From Unity, 15 October 2005

What next?

Last Friday in Derry the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Dermot Ahern, restated the Irish government’s determination that the political momentum created by the IRA’s decommissioning should be built on to secure the return of devolution and the advancing of the Belfast Agreement. Speaking at an SDLP conference on cross-border development, he stressed the importance of keeping that aspect of the agreement going.
     “What is clear is that a new dynamic of co-operation did develop. Ministers, north and south, met on a sustained and regular basis to address the common challenges and opportunities on this island, for the people of this island.”
     The Communist Party’s support for the Good Friday Agreement is based on the opportunity it provides for that dynamic, not for those in power but for those who have been kept out of power through divisions within the working class based on sectarianism and border politics.
     But in a week that saw the gunning down of Jim “Doris Day” Gray as the latest twist in the downward cycle of loyalism and the high-media-profile investigation by the Assets Recovery Agency into big-money property scams being linked to Thomas “Slab” Murphy, as the alleged IRA chief of staff, it was hard to see much evidence of positive advance.
     Watching the DUP and Sinn Féin develop their “shopping lists” to prove to “their own” that they can do the business with the British government is not too encouraging either.
     Nor, for that matter, was the news that Ahern’s government had managed to pay out €40 million to the private consultancy firm Deloitte for their contribution to computer projects on payroll and financial information systems for the public health service—projects which were suspended last Thursday, and so the systems may never run.
     And political commentators wonder why the disillusionment with politics both sides of the border!
     Next week in Belfast the Irish Association for Cultural, Economic and Social Relations is meeting to consider what Ireland will be like in 2020. It is that medium-term perspective that must also concern left and progressive forces in Ireland. Such a perspective must build not on the projections of the establishment but on the activism that will not go away, despite the passive politics being pushed by social partnership in both its Irish and British forms.
     Last week also saw protests continuing against America’s use of Shannon Airport in its oil wars, continued campaigning against education cuts in the North, gay activists marching in Dublin against hate crimes, and a motion being passed by SIPTU, Ireland’s largest trade union, calling into question its continued involvement with social partnership.
     It is to be expected that for months, if not years, to come, mopping up and containing the seamier sides of the Troubles and the Celtic Tiger will have to continue. But that must not distract from the pressing political business of finding common cause amongst the social, political and economic forces for a real alternative to current politics. The time is now to develop an alternative social and economic programme which can engage those forces and develop the politics that can answer the question: What next?

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