement and all it entails: devolution, meaning the acceptance of partition; seats on the Executive, meaning being part of a government that will be using the RUC (or ‘Northern Ireland Police Service’) to maintain partition and attack the nationalist working class; decommissioning, meaning the delegitimising of the armed struggle and the Rubicon that, once crossed, leaves Sinn Fein as no more than a radical version of Fianna Fail.
As David Ervine of the Progressive Unionist Party put it, ‘I am listening with interest to Gerry Adams and the Republican movement being prepared to copper-fasten British rule in Northern Ireland, indeed to help administer British rule in Northern Ireland’.
During the Mitchell Review, Sinn Fein has had assistance from imperialist forces in dealing with any challenges. In the Twenty Six Counties the Irish police and Special Branch arrested ten dissident Republicans training in an underground firing range. Guns and ammunition were also seized. In the Six Counties the RUC launched an operation which they claimed had smashed the Orange Volunteers and Red Hand Defenders. Arrests and the seizure of pipe-bombs occurred in Belfast and Lurgan, where a vicious campaign against the nationalist community has been taking place. An Orange Hall in Stoneyford, Co Antrim was raided, and military intelligence documents containing details of 300 Republicans recovered. Six arrests were made and it was reported that the RUC had an undercover unit of 50 officers working on the operation.
For imperialism, organised opposition to the Good Friday Agreement, whether from dissident Republicans or fascist loyalist terror groups, has to be broken. And in doing so it strengthens the hand of the pro-agreement parties, in particular Sinn Fein. The Agreement offers the hope of stability for big business and the Unionist and nationalist middle class. As Gerry Adams put it in classical new-management-speak:
‘The reason that Sinn Fein has stretched ourselves and our constituency is because we have always had our eyes fixed firmly on the prize. We want a New Ireland in which all the people of this island will be cherished equally and in which everyone will be politically, socially and economically empowered.’
The reality for the nationalist working class is that there is no indication that the agreement will fundamentally change their daily lives. In the same issue of An Phoblacht that reported the breakthrough of the Mitchell Review, loyalist pipe-bomb attacks were reported in north Belfast and in Belfast’s Lower Ormeau Road. In Derry petrol-bomb attacks were made on a Catholic church and the home of a Catholic pensioner who lived in a predominately Loyalist area. In South Tyrone the RUC and British army are engaged in a campaign of harassment and intimidation of the nationalist community, with the setting up of random roadblocks.
As we wrote in FRFI in August 1994 following the announcement of the IRA ceasefire: ‘The struggle is not over. The economic, political and social problems which keep forcing the national struggle onto the political agenda still remain. The Six Counties is a sectarian statelet. British imperialism has not left Ireland…The nationalist working class faces massive economic deprivation and discrimination, with unemployment levels more than twice those of the loyalist working class. Should the Sinn Fein leadership be drawn into any “New Ireland” administration, in the Six Counties or Twenty Six Counties, and have conferred upon it the status of privileged bourgeois parliamentarians, it will find itself in conflict with the nationalist working class – those people of no property who have always been the bedrock of the anti-imperialist struggle’. (FRFI 121 Oct/Nov 1994)
