Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Eammon McCann, radical Labour Party leader from Derry, Northern Ireland, arrived in New York last week and presented the keys to New York City to the Black Panther Party. Mayor John Lindsay had given the keys to Bernadette Devlin when she was in New York last fall. Angered at her treatment by American politicians, she decided to send the keys to the Panthers in the spirit of international solidarity.

THE workers' movement in Northern Ireland, from the way Eammon McCann describes it, seems to have grown with such assurance that it could not have happened otherwise.

In March 1968, McCann was working on a Vietnam solidarity campaign in London, and went to Derry "for a fortnight's vacation." A Catholic family was about to be evicted from their house trailer by the Protestant government. Ten or twelve people dragged the trailer on to a road and blocked traffic for forty-eight hours. They forced the mayor to house the family.

Though Derry's 25,000 Catholics are half of the population of the city, they are crammed together in an area called Bogside. Most of the housing in the city is public, and the Protestant government doles it out to consolidate the Protestant vote. Though much of the working class is Protestant, almost none of the bourgeoisie is Catholic. The religious division masks a serious class division. The lack of housing in Derry is only one example of the discrimination in Northern Ireland against the thirty-five per cent of the population that is Catholic.

A month later the Derry movement disrupted a series of corporation meetings with first one hundred, than two hundred, and finally five hundred people. McCann decided to stay in Derry, and the movement grew.

IN NORTHERN Ireland, there are days for Protestant parades and there days for Catholic parades. There are Protestant routes and there are Catholic routes. In fact, Proestants and Catholics go to different schools and even learn different games.

In October 1968, one thousand Catholics decided to march down a Protesrant route as a demonstration for Catholic civil rights. The Protestant cops couldn't take it, charged the marchers and sprayed them from water cannons.

People's Democracy, a student civil rights group, was formed at the University of Belfast immediately after the march. McCann smilingly explains that the printer didn't know what to put on the top of the poster for the group's first meeting. He started with "Students for Democracy," changed it to "People for Democracy." because there were more than students in the movement, and finally changed it to "People's Democracy" when he realized that "People for Democracy" didn't make much sense. "There were a lot of starry-eyed, romantic people in it," McCann said.

People's Democracy held a march in January 1969 from Belfast to Derry. The right-wing Paisleyite Protestants attacked the march every five or six miles. Catholic farmers and fishermen turned out to protect the marchers, and concrete working-class support gathered around the march "like a rolling stone."

THE DAY of the TDA march in Boston, I walked around for three hours trying to figure out why it was necessary to get my head beat in again. I had to close my eyes every time I thought of the three hundred riot equipped cops outside of the Instrumentation labs last November with dogs and Mace and rifles and clubs. Even after I knew that I had to go, I shivered every time I thought of the cops.

Eammon McCann explained casually that a hundred people marched from Belfast knowing that they would be attacked at every step and that the cops were on the other side. "Those who love the world serve it in action." Yeats tells us. I understood that I would never really hear McCann until I had experienced much more.

In the following weeks, working class groups sprung up all along the route of the march. Despite growing agitation, only a few bills passed the Northern Irish parliament, and nothing changed substantially. People's Democracy held more marches, and at least five times they were attacked by the cops. In what McCann called a "police pogrom," hundreds of police invaded the Catholic Bogside, beat people up, and broke nearly every window in the area.

When, on August 12, the Protestants began to march to commemorate the victory at the seige of Derry, there was no doubt that both sides would be fighting. A Defense Committee was formed in Bogsick, and they prepared to barricade the forty-one entrances to the Catholic quarter and stockpiled over 2500 gasoline bombs. McCann, the Committee's Information Officer, helped organize the defense. All of the barricades could go up in fifteen minutes. "Once we prepared to fight, people would have been disappointed if it hadn't happened," McCann said.

Some of the street kids. who appropriated "hooligan" as their own name, attacked the Protestant march, and then the Protestants followed the Protestant police to attack the Bogside. Using every milk bottle in the quarter for gasoline bombs, and with the help of thousands of newly-arrived Catholics, the residents held off the attack for fifty-one hours. The British Army was mobilized and cordoned off the area to end the attack. The Army is still there today.

