Left Archive: Starry Plough Number 4, Iul 1975, Irish Republican Socialist Party.

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Many thanks to Spailpín who forwarded this to the Archive. This is the fourth edition of the IRSP newspaper, the Starry Plough – and part of a sequential release of them given that they were produced in the aftermath of the split from Official Sinn Féin and also deal with the dispute between the two organisations subsequent to that.

The front cover has the headline ‘Unite Now! against british imperialism and loyalist fascism’. The accompanying article argues that:

We are so used to hearing about sectarian assassinations that it goes in one ear and out the other. As the sectarian attacks initially took place in dribs and drags, coupled with our acceptance of such attacks as part of Belfast life, we do not see that the Loyalists have escalated their war against the Natoinalist population. It is part of the strategy for the Loyalist take-over which is not too far away. In this article we show how the British Army collaborates with Loyalist murder gangs, and actually participated in them themselves and that they will, for political reasons, accept the imminent take over. The pogroms which would follow such a take-over would make the battle of the Bogside and the ’69 Belfast pogrom look like a picnic.

The editorial calls for the ‘immediate and total withdrawal of British military, political, economic and cultural presence from Ireland, ending internment and releasing all political prisoners from Irish and English jails’.

There are reports on a picket of the Irish Labour Party by the IRSP over the Criminal Law Jurisdiction Bill. Another on redundancies for Ringsend workers. The centre section is taken up by a piece on the refusal of ‘industrialists to pay workers the 16th round of the National Wage agreement’ and another on internment. There are other pieces on the Basque country and Women in the Irish Struggle by Stella Makowski of the National Executive of the IRSP.

Tellingly, in light of the concentration on the feud in the previous edition there is no mention of that at all in this edition and only passing mention of the OIRA in relation to activities unearthed by that group of the British security forces.