Sinn Fein setback in Northern special elections THE 15 by-elections held in Northern Ireland on January 23 had virtually the character of a special general election to test the response of both the Unionist and nationalist communities to the Anglo-Irish agreement signed on November 15 by the Thatcher government and the cravenly neocolonialist FitzGerald government in Dublin.
IRELAND nationalist program, was 109,500. Of this, the SDLP got 70,917 and SF, 38,821. Thus of the vote cast for nationalist parties, the SEP got 64.5%, as against 35.5% for SF. This compares with the 43% of the nationalist vote that SF got in the 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, which was the first time it participated in a general election. Its percentage in the May 1985 local elections was slightly less than that.
Moreover, the SDUP captured a second seat in the Newry-Armagh constituency, giving it now two MPs to one for SF. The SDLP's political maneuvering room increased more than the numerical results indicate, because its new MP, Seamus Mallon, represents the more nationalist wing of the party. Thus, the SDLP is now in a better position to claim to represent a broad spectrum of nation. represent a broad spectrum of nationalist opinion.
The renegade ex-republican Workers Party (WP) increased its vote from a marginal 10,000 to 18,000, about half of the Sinn Fein vote. For all political purposes this party is a "left" Catholic Unionist party, but because of its republican past it seems to have collected a mainly nationalist vote by running candidates in Protestant majority constituencies where the nationalist parties did not put up candidates.
For example, the WP got 6,978 votes in the Upper Bann, where there was no nationalist candidate; 3,563 in North Belfast, Where there was was no nationalist candidate; and 8,328 in the Lagan Valley, where there was no nationalist candidate. In no constituency where there were nationalist candidates did it get over a thousand votes. Its most common score in such areas was about 500. SDLP gains
The SDLP vote increased relative to SF in all four constituencies with a potential nationalist majority - MidUlster, Fermanagh-South Tyrone, South Down, and Newry-Armagh. In the first two, SF had been the majority nationalist party; in the second two, the SDLP.
In mid-Ulster, the SDLP came within less than a thousand votes of Danny Morrison, one of the main Sinn Fein leaders. An unknown very young SLP candidate, Adrian Colton, got 13,021 votes against Morrison's 13,998. In the 1983 election, SF got 16,096 (1) votes
1. The traditional Catholic Unionist party, the Alliance party, a fervent supporter of the Anglo-Irish deal, got about 1,700 votes in Mid-Ulster in 1983. It did not stand a candidate in the constituency this time, so presumably its support went to the SDLP.
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The election was forced by the Unionists (who are divided into two main parties, the Democratic Unionist Party led by lan Paisley and the Official Unionist Party led by James Molyneaux). The DUP and the OUP held all but two of the seats in the London parliament for the six-county enclave of Northern Ireland.
The other two seats were held respectively by John Hume in West Derry, a representative of the Catholic bourgeois party, the so-called Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP); and Gerry Adams in West Belfast for the revolutionary nationalist party, Sinn Fein (SF). By-elections, therefore, were not held in these two constituencies.
The MPs for the two Unionist parties resigned en bloc, although there were some visible differences over the tactic, in protest against the Anglo-Irish agreement. They complained that it gives Dublin a voice in the internal affairs of the six-county enclave, thereby violating the national rights of the Unionist people as British citizens.
In fact, the treaty makes no concrete concessions to nationalist aspirations or interests. To the contrary, in signing it the Dublin government for the first time granted the Unionists the right to maintain their enclave as long as they choose. The agreement simply accords Dublin a formal consultative role, the minimum necessary to enable it to justify increased collaboration with British repression to voters in the supposedly independent part of the country.
The essential purpose of the agreement is to facilitate the political isolation and military and police repression of the national liberation movement. In fact, British secretary of state for Northern Ireland, Tom
International Viewpoint 24 February 1986
King, was obliged to say as much openly in an attempt to tranquilize the paranoid reflexes of the reactionary Unionist colonial caste, as well as of rightist imperialist diehards on the "mainland" itself.
Nonetheless, the Unionist backlash was inevitable. Now, even more than in the past, any political maneuvering by British imperialism in Northern Ireland cannot avoid sooner or later jostling the colonial caste.
With the decline of the traditional Protestant-owned industries in the North, the privileges of the Protestants depend more and more directly on their political role as repressors of the nationalist population in the North and as a dam against Irish national aspirations.
In the elections, the Anglo-Irish political operation scored some points. The Unionist parties failed to bring out the vote of half a million that they were aiming for (the total population of the enclave is about a million and a half, about 900,000 of whom are Protestants).
At the same time, the bourgeois Catholic party, the SDLP, which has pinned its hopes for recovering political hegemony over the nationalist population on success of the Anglo-Irish maneuver, scored important gains. Conversely, Sinn Fein suffered its first important setbacks since the end of the H-Block movement.
At 418,230, the total Unionist vote in the 15 constituencies was only 5,291 more than in the 1983 general elections. Furthermore, tactical differences among the Unionists seemed to be sharpening, with a leading OUP MP, Harold McCusker, announcing that he would boycott the Westminster parliament.
The combined vote for the SDLP and SF, the only parties with a
against the SDLP's 12,044. In Fermanagh-South Tyrone, where Sinn Fein first entered the electoral arena in the 1981 campaign that elected H-Block hunger striker Bobby Sands, the revolutionary nationalist party suffered a serious setback.
Owen Carron, Sands' campaign manager and political heir, got 15,278 votes against 12,081 for Austin Currie, a particularly odious Catholic bourgeois politician. Carron's vote was down from over 20,000 in the 1983 parliamentary elections. Moreover, immediately after the vote, the Sinn Fein candidate, who had been on bail on a charge of illegally possessing a firearm, went on the run, effectively removing himself from legal politics in Northern Ireland for the foreseeable future.