A few French students with experience from the previous May helped to build the barricades and organize the fighting. With buildings afire all around, the barricades were thrown together from cars, scaffolding and rubble. Scaffolding poles were lodged in the barricades and wooden stakes driven into the ground in front to prevent assaults by armored cars.

Women fought alongside men at the barricades. In fact, Bernadette Devlin was one of the few members of the Defense Committee to fight in the streets. In Northern Ireland, men are often unemployed while their wives work, a situation which McCann says tends to reverse sex roles. Women were therefore very insistent on participating in the fighting.

Bogside lived as a commune during the attacks. No doors were locked, and people ate and slept together. There was even competition among some of the older women to see who would house the foreign students.

The cops pumped CS gas into Bogside continuously during the attacks. Though the gas is made in England, none had been used in Britain before Derry. Nixon once said that it was all right to use CS gas against students because no one had ever died from it. Movement medical cadre in this country have said often that someone with asthma could die from it. In Bogside, a nine-month-old baby died from the gas that permeated the city.

When the British troops moved in, McCann said that many supposed that they were there to invade the area. McCann calmly told me that he thought that they would have lost a shooting war. By that time the war had spread to Belfast and eight people had been killed.

Eventually the British troops sealed off the area with barbed wire and guarded a few roads into the Bogside. Inside Bogside, Radio Free Derry began broadcasting and two newspapers were printed. There were Black Panther movies shown on the sides of buildings. free donkey rides and toffee-apples and a music festival with rock groups.

McCann said that most of the street people enjoyed it as much as he did. "The fighting was exciting. I enjoyed it tremendously. In fact, I'm rather nostalgic for it." Many of the people in Derry learned politics as they fought. They learned through their own fighting to support the Panthers and the NLF.

THE Weathermen say that most people who live in ghettos and poor working class areas in this country are forced to live violent lives because of the violence around them. Kids in street gangs already feel how society oppresses them, and the only way to organize them into a revolutionary movement is to provide a radical alternative to gang wars. Ideally the violence should be turned against the state.

For kids forced to go to schools that are jails and deprived of any possibility to improve their lives, fighting back comes naturally. A friend of mine who works in a PBH project in the South End told me about a group of kids who had found a black kid one night, poured gasoline on him and set him afire. In fact in New York, "Bum burning," is good sport. The point is that there's no need to convince these people that they have to fight. They're already doing it.

For the Northern Irish, the problem is just as clear. From everything McCann said, Northern Ireland is a British colony by any definition of the word. The British government gives over two hundred million dollars in direct subsidies to Northern Irish industry, almost all of which is directly owned by English companies. Those same companies remove over three hundred million dollars a year in profits from the island. In other words, English taxpayers subsidize English industry in Northern Ireland which pours profits into the pockets of the English industrialists.

About forty-five per cent of capital investment in Northern Ireland is by direct grant from the government each year. About eighty-two per cent of the total capital investment has come from the English government.

Both Northern Ireland and the Republic to the South have massiveunemployment. As long as the profits continue to leave the country and the English government maintains import quotas on Irish goods, the Irish economy cannot develop.

With the economic conditions as bad as they are, the movement throughout Ireland should continue to grow. McCann said that one of the main problems last August was the lack of a solid political organization that could consolidate the rebellion into a united force.

Slowly, that alliance is now being forged. However, the Catholics are still divided into innumerable political factions. The groups range from the openly-socialist Irish Republicancal steps remains an alliance with sigbanned only in the Republic-to a few right-wing Irish Catholic nationalist groups.

Perhaps the most important politiextremist Protestants charging into nificant numbers of the Protestant working class. If the British troops left Derry, the fighting would certainly break out again between Catholics and Protestants. "When Catholics see evtremist Protestants charging into the Bogside carrying the Union Jack, it's hard to convince them that the Protestants aren't the enemy," McCann said.

The Catholic Church in Northern Ireland has denounced the rebels, which has helped to prove to the Protestants that they are not the Pope's agents. The revolutionary socialist part of the movement has already gained a foothold in the Protestant working class. They have been able to convince some of the Protestants that unemployment comes from the policies of the British government. Catholics and Protestants are in the same unions, and the Left's politics have begun to seem more and more reasonable to the workers in a country whose growth industries are controlled from the outside.

The fighting has only begun in Ireland. Buildings are dynamited every week. To McCann it's very clear, "It's the lines of the battle that have to be decided, not whether there's going to be one."