The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Workers’ Party Easter Oration 2011 May 2, 2011

This should have gone up during the week, but better late than never.

Comrades and Friends,

We gather here today to commemorate the 95th anniversary of the Easter Rising, and to celebrate the vision of an independent, democratic, progressive Republic that motivated the men and women of the Irish Volunteers, Cumann na mBan and the Irish Citizen Army in 1916. We remember too the lives of all those who for two centuries have struggled, fought, and so often died for that same aim. We especially remember our comrades who gave their lives in recent decades. However, our presence here today is not simply an act of commemoration. It is a statement about the present and the future even more than it is about the past. It is a political act. Our presence here today symbolises our ongoing commitment to the struggle to build a democratic, secular, socialist unitary state on our island – a Republic.

What do we mean when we talk about building a Republic? We do not simply mean a state without the institutions of monarchy. We mean a state where, in the words of Padraig Pearse, “the people will be lord and master”. In other words, a country where government is run by, and in the interests of, the plain people of Ireland. A government of and for the working class. But a republic is about much more than who controls the state, and republicanism is a social as much as a political philosophy. The revolutionary republican tradition to which The Workers’ Party belongs originated in the eighteenth century in the era of the American and French Revolutions. Republicanism meant replacing the government of a privileged few by a government of the many. It meant replacing a society of privilege with civic equality. These were social as well as political revolutions. The republic we now seek to build is a republic where economic power is in the hands of the working people who actually create the wealth, and not in the hands of a small percentage of bankers, property speculators, industrial and commercial capitalists, landowners and crooked politicians. It is a society of equals, where a person’s gender, colour, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, disabilities or background no longer matters. Society – in education, in the media, in healthcare and elsewhere – will reflect the values of liberty, equality and fraternity, and not the needs and the greed of capitalism. This is the republic as we understand it: not just the absence of a monarch or simple territorial unity, but a truly free and equal society where capitalist exploitation has ended, where the economy functions in the interests of the working class, where sectarianism has been overcome, and where the working class holds political power.

It is clear that Ireland, north and south, is very far from being such a society. In both parts of our island, there is massive and structural inequality, a situation made worse during recent decades by Thatcher and her successors in the north, and Haughey and his successors in the south. Across Ireland, successive governments have followed the same policies, sacrificing public investment and public services; industrial planning and development; manufacturing; and productive and high-skilled jobs in favour of high finance; property speculation; low skilled, low paid jobs. They have used public money to provide subsidies for the multi-nationals, big businesses, banks, speculators, and the rich through tax cuts and privatisation. For example, in the south, half a billion euros a year are handed over to private landlords by government bodies for housing. Why is this money being put into the pockets of wealthy individuals rather than being used for the public good? This money would be better spent creating jobs through the building of sustainable and high quality public housing that would last for decades, but the ideology of capitalism and the corrupt links between the political establishment and speculators ensures this will not happen. We have seen a government in Dublin introduce a budget that punished the working class and the least well off in society – such as the unemployed and the disabled – while at the same time actually leaving the wealthiest in society better off. There is little reason to hope for much different from a Fine Gael-led government.

At the same time as it slashes and burns the public sector, the Tory-Lib Dem coalition speaks to us of the Big Society. What does this actually mean? It means taking duties that central and local government have been doing perfectly well and paying the private sector more money to do them less efficiently. Just this month, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive was forced to cancel the contracts of one of its private sub-contractors because of the poor quality of its work and overcharging. The Big Society is a con, the same old Thatcherite policies cloaked in the rhetoric of that contradiction in terms, compassionate conservatism.

But what of the Northern Ireland parties – can we expect more from them than from the coalition in London? Now, in the middle of an election campaign, they would certainly like us to believe so. They would like us to believe that they are no longer the same sectarian parties of the past; they would like us to believe that they have the policies to meet the needs of our people, to improve public services, to create a united society, to protect us from the cuts, and to create economic growth. They might as well expect us to believe in the Easter bunny.

The sectarian carve up of the spoils of government at Stormont has not fundamentally altered the nature of the big political parties. This was obvious from the so-called Programme for Cohesion, Sharing and Integration cooked up by the DUP and their partners in Provisional Sinn Féin. Here was a strategy supposedly designed to overcome the problem of sectarianism that did not mention reconciliation once. Rather than address the issue of creating a common identity and a common sense of citizenship among our people in Northern Ireland, its authors sought to consolidate the concept of separate but equal, to entrench the sectarian division. Just as in 1798 or 1916, the struggle against sectarianism remains at the forefront of the revolutionary struggle. Religion has no place in politics. We in the Workers’ Party adhere to James Connolly’s argument that socialism has no religion – it is simply human. Sectarianism has not gone away, and it is the duty of all republicans, all socialists, all progressives, and all democrats to fight it in all its manifestations. We cannot rely upon political parties and a political system dependent upon sectarianism to tackle sectarianism. It is time we moved to the democratic process – to the task of building a truly democratic Northern Ireland, one in which we move beyond sectarianism. Nor are we blind to the issue of religion in the south. We continue to push for the secularisation of the education system and the clearing out of the remnants of religious doctrine from state institutions and state-funded bodies in the Republic. In both states, a secular, integrated education system is an essential first step, but only a first step. We in the Workers’ Party are offering an alternative to the perverted sectarian politics of unionism and nationalism at this election.

