INTERVIEW WITH BERNADETTE DEVLIN
(The following interview was left of the prisoners' five demands. we were going. given to Gerry Foley on February 16 in Dublin at McAliskey campaign headquarters. Mrs. McAliskey has not had the opportunity to review the edited transcript.)
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Question. What do you hope to accomplish by running in this election?
Answer. The main objective in the beginning was to do something to halt the demoralization of the anti-imperialist movement--to reunite it around a concrete campaign and get it moving again.
The question of elections was first posed rather in the abstract, when we were discussing the H-Block conference, which was due to come up at the beginning of February. (It was later postponed to March 14)
A number of people within the H-Block Committee felt that it was going to be impossible to continue or to attempt to rebuild a mass movement around what was
There were also differences within the prison itself as to how we should go on tactically.
In this situation, there was a lot of demoralization. Various arguments and divisions started coming up again. When people can't see a way forward, they begin to fall out over why it isn't there.
We felt that the continuation of work for the prisoners had to be linked to a campaign against what was becoming open and systematic repression against the H- Block movement in general. A number of key people such as Jim Gibney are now in prison on charges. People have been arrested throughout the country. And young Keogh was given a three-year sentence by a Dublin court for alleged involvement in a riot during an H-Block protest at the British embassy. But there was disagreement about how central an issue such repression should be in the H-Block campaign. It really looked like we didn't know where
People's Democracy were preparing to put forward an argument at the H-Block conference that I basically agreed with. It was one that said that we had not succeeded in getting all of the five demands, but that we should build on what we had got. They said that we should recognize that what came out of the campaign, in an overall sense, was a revitalization of the national struggle itself, and that's what we should build on.
On this basis, People's Democracy said, we should begin to take up the general question of Irish politics. We should do this with the understanding that the government was unstable and that the elections were coming up in the relatively near future. Those of us who discussed it at the time thought in terms of months.
It's indicative of the way things happen nowadays that just when we'd got the leaflet out asking for people to support a discussion about moving
MASH from the H-Block issue onto a broader platform of limited issues around which we could all agree and on which we could build the same kind of mass movement on a higher plane, the government fell. In fact, I was asked to sign the leaflet on one night, and the government fell the
THOMAS next.
So, then elections became a concrete question. People's Democ- SMASH H BLOCK racy asked me if I would fight this seat.
Q. It became more and more obvious during the hunger strike campaign that the H- Block activists were looking toward the development of an anti-imperialist front to fight the elections. The movement's greatest successes came in elections. You probably remember the huge • applause you got at an H- Block rally in the Mansion House in Dublin before the last Irish general elections when you called for contesting every seat against the pro-imperialist and capitulationist bourgeois parties. Why was this momentum halted?
A. The first problem was that after we fought these elections there was no agreement within the movement how to carry these successes forward. There was no agreement on what you may call a strategy of elections, as opposed to the tactic. We had Bobby Sands and Kieran Doherty elected. But despite the fact that they were elected, both were allowed to die. We elected Owen Carron in Fermanagh-South Tyrone.
After that, it seemed to me that differences over abstentionism or a lack of understanding of even how you could use abstentionist MPs, how they fitted into the overall work of building a mass movement, were demoralizing to people in our own area.
The media and the political machinery of parliamentarism had isolated Owen Carron. So, he was reduced to resorting to what looked like one stunt after the other.
Another problem was that in the absence of the hunger strike campaign people feared that it would be impossible to maintain the momentum of the H-Block vote. I think, frankly, that they were right about this. I think there are areas where we won't be able to hold the levels that we reached before.
On the other hand, this campaign has shown to people in the areas where they are fighting, whether it is here in Dublin-North Central or in Sligo-Leithrim, or in CavanMonaghan, or in Limerick, that the movement has not disappeared. The ease with which the militants were pulled back into this campaign and the enthusiasm with which they themselves came back to take on this fight is very positive. It puts a big responsibility on us not to lose our momentum again.
Q. Have the problems of disunity that you mentioned been overcome?
A. In the short time available, it was impossible to put together the sort of anti-imperialist united front that we wanted. It would have been necessary to have discussions with Sinn Fein, the IRSP, PD, and independents such as myself and arrive at a basic program on which we could fight a united-front campaign. Of course, the question of abstentionism hasn't been resolved at all.
So, at a very limited level, what we started off with was a nonaggression pact. That is, the different organizations or independents will fight the elections on fairly similar bases. They will not fight each other. Everybody recognized that fighting the elections was the thing to do. In fact, this time even the abstentionists are hoping that I will win.
Q. That is, they couldn't have anything to do with such a thing themselves, but they're still thinking it would be marvelous luck if you won.
A. That's right.
Q. In the Irish general elections, the H-Block movement broadened. Has there been any similar broadening in this campaign?
A. The difference between my campaign and those in other areas is that there it is essentially the H-Block activists that have been pulled back in. In this district we have put together a marriage of the H-Block activists with whole layers of dissident radicals, many of whom were never involved in the H-Block campaign in any real sense.
People are looking for a fighting campaign on social issues, for independent working-class action on social issues?
A. That's right. This election campaign has successfully challenged the partition idea that separates the national question from what people down here on this side of the British-imposed border call "working-class politics."
In the H-Block campaign we realized that what we needed was fifty years of partition education to try to overcome in the length of time it took ten men to die, and we couldn't do it.
I think that many people in the campaign realized that the absence of a strong anti-imperialist working-class tradition in the South was what really beat us. There is a strong feeling now that what we can do is start building it.
