A lot of people initially come to the Irish question out of emotion. Part of the reason is that there are forty million people in the United States who, at the last census, identified themselves as Irish first. That's roughly ten times more than the number of people who live in Ireland today. People whose mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers came to this country fleeing oppression in Ireland quite understandably feel a great affinity with--and a great emotional attachment to--the "old country" as it's called. However, people who are not Irish-American, and many people who are, do not know the history of Ireland and therefore they tend to be dependent for their information on the non-existent coverage or distorted coverage in the media. So what I want to do first is take you on a ten minute tour of eight hundred years of history.
One of the things we have to establish first is that there is no religious war in Ireland. Religion has very little to do--in fact, has nothing to do with the situation in Ireland. The violent conflict in the north of Ireland is not a conflict between two warring communities. It is a fight being waged by that section of the country's majority which was violently coerced into the northern state, against the British and their control and domination of Irish affairs.
If people understood this history of oppression in Ireland, they would under- stand the history of oppression throughout the human race. I say that because it remains an incontrovertible fact that there is not a single weapon of oppression, there is not a means of oppression used by any government in this world against any people that has not in the course of our history been used by the British against the Irish.
That may seem like a very audacious statement to make. Yet we share with the Native Americans of this country a history of genocide against our people. During the 1840's when what is referred to as the Great Hunger, the Great Famine of Ireland, took place, many people came to this country fleeing starva- tion. People who look back from the present day with historical knowledge or read about it have a visual image of a famine--that is, a country without food. The fact is when you look into your history there was never a famine in Ireland. How could there be a famine in a land where it never stops raining but never rains hard enough to wash the soil away? There was one crop and one crop only that failed in Ireland and that was the potato crop. The corn grew, the wheat grew, the oats grew, we continued to grow flax and make linen in the fledgling mills of the '40's in the North.
Only the potato crop failed, so why did our people die? Our people died because by British law in Ireland the native Irish population was not allowed to eat any crop they grew except the potato. Every day of every month of every year our people starved and fled famine. They fled to this country in what were known as the coffin ships because the vast majority of the people who left Ireland for America never saw it. They died of weakness, starvation and fever on the way across and the ships were called coffin ships.
They starved because the simple policy was this: if you lived in your hovel the lands that you'd farm belonged to the British landlord who in a previous time had taken it from us. If you had no potatoes to eat, you starved. But the landlord's bailiffs came around and collected the rest of your crops and collected the money for the right to live on your own property. If starving people did not part with the food, they were thrown into the gutter. Yet for every day and every week and every year that famine lasted, form 1845 up to the beginning of the 1850's, ships laden with food left the coasts of Dublin, Cork, Derry and Belfast for the British trade market. The British called it famine, but we called it geoncide.
With the exception of young people who have taught themselves their language, and old and young people along the western seaboard who still retain Gaelic as their first and natural language, most people in Ireland speak English. That was not an intellectual decision taken by our people, that English was a superior language. Most people in Ireland today do not speak Gaelic. But there was a time in our history when nobody in Ireland among the native Irish spoke anything but Gaelic. It was the only language they knew, but the British demanded--because they couldn't understand what we were saying--that we only be allowed to speak in English. The penalty for speaking the only language we knew was imprisonment, transportation or death. There was a time in our history when the British determined that it was the musicians, our poets and our bizarre musical instruments like the harp and the pipe (which they didn't understand) which were the cause of our subversion.
So, there was a time in our history when our music, our language, our culture were outlawed, and the penalty for using them was death, transportation or imprisonment. There was a time in the history of Ireland whin it was forbidden to educate the native Irish. A time when we were forbidden to practice our religion. We were forbidden to own land, property and money in excess of a five pound note or a horse. That situation developed from the first time the British came to Ireland which is almost eight hundred years ago.
In all that eight hundred years not only is there not a weapon of repression that they have not used--not only do we share that history with the Native American of this country. We are also the only white race to share a history of slavery with our Black brothers and sisters. We are the only white people the British ever sold in slave markets. They sold the Irish in slave markets in the Caribbean along with our Black brothers and sisters. Not only do we share that historical knowledge of repression. We share with the Palestinians the history of being driven off our own lands, and having somebody walk in and say,"well, now that we are here forget about history--this is our state, move you on." As I say, no matter where you look at it, if you understand and know Irish history, you know the history of oppression.