The Executive’s budget plans for the next five years reveal the reality behind the talk of fighting cuts – the big parties’ strategy is one of privatisation and cuts, and an almost religious belief that economic salvation can be found by turning Northern Ireland into a tax haven for multi-national corporations, a Lichtenstein on the Lagan. We need only look at the south to see the truth – a cut in corporation tax is not the answer to our economic problems. Nothing can replace sustainable, high-skill, high-wage, productive jobs as the beating heart of a healthy economy. We have had enough of call centres and fly-by-night investors who pocket government grants then move elsewhere.

The state has the capacity to initiate real economic change. No-one who has witnessed governments worldwide save capitalism from itself in the last few years can seriously now question the economic power of the state. The Assembly parties wish to keep the state bound in the chains imposed on it by Thatcher, Regan and their descendants. The Workers’ Party wants to smash those chains, to revitalise the economy with the state’s power, and to put the levers of power to work for the working class, and not for the bourgeoisie. Our presence in these elections is a reminder that there is an alternative – socialism is the alternative. Between now and May 5th, the members and supporters of the Workers’ Party must concentrate our efforts on getting that simple message to as many people as possible.

The basic idea that lies at the heart of our politics, that lies at the bottom of our republicanism, our socialism, is very simple: People should control their own lives and be able to build a future that works best for the many, not for the few. That was the principle that motivated the revolutionary democrats in America, in France, and in the United Irishmen. It was not for nothing that Pearse called his last work before the Easter Rising The Sovereign People. Can the people of Ireland really say that we are sovereign, that we are masters of our own destiny today? In economic terms, it is clear that the answer is increasingly “No”. Too many important decisions continue to be made in London or Brussels. At one level, we need only look at our ports and airports to see our young people forced once more into emigration. And again, as before, we are told by elements of the political establishment that their departure is necessary. The return of large-scale emigration when so much wealth was given away in tax cuts and in corrupt deals is not so much an outrage. It is a crime against the entire Irish people.

Last year, we spoke about the 30 billion euro that was then the minimum for the bank bailout, the equivalent to the Irish state’s tax take for the year. The running total will likely soon reach over 70 billion euro, and experience gives us every reason to believe that that figure will increase. Some of this money will come from the so-called IMF bailout, for which we are supposed to be grateful. Grateful that the future of generations has been mortgaged to protect the interests of banks and speculators at home and abroad. Grateful that public assets will be sold cheaply to speculators. grateful that wages, benefits and public services will be devastated at the behest of the boot-boys of international capitalism. Grateful that the living standards of workers will be seriously worsened, an outcome enthusiastically welcomed by a political and social establishment still in thrall to our own form of neo-liberalism. We are not grateful. We are angry, and we will fight back.

The results of the general election demonstrated that the people are angry. However, the anger of the people must be channelled in the right direction to be effective – a near majority for Fine Gael shows that so far that has not happened. We welcome the election of an unprecedented number of left TDs, and the Workers’ Party will work in alliance with others to lead the resistance against the cuts. Our people can choose a different path to that laid out by the IMF and its local cheerleaders, as the people of Iceland have done. All that is required is the political will. This is why the Workers’ Party some months ago launched the We Demand Democracy campaign, which is calling for a referendum on the bank bailout and on the economic policies demanded by the IMF. Building the campaign for a democratic judgment on the economic future of the Irish state is among our key tasks in the months ahead.

There has been much talk of sovereignty of late, and not all of it has to do with the IMF. It is often claimed that the continued campaign of violence by those who have rejected the wishes of the people regarding the Good Friday Agreement is justified on the grounds of sovereignty. For us, that issue is simple. The people of Ireland have rejected violence, and have lain out the way they wish unity to take place: namely, by consent. This has long been our position. The only valid republican struggle in these circumstances is one to persuade the inhabitants of Northern Ireland that a united and independent people is the way forward for all of us on these islands. The forthcoming visit of the British Queen to the Republic has also provoked some debate. This speech began by laying out our understanding of the republican tradition.

We stand here proudly as the heirs of those who stormed the Bastille and made themselves citizens, not subjects. We stand here as revolutionaries for whom monarchy, aristocracy and inequality are anathema. We stand here as people who live in the real world. As socialists, we see beyond mere figureheads or symbols and act according to the underlying realities of class society. We reserve our anger for those who really hold power, who launch the wars for oil, who break promises on human rights at Guantanamo, who continue to seek to isolate and destroy socialist regimes like Cuba 50 years after the Bay of Pigs, and who seek to deepen the exploitation of the Irish working class. So we will protest against Bush or Blair, Obama or Cameron. We will struggle against the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. We will fight the cuts introduced by the powers that be in Dublin, Belfast and London. We will keep our focus on what matters, on what affects the political and economic conditions of the working class, north and south.

Comrades, we have our goal towards which we are striving – a republic where the working class is truly sovereign. That means creating a society that has overcome sectarianism and embraced secularism; a society that believes that wealth should be redistributed from the top to the bottom, rather than the other way round as has been the case in recent decades across Ireland; a society where socialism can be built. The emancipation of the working class requires a militant party of and for the working class. We go from here today to continue our long efforts to build that party, through elections, trade union activity, community activism and other forms of agitation. Socialism is the alternative. Let’s build that alternative.