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From International Socialism (1st series), No.51, April-June 1972, pp.15-17.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
In the 1940s travellers crossing the border from Northern Ireland were greeted by banners proclaiming ‘Welcome to Independent Ireland’. North bound travellers were warned ‘You are now entering Occupied Ireland’. There was then – and is now – no doubt about the accuracy of the second slogan. But what of the first? Just how independent is the Twenty-six county ‘Republic of Ireland’? The question is directly relevant at a time when the British Government looks increasingly to the Lynch Government in Dublin to move against the forces of republicanism, and preserve some semblance of the status quo throughout Ireland. Ireland is an outstanding example of the uneven development of capitalism in a country dominated by a foreign imperialism. Although trade and commerce developed widely in Ireland during the eighteenth century, unprotected exposure to competition from Britain, combined with active discrimination against sections of competing Irish industry proved disastrous after the Act of Union in 1801. However in the north east there had been a greater development of industry, including manufacturing. In part this was due to official encouragement given by the British ruling class to the creation of a stable middle class. This was achieved by assisting the Protestant peasantry, descendants of the Ulster settlers in the previous century, to buy their holdings. This occurred more than 120 years before the Catholic peasants in the rest of Ireland. The relatively advanced nature of industry in N.E. Ulster meant that the continued prosperity of the growing northern Protestant bourgeoisie depended on ever widening markets. It became essential that the northern textile and engineering industries were not denied access to either British domestic markets or those of the world wide British empire. Throughout the nineteenth century support for Union with Britain came to mean increasingly bitter opposition to the demand for Home Rule from the late developing southern Catholic middle class. The convenient blend of economic and religious sectarian motives for opposition to Home Rule can be judged from the following quotation from a Unionist Party pamphlet Commercial Ulster and the Home Rule Movement in 1902:
‘The cry against Separatism ... is not merely voice of the Orangemen that is heard ... it is not the voice of Protestantism alone that is heard ... it is the voice of civilised humanity ... it is the voice of trade, it is the voice of commerce, it is the voice of Capital.’
At that stage the majority opinion within British ruling class circles was that the uneven development of capitalism in Ireland, which British policy towards the Catholic peasants had done so much to foster, was no bad thing. The relative advancement of industry in the north-east was regarded by Tory leaders like Lord Randolph Churchill as providing a stable ‘base for the maintenance of British interests and British power in the island’. It became British policy to encourage and protect their Unionist allies by directing business to the Belfast shipyards, and by providing finance for the continued development of industry in north east Ulster. In the south the picture in the nineteenth century was very different. The backwardness of trade and industry had left a weak and conciliating Catholic middle class. Time and again in the nineteenth century the mass of Irish peasants looked in vain to their middle class leaders to direct the struggle against the landowners and the occupying British power. But only among the most economically backward sections of the, mainly rural, petty bourgeoisie did the insurrectionary ideals of the 1798 Uprising live on through the physical force ‘Irreconcilables’, the Fenians and later the Sinn Fein movement. This petty bourgeoisie believed that with England off Ireland’s back a purely Irish, socially harmonious form of capitalism could develop. But this in their view would mean extensive protection of small Irish manufacturers from the British giants across the water. Protection went together with the Home Rule movement among the southern middle class moderates and the Sinn Fein radicals alike. The official ‘Sinn Fein Policy’ in 1905 put it like this:
‘Protection means rendering the native manufacturer equal to meeting foreign competition. If a manufacturer cannot produce as cheaply as an English or other foreigner, only because his foreign competitor has larger resources at his disposal, then it is the first duty of the Irish nation to accord Protection to that manufacturer.’
Arthur Griffiths, the founder of Sinn Fein, recognised that’ the ‘greater resources’ of British capital was based on Britain’s ownership of an empire. He went so far as to advocate that Ireland might have its own commercial ‘empire’ taking advantage of ‘the links forged with Africa and Latin America by Irish Catholic missionaries’.