That extends right up to the modern day technological repression of people through sophisticated torture methods, through the use of emergency legislation and the whittling away, abandonment and destruction of basic human rights, basic legal rights, the basic civil, political and economic rights of our people.
Our history developed over eight hundred years. Not only did we have a history of repression and conquest. But no generation of Irish people ever accepted the legitimacy of British rule in Ireland. Conflict, we've never known any- thing but conflict in Ireland.
At various times in our struggle we have taken inspiration from our brothers and sisters throughout the world, taken lessons from how they were fighting their battles. We tried every method available, from land struggles, through civil liberties struggles, through constitutional political movement and through armed struggle, and we have a long history of every single method of attempting to overthrow oppression. It was at the beginning of this century, in fact it was the beginning of 1901, that Sinn Fein was born as an organiza- tion. Again, people think that Sinn Fein is something that came in the 1970's. Sinn Fein was founded at the turn of the century. A number of organizations that are crucial to our history were founded then. We had the Sinn Fein movement, which was the movement for Irish independence. We had the Irish Citizen's Army and the labor movement under James Connolly, the organization of the developing industrial workers. We had the Irish women's army, and our political women were organized in full knowledge and in demand of their rights as women, organized in the women's army at the turn of the century. Before Germaine Greer was even heard of, but that tends to be forgotten as well.
And so it was at the turn of the century that we had an experience in Ireland that we share with the Chileans, a history we share with Central America. The lesson of this century is that democracy means something different to people who run and control our lives than democracy means to the rest of us. We are told by many people that no one minds your being a dissident, although it is bizarre and odd, because so long as you do it through democratic channels, it shows it's a wonderful country. America particularly: this is the land of D-e-m-o-c-r-a-c-y where everybody gets to read what they want, say what they want, until what they really want to say becomes subversive.
We had that kind of democracy at the turn of the century in Ireland and we used it. We used all the hallowed democratic channels, and won by combining the armed struggle, the land movement, the labor movement and the constitutional movement. By 1910 we had actually successfully secured a guarentee from the British government--voted on, passed and supported in the democratic British House of Commons--that Ireland would be granted independence and that position had been arrived at by a combination of activity by all those movements. The British government "home rule", as they called it, for the Irish.
But there were problems. The problem arose out of another weapon of oppression. There was a time in our history from the 15th and 16th century when Britain sought to control Ireland by driving the people off the land. We were driven into the barren lands and the northeastern counties. Most of the people got assimilated but in the northeastern counties there was a massive plantation-- plantation was the term the British used for it--a massive plantation of people from Britain, from northern England and from Scotland. We were driven off our lands into the mountains and into the bogs. Meanwhile peasants, workers and landlords, in fact all class strata--this was unlike other colonizing policies, because all class strata came to us since we were only a couple of hours on the boat away--and the northeastern counties were populated or colonized with reliable citizens who put us off our lands.
The conflict in northern Ireland today relates back to those problems as well. As I say, the British Parliament had decided democratically that we were entitled to and had won the right to and would be granted independence. In the northeastern counties, the national minority, the colonizers and descendents of the colonialists constituted thirteen percent of the population. With the connivance of the British generals, and high ranking members of the British right-wing and the British Conservative Party, they armed illegally and threat- ened to overthrow the democratic decision of Parliament.
The First World War intervened. Here there are stark similarities with the situation in the Middle East and their conflict today. Our conflict arises partly out of the fact that Britain promised the leaders of the Home Rule movement that independence would be granted on the immediate end of the war if the leaders of the Home Rule movement would recruit to fight in Europe in the British Army. John Redmond and all those other people who have gone down in history as traitors of the national movement recruited people for the King's shilling. (If you ever hear that expression in Irish music, that's what it means, that people were paid one shilling to go and die in Europe.) Simultane- ously the British promised the loyalist minority of the North that if the illegal army, which they had mustered and armed and trained with the connivance of the British ruling class, would go and fight on the field of Flanders there would never be Home Rule in Ireland. The same agreement was made in fact to the people in the Middle east, to the Palestinians and to the Jews.