Where the SDLP had held a lead over SF before, this time it pushed it to the electoral sidelines. In 1983 in South Down, SF polled 4,074 votes against 20,145 for the SDLP. This time, the SDLP got 23,121, and SF less than 3,000. In NewryArmagh, in 1983, SF got 9,928 against 17,434 for the SDLP. This time, it got 6,609 against 22,694 for the SDLP.
It is possible that the SDLP profited significantly from tactical voting in Newry-Armagh, since Mallon was the only nationalist candidate given a chance of winning a seat away from a Unionist. But this was only part of a much larger pattern.
Gerry Adams commented on the election results saying that SF had been opposed to letting the Unionists make them into a referendum but that the SDLP had played into the latter's hands:
... we said before the elections to the SDLP that the elections should be ignored by nationalists to expose the so-called referendum or at least some arrangement should have been come to so that anti-Unionists could have had the opportunity to return their candidates."
According to the January 25 Irish Times, Adams said that if the SDLP had been willing to accept an electoral pact with Sinn Fein, six nationalist candidates could have been elected. The pact SF proposed was for dividing up the constituencies.
The SF leader minimized the importance of the election results, saying: *This was a very unique election ... I think some of our voters stayed at home and others backed the strongest horse." He went on to remark, according to a summary by the Irish Times, "Sinn Fein opposition to the Anglo-Irish Agreement was still the correct policy for nationalist party and [Adams] said in the long term, as people came to realise that the agreement would not 6
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Members of the Democratic Unionist Party demonstrate inside Hillsborough (DR)
change the Northern State, the SDLP gains would be drastically reduced."
Morrison said, "The outer ring of the party's support may have been susceptible to the promises of peace and reconciliation around the corner."
Some days after the elections, Tom Hartley, a central leader of SF, stressed to me in Dublin that the elections had showed that Sinn Fein had built up a hard core of electoral support that had held firm despite illusions in the Anglo-Irish agreement.
A few days before the vote, I talked to Martin Ward of the SF National Executive at the party's mid-Ulster election office in Omagh. Ward anticipated that the SF vote would decline some. He noted such negative factors as "illusions" in the Anglo-Irish accord, the fact many SF supporters did not see the need for fighting the election, and a notably better financed SDLP campaign.
On the other hand, Ward stressed that the election machine that SF had built up remained solid and was ticking over smoothly. For this area, it included about 150 workers, ten to twenty of them full time, although the party had no paid election staff.
(Irish Times correspondent Fionnuala O'Connor was impressed by the impecuniousness of the Sinn Fein campaign in South Down in contrast to a slick, well-heeled SDLP operation. SF did not even have enough cars, she wrote.)
I did not get the impression that either the SF workers or leaders expected the sort of setback that occurred. Generally they seemed confident in the effectiveness of the election machine they had built up.
SF activists and leaders seemed to think only in terms of their party steadily building itself up and the SDLP steadily discrediting itself. Some argued that SF had won the bulk of the youth, and that since young people were no longer emigrating as in the past, it was only a matter of time until they overcame their rivals. No one seemed to have much interest in initiatives to develop broader campaigns.
In short, there seemed to be little or no sensitivity to the need for political strategy. This is despite the fact that at the time of the local elections last year some republican leaders talked of the need for a new strategy to take on the SDLP. (2)
Despite the historical self-confidence the republicans expressed about the eventual demise of the SDLP, their attitude toward it has gone through big swings. In the early stages of the H-Block movement, they tended to regard it as simply a traitor party that had to be treated as such. In this election, they offered to divide up the constituencies with it in the name of pannationalist unity, without any political conditions.
However, this election was about the Anglo-Irish agreement. The SDLP was for it; SF was against it. So, the SDLP vote was counted as a vote against SF. In fact, the most important stake the imperialists and neocolonialists had in this election was to insure an increased SDLP vote against SF. So, whatever points the republicans may have gained by showing that they were more interested in nationalist unity than the SDLP, were almost certainly far outweighed by the confusion this tactic must have caused among nationalist voters about what was at stake in the vote.
Moreover, the question of what the SDLP is seems still open in SF. Notably, rural SF leaders and activists seem to define it by subjective criteria ("cowardess," among other things). The Belfast leaders, on the other hand, tend to define it as a "class party," the majority of which at least consists of middle-class people irreducibly opposed to a revolutionary struggle. Neither attitude, in fact, seems to lead anywhere in dealing with a bourgeois leadership of a section of an oppressed nationality.
There was an apparent contradic-
See my article on the Northern local elections in 'International Viewpoint,' No. 77, June 3, 1985, entitled "Victory for the Anti-Imperialist Movement." International Viewpoint 24 February 1986
SOUTH AFRICA tion between the republicans' denunciations of big money being pumped into the SDLP by imperialist and neocolonialist godfathers and their claims that basically nothing very important was at stake in the elections.
For example, Paddy McManus, vice chair of the Belfast Executive of SF, told me the day before the vote that he estimated the SDLP had spent £20,000 on newspaper ads alone, as against £2,000 to £3,000 spent by SF for that. He pointed to the role of U.S. political agencies in building up John Hume and the SDLP.
No republican I spoke to seemed to link the republican electoral breakthrough in the North to the mass movement built around the H-block issue. Some explained that it was simply the result of the decision of the republican leadership to contest elections. The support had been there; it was just a matter of tapping it.
All the republicans I talked to said, in the same vein as Gerry Adams, that the Anglo-Irish Agree-