However moderate the Home Rule and Independence movements were, British ruling class regarded them with hostility and fear. In part this was because the British ruling class was not certain that the weak Irish middle class and the Utopian petit bourgeoisie would be able to contain the radical and implicitly revolutionary aspirations of their peasant and working class supporters. The revolutionary socialist labour leader James Connolly recognised that the international development of British and world capital made a nonsense of any hope of a genuine Irish independence based on capitalist property relations. He saw that a protected isolationist Irish capitalism was an illusion and that ‘bourgeois independence would lead back to empire’.
In 1897 Connolly wrote:
‘If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and waters with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs. England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that freedom whose cause you betrayed’.
It would be difficult to imagine a more prophetic anticipation of the actual history of the Twenty-six county state since its creation in 1922. Connolly also foresaw that this kind of crucial strategic concession to the Irish middle class would be used as a way of containing the potentially revolutionary demands of the Irish workers and small farmers.
The independence of the Free State was a sham. It was armed and partly financed by British money. It was with British guns that the republican opposition was crushed in the Civil War. From the beginning the Free State civil service was modelled on and largely trained by Britain. The tradition of close and continuing liaison between departments of the Twenty-six county Government and Whitehall is one stemming from the birth of the Free State. This liaison has worked particularly closely in the field of ‘political security’. Collaboration by the Twenty-six county police and Special Branches has long been an essenital component of British vigilance over republican and revolutionary socialist activity in both the North of Ireland and Britain itself. From its birth the Twenty-six county economy has been dominated by British capital. Indeed the penetration by British capital of every department of production and distribution has continued over the period since 1922, no matter what official policy the Dublin Government adopted. Official economic policy has in fact gone through several different stages. When Sinn Fein and the IRA split over the Treaty, the Free Staters represented the largest of the southern bourgeoisie and big farming interests. They had an interest in close and continuing access to the British market and to the investment opportunities provided by the British empire sterling area. As a result protection and economic friction with British interests in the Twenty-six counties was kept to a minimum. However in 1932 De Valera, representing the ‘radical’ wing of Sinn Fein and the smaller business interests and the rural petit bourgeoisie came to power. His Fianna Fail party attempted to put into practice the old protectionist policies of the republican movement. Tariffs were erected around most native industries. A law was passed requiring companies to have a majority of Irish directors. In addition the De Valera Government refused to continue making compensation payments to English landowners who had been compelled by a pre-1914 British law to allow their tenant farmers to buy their holdings. The slogan during this period of economic war was ‘Burn everything British but their coal’. However British capital in Ireland itself remained untouched. De Valera’s Fianna Fail was not prepared to take over foreign property in Ireland, not least because this would have pointed to taking over Irish capital too.
Before the outbreak of World War Two De Valera had come to terms with the British Government. From 1945 onwards, through successive Government changes in Dublin, tariffs and other forms of protection for Irish industry were progressively reduced. This process accelerated through the 1950s and 1960s during the long post-war economic boom. The Twenty-six county economy was able to attract a considerable volume of foreign investment, not only British, during this period thanks to massive tax incentives and low wages. In 1965 the Fianna Fail Government negotiated the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement. This opened the floodgates to a further penetration of British capital. It was also at this time that the then Dublin Government initiated the first cross-border talks with the O’Neill Government in Stormont. It was evident that with entry into the Common Market looming ever closer
the interests of capital on both sides of the border pointed in the same direction – closer integration with Britain. But for that to take place a political settlement of the border and the underprivileged status of the Catholic population in the north was necessary. In Whitehall it was also accepted that there had to be political changes in the six counties if there was to be a political rationalisation of the economic interests of Anglo-Irish capital in the country as a whole. The problem for the British ruling class is that they have to achieve this rationalisation while at the same time maintaining the Orange Stormont link and preventing the forces of revolutionary republicanism being allowed to challenge the imperialist status quo over the whole of Ireland.