After the war there was a general election where again peacefully, democratic- ally and through the ballot box, Ireland decided on independence. In the 1918 general election, 85.13% voted for independence. Under threat from the loyal- ist minority in the north, the British rufused to implement their own govern- mental policy. Sinn Fein had won every British parliamentary seat in Ireland in 1918, with the exception of the three northeastern Unionist areas. So what Sinn Fein and the national movement in coalition with them decided to do was convene a national assembly in Dublin and peacefully negotiate with Britain for the full implementation in Ireland of a British policy democratically decided upon.
The British reaction to the forming of the national government in Dublin was to declare war immediately on the people of Ireland. From 1918 to 1922 they fought a bloody, intense war against the Irish people. Now remember that they had just fought the 1914-1918 war, in which their own working class people had been slaughtered in Europe in pursuit of Britain's imperialist greed while people thought they were fighting for freedom. Britain was very short of bodies with which to fight the Irish War so she opened her prisons and the Irish war was fought by giving British pardon to every unfortunate social misfit and criminal in Britain who would come and fight the war in Ireland. This wasn't a war of soldiers. It was a war of cutthroats and rapists, where whole towns were burned and women were brutalized and raped, children were killed in their beds.
Between 1918 and 1922 it was again the Irish under their political and military leadership who went to London peacefully to negotiate an end to the war. What was Britain's response? With the leaders in London, Britain threatened to intensify the war in Ireland. In the absense of the political and military leadership of the country, under duress, Ireland's leadership at the time, Michael Collins and Griffith and the others, signed the Treaty. If we did not have a puppet state in the south of Ireland today there is no doubt that the treaty on which partition is founded has no more validity than the treaties that were signed under duress by the Native Americans in this country.
Nonetheless, we have no authority to go to the United Nations, and again the similarity with other struggling people emerges. We have no nation state through which the northern nationalist population can approach the United Nations. The people who speak for us are the British because they govern us. The southern Irish government has a constitutional right to speak for us and it doesn't, nor does it in any way represent our interest.
The war was finally ended by partitioning Ireland. The three northeastern counties of loyalist colonists were to be allowed to secede from the Irish nation. What happened in reality was that they were too small in number, too small in territory, and too limited in their resources to form anything. So we were drawn into the state. Instead of the state of northern Ireland comprising three counties, it compromises six counties. Three of them voted for independence and in those counties lived our forefathers and foremothers.
The state of northern Ireland was created in violence against the democratic wishes of the Irish people and it was coerced a part of our people. We were transformed overnight from part of the national majority within Ireland to a national minority within an artificial state. From the day and the hour the state was created we had no political, economic or social rights in it. Which brings us up to date, to the analogy with our Black brothers and sisters.
We are aware, more aware than most, that all things are relative and that the humiliation and degradation, the suffering and the death, and the blood shed in our country is infinitely less than that suffered by our Black brothers and sisters in South Africa, but the principle is exactly the same. The difference is a matter of degree, but the principle is the same, to the point where in 1968 we in northern Ireland were making three revolutionary demands of the British government which were ultimately to destabilize the entire state. This happened not in South Africa against the Botha regime, not against some tin pot dictatorship in Latin America, but in the heartland of Western democracy that supposedly invented democracy and exported it for improvement to the U.S..
The revolutionary demands were the right to equality to the vote, the right of equality of opportunity to employment, and the right of equality in opportunity in gaining a roof over our heads in any area of northern Ireland we chose. That was our position. Is it any wonder that the Civil Rights Movement {in northern Ireland} took its inspiration not from eight hundred years of our own history, but directly from this country? Because what many people of Irish extraction did not understand and sadly too many still do not understand was that when Martin Luther King said,"I have a dream," he was speaking for Black people in this country and for us in northern Ireland. He was articulating our needs and articulating our dream.
Long before Gerry Adams and other people were old enough to be heroes of the nationalist movement, people in the nationalist and Catholic community in northern Ireland knew almost every speech that Martin Luther King made, and they knew almost every speech Malcolm X made. They knew them not because they thought it was the intellectually liberal thing to do. They knew them because they needed to know, and those speeches were the only articulation of what our own people needed. Our experiences in many ways were similar from there on, except that the state in which we live was so founded on injustice that in some ways the parallels are clearer with South Africa.
The state of northern Ireland constitutionally, institutionally--the very essence of its being cannot sustain democracy. Therefore by asking for democracy and for equality within it, that demand in itself will bring this state down around its ears because the state is created to ensure that it never happens. You don't have to be a revolutionary, you don't have to want to overthrow the state, you don't have to be a subversive or a wrecker--you just have to be a decent human being who knows that there are people in this society who do not have justice, equality or basic human dignity, and you just have to demand that they get it. The survival of the state depends on in- equality, a lack of human rights, and the arbitrators of another people's dispute.
