8. The Thirties¶
Core Argument¶
8. The Thirties
The 1930s witnessed an intensification of class struggle across Ireland and Britain in the wake of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. In Belfast, mass unemployment and appalling housing conditions afflicted both Catholic and Protestant workers, though the former endured additional layers of discrimination. The Revolutionary Workers Group organised joint marches of unemployed Catholics and Protestants against welfare cuts imposed by Unionist-controlled Poor Law Guardians. On 11 October 1932, 40,000 workers from across the North assembled in Queens Square. These events, the chapter argues, decisively refute claims that Protestant workers constitute a permanently reactionary mass; at decisive moments of class struggle, unity across the sectarian divide has emerged and can emerge again.
The Six County statelet was economically unviable, requiring constant British subsidies. The South fared worse, remaining an agrarian economy dependent on British capital, with massive emigration confirming James Connolly’s warnings about the impossibility of genuine independence under capitalism. By the 1960s, British imperialism prepared to hand over the North, pushing Prime Minister Terence O’Neill towards reforms and closer relations with the South. These moves sparked Unionist splits and a Loyalist backlash.
The Civil Rights movement, influenced by Marxism and the events of May 1968 in France, contained both Catholics and Protestants. Its leaders made a fatal error by failing to link democratic demands to a socialist programme, thereby failing to attract Protestant workers. Only a socialist platform promising increased jobs and housing could have undercut Paisleyite sectarianism. In August 1969, working-class residents of Derry’s Bogside fought off the RUC and Apprentice Boys for two days, with Bernadette Devlin leading the fighting. The Stalinist leadership of the Republican Movement was unprepared; having discarded weapons, they could not arm Catholic workers’ districts. Revolutionary youth scrawled ‘IRA = I ran away’. The text argues that an armed workers’ defence force, modelled on Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army, was needed. Fearing revolution, the Irish bourgeoisie split the IRA, funnelling money to right-wing, anti-communist elements to form the Provisional IRA in January 1970. Southern state intelligence, via ministers Blaney and Haughey, organised and supplied the Provisionals. Both British and Irish ruling classes conspired to crush social revolution. British troops entered Derry on 14 August and Belfast the next day, ostensibly to keep peace, but their real purpose was to destroy the revolutionary movement. The Provisionals, viciously anti-communist, grew rapidly by offering arms and a simple policy of ‘Get the British troops out’, cutting across the Civil Rights movement and exacerbating sectarianism. Local non-sectarian defence groups and joint Catholic-Protestant worker patrols had formed, but sectarian paramilitaries drove people from their homes to create separate enclaves.