Victory for the the anti-imperialist movement The May 15 local elections in Northern Ireland were a watershed in the development of the anti-imperialist struggle. The revolutionary nationalist political organization, Sinn Fein, succeeded in holding the mass vote that it won in the wake of the H-Block prisoners' hunger strikes in 1980-1981. It did so despite a whithering propaganda barrage from the capitalist media and all the established authorities in the British Isles and despite a new reactionary electoral law.
Using the pretext of combating impersonation at the polls, the Thatcher government pushed through a bill opening the way for harassment of electoral workers and in general making it much more difficult to vote, especially for the poor and the young. The new law requires that prospective voters present iron-clad identification, drivers' licences, passports, and the like, documents that the young and the poor, who vote predominantly for Sinn Fein, do not have. Many people were stopped from voting at the polls by police and Sinn Fein must have been the major loser.
Despite all these obstacles, however, the revolutionary nationalists won over 12% of the total vote and sixty seats in the local councils.
council in 1980 by pro-Sinn Fein voters before the revolutionary nationalists decided to contest elections.)
McAnulty, the single PD candidate this time, got 131 first preference votes in a Belfast district, more than twice the total for the Communist Party standardbearer, and also got a large proportion of the Sinn Fein preferences after those cast for its own candidates. Sinn Fein had advised its supporters to cast preference votes for PD.
I accompanied a team of PD doorto-door canvasers in West Belfast one morning just before the elections. They got a generally quite friendly reception, and most of the younger people bought copies of the PD paper, Socialist Republic/ Poblacht Shoisialach.
McAnulty pointed out that he understood the desire of Sinn Fein leaders to strengthen their organization but he hoped that they would not neglect the need for building broad mass-action movements at the same time. He thought that in particular it was important to build a united-front movement in defense of Sinn Fein's democratic rights on the councils, among other things in order to reach sections of the nationalist population that still support the SDLP on the basis or parlamentary musions. on the basis of parliamentary illusions.
In fact, the SDLP remains a major obstacle to the anti-imperialist struggle. It is still the majority Catholic party, having gotten about 16 percent of the vote this time and about 100 council seats.
Moreover, McAnulty stressed, many Northern nationalists still have illusions in the so-called New Ireland Forum promoted by the Dublin government as a scheme for "solving" the Northern problem. A broad campaign is necessary to expose it more effectively.
This was an unusually quiet election. But at the same time there were signs of deepening reflection on the part of the anti-imperialist vanguard. For example, for the first time a significant amount of the campaign material was in the Irish language - indicating the growing affect of the massive nationalist cultural movement set in motion by the H-Block campaign.
Historically, the Irish-language movement has been associated with an aspiration for a radical reorientation of Irish society. Its new growth indicates that a massive vanguard has rededicated itself to working for a new Ireland, and their thinking can certainly move on to a fuller range of political and social questions, as did that of the Gaelic enthusiasts who built the movement that dealt British imperialism its first major defeat in Ireland in 1916-21.
Gerry FOLEY
BELFAST - "Sinn Fein has translated the emotional support it won in the H-Block campaign into a formidable political machine," Bernadette Devlin results ey hey succeeded in isciplining said, commenting on the their vote and using it to maximum advantage within the proportional representation system. The result of these elections was a major victory for the anti-imperialist movement. It has revived people's hope in final victory."
A Sinn Fein leader I talked to in Belfast on the eve of the election explained that their fundamental objectives in this election were to strengthen their organization and to consolidate and discipline their vote, that is, to "build an ideologically secure base." He pointed out that in the elections for the Northern Ireland Assembly, the first elections that Sinn Fein contested across the North, their inexperience in electoral politics and a lack of consciousness on the part of their voters had enabled Austin Currie, a particularly despised bourgeois Catholic politician to gain a seat on the strength of Sinn Fein transfers. That was an example of the sort of thing they wanted to avoid.
On the other hand, the Sinn Fein representative noted that the party leadership understand that they have to give more thought to the problem of cutting further into the vote for the Catholic bourgeois party, the Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP).
"For that we need a political program" he said. He stressed that the party was still very inexperienced as a political organization and thought that it would take five or six years to put it into the shape they wanted. One of the major objectives of Sinn Fein election work, in fact, was to build up an intermediate leadership.
The election of a whole body of elected representatives now presents Sinn Fein with new and more complex political problems. For example, the response of the pro-imperialist Unionists has been to call for a boycott of Sinn Fein councillors. Even the SDLP has floated the idea of a bloc of "all constitutionalists" against the "men of violence."
At the same time, the powers of local government in general are under attack from the Thatcher government. Obviously also, the problem of integrating the work of Sinn Fein councillors into the organization's overall revolutionary perspective is a complicated one.
Sinn Fein began before the elections to prepare for tackling these problems by setting up a mechanism for political direction of its councillors by Sinn Fein committees. Moreover, during the campaign it showed a fresh openess to discussion of political problems and to collaboration with other revolutionists.
"Most militants thought that the most important thing in this election was to assure the biggest possible Sinn Fein vote," John McAnulty, an outgoing Belfast councillor and leader of People's Democracy, Irish section of the Fourth International, told me. "We agreed with them in general. But we also thought that it was important to run our own campaign to begin to raise the questions of strategy and perspectives of where we were going to go after these elections." (Two PD leaders were elected to the