How extensive is British economic control of the Twenty-six counties at present? The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that between a third and a half of all manufacturing concerns are either controlled or owned outright by British firms. Perhaps 70 per cent of the 100 largest companies in the Twenty-six counties are British-controlled in part, or entirely. In 1971 profits totalling £21 millions – 60 per cent of total profits of all publicly quoted companies – were pocketed by British investors. In the past ten years some 500 new industrial concerns, with assets totalling about £150 millions were established in the south of Ireland. Of these more than a third were directly sponsored by British companies. British investment in Ireland is also highly profitable. The average rate of profit on foreign capital in Ireland during 1970 was a little over 20 per cent – compared with 13.4 per cent in Britain itself (Dublin Chamber of Commerce). Just how dependent the Irish economy is on decisions taken outside the country can be gauged from the fact that some 70 per cent of investment in manufacturing is decided on or sanctioned by head offices abroad – mostly in Britain. Not that the Twenty-six county state is not generous in bribing big business to invest in the south; – half the cost is met by the Irish tax payers of all new industrial investment and foreign firms making the investment may not be liable for profits tax for up to fifteen years.
Another important measurement of the dependence of the Irish economy on British capital can be made through foreign trade. Today 55 per cent of all Twenty-six county imports are supplied by Britain and more than 66 per cent of all exports are sold in the British market. The impact of the 1965 Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement will almost certainly increase this bilateral exclusiveness of Twenty-six county foreign trade. However it is as wrong to picture the Twenty-six county state as a mere colonial appendage of the British state as it is to imagine that the Green Tory state has achieved complete national independence. The native Irish ruling class enjoy a junior partner relationship, with their cousins in Britain. The Twenty-six counties are, in that sense, a client state of British capital. The partnership is not merely evident in the joint investments of British and Irish interests in Ireland itself. The Irish ruling class itself has long had a tradition of foreign investment. Indeed the proportion of the Irish national product invested abroad and the per capita income from that investment is among the highest in the world. Total Irish investments abroad are about £550 millions, some 85 per cent in the sterling area. It is to facilitate this lucrative exploitation of foreign labour that the Irish bourgeoisie (and all Twenty-six county Governments) have jealously defended the almost total integration of the Irish currency with sterling and managed Irish monetary affairs in total harmony with the policies laid down in the City of London. This is why Irish interest rates are based on London Bank rate, irrespective of the domestic state of the Irish economy.
It is precisely this almost total integration of the economic interests of the British and Irish capitalist classes which makes a nonsense of Twenty-six county claims to political independence. Of course the Free State Government does occasionally jib at particular political decisions taken in London. The ‘special relationship’ is not always totally devoid of friction. But where conflicts arise normally the junior partner puts up and shuts up. The events in the North of Ireland and the unwillingness of the British ruling class to disentangle itself from its alliance with the Orange establishment has posed several points of conflict. The British Government is not unaware of this and the dangers of placing its Twenty-six county allies in a position where they will be seen by the mass of the Irish people as traitors to the cause of Irish national unity. There will be attempts made to reach a ‘political settlement’ which may abolish the externals of partition in return for binding both parts of Ireland (via some kind of new federal constitution) closer to Britain. When that happens the Irish bourgeoisie, having come to political power on the back of the anti-imperialist republican movement, will have travelled the path right back to the empire. That is why imperialism cannot be defeated in Ireland without the overthrow of the rule of Irish capital. Only a strategy which sees how the consummation of the national struggle demands the triumph of the workers republic has any chance to break Stormont, Orangeism and the hold of British capital in Ireland. The petit-bourgeois republican leaderships and those who pedal the illusion of a theory of stages in the struggle for Irish freedom cannot lead the anti-imperialist movement to victory. The task of building a revolutionary socialist workers movement and winning for it the leadership of the national struggle falls to the small but growing forces of marxism in Ireland.
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