British miners and Irish rebels -
La common struggle The following article is from the September 27 issue of Internationalen, the paper of the Swedish section of the Fourth International. All of the quotes have been retranslated from the Swedish.
SHEFFIELD - "On British TV, the Catholics always seem to be troublemakers. In fact, it is the Catholics who are the oppressed.
"If people at home could have seen what we saw there, there would be a reaction, as there was this spring when people could see on TV how the police beat up unarmed pickets at the Battle of Orgreave?
"We are on the same side as the nationalists there. We have the same enemy - Thatcher."
That was Guy speaking. He is a miner from Armthorpe in South Yorkshire. He and a dozen other British miners were part of a trade-union group that has just visited the civil-war-wracked North of Ireland.
They came back overwhelmed by their impressions. And moved by the support they got.
During the time that they were in Ireland, they met a lot of Irish nationalists and visited their communities. They also participated in the big demonstration on August 12, on the thirteenth anniversary of the British government's decision to introduce internment without trial. It was an impressive experience for them.
The police in the North of Ireland and the British army attacked the demonstration and staged a veritable pogrom. One person was killed and about a dozen badI wounded.
mal Viewpoint October 15, 1984
"I felt ashamed to be a British subject after what happened," Wayne said. who is also from South Yorkshire. Brit ish soldiers fired rubber bullets right into crowds that were not doing anything. They shot to kill!"
And Steve, from a mining district in Lancashire, added:
demonstration we saw that they were not firing to stop some skirmish or at any place in particular. These devils were not out to solve any problem that might have arisen. They were out after anyone who was in the demonstration. As far as they were concerned, anyone who was there was an enmy.
"It's the same in our own strike. When the police come to some place, there is trouble. Otherwise, it's quiet."
During their time in Belfast, the British lived in various Catholic ghettos around the city. The Yorkshire miners were put up in Ardoyne, which is entirely surrounded by Protestant neighborhoods.
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"It's fantastic to see how oppressed people can organize their community, how they can build up human relationships despite deprivation.
"We were also struck by how people help the women whose husbands are in prison. It's like the sort of thing that happens in our strike when workers' families get food packages from other groups of workers and other unions."
That was Wayne's comment.
Guy was pondering over what could have happened to make the British soldiers play such a vicious role in this longdrawn-out war against a whole population.
"Before we went to the North of Ireland, I was sitting and chatting with a soldier in a pub. His father was a miner. Now he was a solider in the British army in the North of Ireland. Before he went into the army he didn't hate anybody. He never wanted to shoot anything. I wondered what they had done to him to make him into a killer, a murderer!
"I was ashamed. class lads. They are deserting their class. But we can't 'brainwash' them back, the way the army brainwashed them for its purposes. talked to is very active in the picketing. But his son is fighting the same sort of people he came from.
"If only soldiers like him could mutiny! Like the Sikhs did in India, when their temple was stormed and they shouted, We're not firing on our own people!' That would be class solidarity."
After their visit, the British workers were convinced that the nationalists in Ireland have been subjected to the same sort of slander campaign they have. They are intensely aware that their own future is part of a common struggle for common interests:
"With what is happening in the miners' strike, with the spiraling unemployment, we see our own future happening in the North of Ireland. That's what we want to tell the British workers now."
I was the fifth person, and so the rain ran down my back for the next half hour.
One question was enought to start a discussion. Morris told how Margaret Thatcher had been preparing her attack on the miners' union for years. He talked about how she and her reactionary sup-
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