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Gerry
Adams in a recent speech at the Balmoral Hotel, on
21st October 2003, not for the first time compares
the Good Friday Agreement with a long journey. However
these days he seems to be envisaging the final destination
as being a place somewhere different to that which
was intended, by the thousands of Republicans who
have participated with Adams on this journey over
the last thirty odd years, in this phase of the historic
struggle for Irish freedom from the English State.
In
his speech Adams said, "Some years ago I compared
all this [the GFA] to a journey. For us the destination
is an Irish republic." If he means this literally,
then many will say “you're on your own on this
part of the journey, for we have seen the 'Irish Republic'
as envisaged by the likes of Michael Collins and the
founders of the Free State.…and administered
by the heirs of both Collins and De Valera.”
What
the likes of them call the Irish Republic is light
years away from that envisaged by Connolly, Mellows
and the vast majority of Republican Socialists. It
is a land inhabited by loan sharks, corrupt politicians
and sleazy business people who feed off each other
and leech off those who are economically less well
off. The former living a life of plenty at the latter's
expense. Few Republicans risked their lives, suffered
and sacrificed simply so that all the people of the
Island of Ireland could be citizens of such a state
and thus eligible for similar exploitation by Irish
gombeen men and women. No, the place the majority
of Republicans, along with their supporter's who have
equally struggled and sacrificed over the years, envisaged
is a far better place than what Adams seems willing
to settle for these days. It is called a Democratic
Socialist Republic of Ireland.
Words
are important in politics, the more so for a cautious
conservative politician like Gerry Adams. This speech
would have been read over and again by he and his
advisors. Every i and t would have been carefully
dotted and crossed and then again double checked.
The fact that the word socialist appears nowhere in
the speech, despite a Socialist Republic being to
date part of Sinn Fein's objectives in its constitution
is not some sort of oversight let alone a mistake.
Adams
and his clique—for all their abilities that is
what this SF leadership group have become—were
informing via this speech their new found friends
in the worlds of corporate business and politics north,
south and overseas, plus their associates within the
Catholic Church that they have nothing to fear from
Sinn Fein. “We intend conducting any future political
campaigns by the rules laid down by you. Big business
has nothing to fear from SF, socialism may from time
to time pass their lips and occasionally appear in
SF's press. But like all reformist party's this should
be seen as nothing more than bread and circuses for
the membership. In reality we are responsibly bourgeois
politicians. Your wealth is safe in our hands.”
Now
no one expects Sinn Fein to wear its socialism on
its sleeve like some Trotskyist sect, who unless one
of the old beards of socialist theory gave their approval
in one of their theoretical works, decades if not
centuries before for any new turn in party policy,
then it cannot possibly be pursued as it would be
traitorous to the working classes. But in a speech
of such importance as this in which Adams himself
points out the importance of having a route map to
where Irish republicans wish to arrive at, the exclusion
of the word socialist is about as clear a statement
of Sinn Fein's future political intent as one could
ask for.
Many
socialist members of the Provisional Republican Movement
have sat back these last ten years and at important
moments kept their thoughts to themselves for one
reason. Although often appalled at the direction the
Adams clique has been taking the Movement in, they
understand that this stage of the armed struggle is
over. The Adams leadership to their credit understood
this before many and as such there has been no alternative
to them; if the movement is to remain united, thus
emerging from the traumatic events of the last thirty
years as a united movement capable of going forward
to a new phase of the struggle for a United Socialist
Ireland.
Whether
they were right or wrong in this analysis is not for
me; what I would suggest that the time has now been
reached for socialist republicans to assert themselves.
To say openly that it is not acceptable for Sinn Fein
Ministers and Councillors to implement policies that
are detrimental to the mass of the Irish people. Policies
such as the Irish equivalent of Public Private Initiatives
which can in the long run only but weaken Ireland's
public schools and hospitals. It should not be overlooked
that policies like this were originally shipped across
the Irish sea to benefit UK and US and EU multi national
corporations. It is high time the word Socialism is
not something with which the leadership rallies the
party faithful, in much the same way Labour Parties
sing the Red Flag at the end of meetings the world
over, only for it to be tightly packed into delegates'
ruck sacks and forgotten about until the following
year.
Ireland
is desperate for a party that represents its dispossessed,
whether they live in rural or urban parts of the Island.
People within Ireland and around the world placed
their hopes in Sinn Fein emerging as such a party
and in the process becoming a beacon for socialism
and democratic accountability. A party whose leadership,
membership and supporters come from the same constituency,
the wretched of the earth. Such a party if it is to
succeed in its task of building a new Ireland can
only be a broad based Socialist Party. Is it not time
the thousands of socialist Republicans within the
ranks of the Republican Movement redraw the flawed
route map the party leadership has been charting its
way by and told the Clique around Gerry Adams that
they have taken a wrong turning and they must get
back on the road, straight and clear as previously
charted by Connolly, Mellows, Sands and the hundreds
of thousands who have invested in the day when a United
Socialist Irish Republic is born?
The
alternative is to forget about socialism as the Adams
clique seem to wish and let them go unchallenged.
Sinn Fein or whatever it ends up calling itself (history
teaches us that such ex Republican parties always
change their names, as to keep the old one is a living
reminder of their betrayals) will become one of many
such parties in the South and eventually part of the
exploitative establishment in the North with a united
socialist Republic being a distant memory.
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