2. Do you think that this campaign represents a step toward the formation of a mass revolutionary workers party?
A. I don't think that we are very clear yet about what it means in real terms. In principle that is what it means, in principle that is what people are looking for. In campaigning in the constituency, I find that that's what a lot of unorganized people are looking for.
We started off trying to halt a demoralization, and at this stage in the campaign we think we have a fighting chance of actually ending up after the election further along the road than we thought, that we have a fighting chance of getting a seat here.
It always happens in an election campaign that the people you most convince of the correctness of your argument are the people who work for you. So, the estimation of winning a seat might be overoptimistic. But certainly the impact of
the alternative we offered was bigger than we thought it would be, and we may have much bigger opportunities than we expected to get something going.
Q. It's certainly true that the sort of campaign workers that you have attracted to your campaign give some indication of what the nucleus of a mass revolutionary workers party could be. They seem well rooted in their communities and intelligent, militant working people with a considerable experience already of radical politics of one kind or another.
A. This is the first time that I have fought an urban seat. It is the first time that I have actually gone out to organize trade-unionized working people where they are.
What I find when I go up and knock on thier doors is that they tell me what is needed in this country. They're the people who say, what we need to do is to build an independent voice, an independent organization for working-class people, what we need is to put together a political party that has no interest, that won't go to try to see what it can get out of Fianna Fail or Fine Gael (the bourgeois parties).
The H-Block movement has shown a way to overcome the sectarianism and division in the labor movement. On the doorsteps, many people who had nothing to do with the H-Block movement will tell you that we need something like the National H-Block Committee to fight on issues like unemployment and housing and the fact that we were being mugged by the multinational companies. If we could put the same numbers of people on the street on those issues and build that kind of a movement, we'd go somewhere.
The H-Block campaign is a practical example of something that works. It makes people look and say, well, we should apply that to our own
You don't have to try to find some way of presenting the national struggle and the economic struggle in the same context. People can actually see them in the one context. What they want to know is what you're going to do about it.
Q. That is, the National H-Block Committee was able to organize peoparliament doesn't do anything for them. But they want democratic representation, some way of imposing majority rule.
A. That's the gut feeling people have. At this stage they haven't thought it out.
It's also interesting the number of people who say when you get into a discussion with them that what we need here is a movement like Solidarnosc. These are ordinary people, not out of the Labour Party or any split from it, just ordinary people thinking out their problems.
I find a lot of trade-union people who are not in political parties, a lot of trade-union people coming out of the factories wear Solidarity badges. There are various kinds of badge wearers. Those who wear anti-apartheid movement badges, nuclear disarmament badges, are usually in the twenty-fiveish age group and from Labour Party backgrounds. But the politically unorganized rank-and-file trade-union member seems to be wearing a Solidarity badge.
Q. A right-wing candidate here tried to use the issue of Poland against you, saying that you were for socialism and that meant the sort of repression that is going on in Poland. What was the effect?
A. He fell flat on his face. We were able to show that it was people like us who actually organized public support for Solidarnosc. I also pointed to the fact that Lech Walesa supported the demands of the hunger strikers, and the right-winger in question, Sean "Dublin Bay" Loftus, did not. I said that what Solidarity was for was the kind of democracy for the working people that I am fighting for. So, they dropped the argument of Poland, because it worked against them.
Q. Although parliamentary politics are a rigged game, there is obviously a very important democratic aspect to the sort of campaign you are waging. You have to organize groups of people and you have to go out and convince people to work for you and to vote for you. That's part of the problem with the Republicans, isn't it? Their fundamental concept is that it is the daring, initiative, and dedication of small groups that matters. You show your strength, changing, but they don't know it either. The Republicans know that for all their weaknesses the hunger strike campaign, the National H-Block Committee, mass action and democratic organization worked. They have to take account of that so they are slowly shifting. This is largely imperceptible, but it creates crises when definite decisions have to be made. It probably produces a turnover in their membership.
2. When members educated in the old line drop out?
A. That's right.
Q. But why then have the Republicans been seeming to go backward politically since the end of the hunger strike? Before that their paper, "An Phoblacht-Republican News" had a lot of political vitality and was developing. In the last months, it has been strikingly empty politically. They've hardly said any thing about Poland, for example, although they claim to, and do, represent the Irish revolutionary nationalist tradition that has been historically closely linked to Poland.
A. In fairness to them, everybody fights their own corner first; it requires some kind of political perspective to be able to relate that to the struggles of other people. And since the end of the hunger strike, it has been the republicans who have been cracked down on, and for some time they have been finding their main energies concentrated on the defense of their own organization.
In particular, their most political leaders, like Jim Gibney, have been picked off. He was a key person in the development of the H-Block campaign. Now he is in prison in Belfast on charges and will probably remain there for a year to a year and a half before he is even tried.
At the height of the mass movement, people like Jim Gibney could not have been arrested. Now he's being charged with offenses committed in 1975-76. And this is on the basis of the testimony of someone described as a born-again Christian, whose mental stability will certainly be questioned. That is an indication of how far back we had fallen in terms of mass organization.
But now we are beginning to reorganize and recover our direction. And we can move forward on the ple in practice to fight for something. give an example, and the people
A. That's right, that's what people are looking for. At the same time, the illusion in parliamentary democracy is still deep here.
Q. But that's a two-sided quesisn't it? People may realize tion, that the politicians lie and that will follow you. That's a fundamental difference from Marxists whose objective is to educate the working people to take their fate into their own hands.
A. Well, in reality the Republicans think the way you describe, but they don't know it. Now, they're basis of gains that have profoundly changed the terms of politics in Ireland. We are going into a harder and harder fight and we need more and more help from our friends internationally, from the workers, revolutionaries, and other fighting peoples.