11. The Good Friday Agreement¶
Core Argument¶
The Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998, is presented here not as a historic peace settlement but as a reactionary capitulation by the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin leadership, who abandoned the goal of a united Ireland after thirty years of armed struggle in exchange for ministerial portfolios at Stormont. The chapter argues that the Agreement was a defeat for the republican movement, forced by the impossibility of achieving Irish unification through individual terrorism against a British imperialism determined to crush the Provos. The core narrative traces the degeneration of Sinn Féin from the ‘Ourselves Alone’ militancy of the early 1970s to a reformist, parliamentary party desperate for negotiations, culminating in Gerry Adams calling for UN intervention in 1992 and the 1994 unconditional ceasefire. The text draws heavily on Ted Grant’s 1994 pamphlet Ireland After the Ceasefire, which predicted that no British withdrawal, no abolition of the Unionist veto, and no border disappearance would result from the ceasefire, and that any power-sharing assembly would be no answer to unemployment, housing, or sectarian division.
Key claims include that the Provisional IRA was a bourgeois right-wing tendency from its inception, founded on guns and money from the Blaney-Haughey wing of Fianna Fáil, and that its campaign deepened the sectarian divide, setting back unification for decades. The chapter asserts that British imperialism has no real economic interest in retaining the Six Counties—it is a financial drain and political embarrassment—but cannot disengage because of the Frankenstein monster of Protestant sectarianism it created. The repeated suspensions of Stormont and the fragility of the institutions are cited as evidence that the Agreement is unsound and will break down. The text polemicises fiercely against the British Left, particularly the Labour Left, the Communist Party, and the Socialist Workers Party, who first supported sending British troops to the North in 1969 and then uncritically cheered the IRA’s bombing campaign from safety. The Marxist tendency grouped around Militant is held up as the honourable exception, having opposed the troop deployment and moved an emergency resolution at the 1969 Labour Party conference demanding withdrawal and joint defence committees of Protestant and Catholic workers. The chapter concludes by invoking James Connolly’s insistence that the Irish question is a social question resolvable only through the united action of the working class, and offers the hand of the International Marxist Tendency to Irish workers and youth against capitalism and imperialism.