To give you a brief idea: our legal system does not have the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. We do not have the right to a trial by jury. We do not have the right to know and cross-examine, to identify those persons who make accusations in court against us. The court does not require evidence in order to convict; it requires only testimony of an accused. We have mass trials of this nature, as Mel King saw for himself when he came to northern Ireland. Where fifty people would stand in a docket charged with anything from a hundred to two hundred unrelated offences and the only point in common between them all would that one single person would give evidence, relating his own history over a ten year period. And in that history he would relate how in conjunction with all those people at different times he was guilty along with them of conspiracy to murder, of withholding information, of subversion and plotting. When he's done, the judge grants him immunity for all these charges. And then on his testimony alone, with no cross-examination possible, the judge sends the people in the docket to prison for a minimum period of twenty five years.
After such services to society, and in light of the dangers of returning to the ghettoes after such a performance, the witness is relocated at the British government's expense. He is relocated in one of three places. Britain still has friends, and so the witness sails off to South Africa, Canada or Australia, protected by the CIA and whomever else is looking after him. While our people go to prison.
We have the highest prison population per capita in Europe, but we have no political prisoners. Or so we are told. Fifty percent of our prisoners are under the age of twenty five, 30% of our prisoners are serving natural life, and over 50% of our prisoners are doing an excess of twenty five years in prison. And why? What is the dangerous thing we are demanding? Do we want to overthrow democracy, or invade Britain, or overthrow democracy in the U.S., or take over General Motors? Well....
All we ask is that after eight hundred years of conflict, of bloodshed and injustice, the British finally accept that they have no right to be there. They are incapable of governing that part of the country, and every year they have been at it, they have brought death. For every year they have been at it, they have brought injustice. For every year they have been at it, they have distorted and twisted the mentality of the loyalists in northern Ireland and, they have destroyed the human and the economic, social and political rights of the Catholic minority in northern Ireland. They have distorted the south of Ireland and created in it a puppet state.
The movement has strengthened and deepened, grown from a civil rights move- ment to a national liberation movement. It is a movement which the political leadership remains today as it was all those years ago, the organization Sinn Fein. It is politically a different organization than it was then because it has radicalized. Sinn Fein is an organization that without qualifications supports liberation struggle throughout the world. With reference to the confusion of some of their people in this country, Sinn Fein is an organiza- tion that supports the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the people of South Africa, and every liberation movement any place on this earth.
The majority of Sinn Fein is made up of people far younger than me. We are old hat, it's the young people that have taken over. Sinn Fein works in its communities, and over the period of time following the hunger strikes it participates in the electoral process. Sinn Fein has elected representatives at every level of representation in northern Ireland: the British House of Commons, the northern Ireland Assembly and the local government administration. They have a policy of non-participation in what they regard as the illegal parliaments of Westminister, Belfast and Dublin, but they participate in the local administration.
Local administration is paralyzed in northern Ireland; it simply doesn't work. It has stopped functioning because we elect members of Sinn Fein. When our members walked into their buildings, they first barred the door. When we went to court to say,"Look, we got elected in here," Sinn Fein was allowed to walk into those buildings, and the loyalists walked in after them. And here you have to understand what we are dealing with: the loyalist members of the local administration would disinfect everything that our representatives touched. Every time somebody went to the mike they disinfected it. They went around everytime anybody spoke with air fresheners. Of course, for a whole week it was hilarious. They used to lift the chairs that our people were supposed to be sitting on and set them out in the street, so you had to go out and bring your chair back in. Finally, what they do now is walk into the council and if any Sinn Fein representative is there they adjourn.
Local administration is paralyzed because the loyalists refuse to function. They refuse to work with Sinn Fein representatives there; their cry is that we shouldn't be allowed to use the deomocratic process because we are disloyal citizens. We shouldn't be allowed to do anything.
So along come our saviours, galloping in on their Irish heritage: tra-rump, tra-rump, tra-rump: "There is to be an end to this brothers and sisters. We have had eight hundred years of it, and we can't have it any more. One of these days peace is going to have to break out." You have heard it all before: We are not fit to govern ourselves. We can't decide. We are an ignorant people with a predisposition to violence. Somebody is gonna have to look after us. The British Army has tried it and that doesn't work. They have a tendency to come in here on their feet and go out on their backs. We are going to have to do something about it, and in a little more sophisticated fashion. We have to have... the Anglo-Irish peace agreement.
Now this is truly a wonderful invention. First of all, the British government and the Irish government are not at war, not since they signed the treaty that sold the rest of us out. There is no conflict between the British government and the Irish government, never has been. The common purpose is to stifle and destroy the radical and national movement in Ireland. They have no disagreement they are buddies, friends and always have been. So why do they need to make a pact when they have no disagreement in the first place?
What they made the pact over was us. Garret Fitzgerald gallops around here and hopes that forty million Irish-Americans will be further confused because this pact is the first step to the peaceful negotiations of a united Ireland. Every- body says that's nice, and Tip O'Neill says that's great and could we get a Kennedy elected on the strength of it? Out it comes, and I don't know if people are falling for it or not but they are saying out here that it's the first step to a united Ireland. Meanwhile back at the old corral the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland is assuring the British in northern Ireland that the purpose of this agreement is to assure that the north of Ireland remains British in perpetuity.
In times of crisis we always read the London Times. They always know what's going down. And according to the London Times this is a security agreement. This is a pact between the southern Irish and the British to update the technology of the security forces in the south to the level of the security forces in the north. Which is some level. Every citizen in northern Ireland has his or her profile data and all their activities are listed in the British Army computer at Army headquarters. So the South is going to be updated to that. It is an act to improve counter-intelligence in order to catch "sub- versives" and to head off a radical movement because you just don't know where it could lead.
Who's paying for it? Everybody's grandfather, Ronald Reagan, is sending us $50 million a year for five years, because he is a big-hearted man. Because it breaks his heart to see all those poor people in Ireland from whom his people came, with insufficien money for jobs and things. Now I don't know whether we are cynical or maybe just well aware--we still belong to that class of the ungrateful poor. But there are an awful lot of poor people in Boston who would like to get their hands on some of this free money that's floating around. An awful lot of poor people all through this country, and awful lot of good liberal programs got started in the '60's, when we were all heavies. We were going to overcome and do our bit. They are all getting cut back. We can't afford affirmative action programs any more. Can't do anything: there is not enough money. But here's $50 million for Ireland. So we are asking: what does he want in return?
And we know what he wants in return. Ireland is one of the last remaining neutral countries in Europe. We aren't in NATO and we don't want to be in a nuclear war. And Ronald Reagan doesn't own a country in Europe. Yet. But this is a very small country in Europe, southern Ireland. Of every ten of its people three are supporting the other seven in taxes and still not managing to provide a basic poverty level for the poor. In the south of Ireland 50% of the population are under the age of thirty and most of them don't have work. In the south of Ireland the gap between the poor and the wealthy is growing and right across the border in the north of Ireland the poor are organizing, growing strong and powerful. If Garret Fitzgerald isn't very careful, very soon they will be organizing and growing strong in the south. So you have got to buy them off. And $50 millio of American money is serving no purpose in Ireland except to prop up Garret Fitzgerald and the partition state of the north. That suits Fitzgerald and that suits Thatcher.
But it is only fair that we serve notice on Mr. Reagan and on our Irish- American brothers and sisters, that even if he sends his money (and we probably don't have the power to stop it) don't expect us to tow the line for you. Because we have spent eight hundred years fighting oppression for the right to do one small thing: determine for ourselves the manner of our lives. It has taken us so long that by now there is no doubt that left to our own devices, by the time we gather sufficient strength to persuade the British that they have no right in our country, we will also have gathered sufficient wit to realize that there is only one way that we can organize to feed four and one half million people in a country that small. And that is to organize it following again the example of our oppressed brothers and sisters around the world. We may be organizing like the Nicaraguans, we may be organizing like many of those people in the emerging nations : but we will be organizing, not to overthrow anybody but to feed our own people through a system of economic and political administration and basicc organization fundamentally different from what you people like to call democracy. And what we people call capitalism. We did not come this far dowm the road through the blood of our people to arrive at freedom and find it already sold out. Ireland is not for sale for $50 million. We'll take it if we have to. You can throw every last dollar at us and we'll eat it; and with it the hand, and the arm and the man that feeds us.