Working people across the world, especially in Ireland and Britain, need to step up the demand for the British government to stop stalling and open all-party peace talks now, without preconditions, following the bomb that went off in London February 9 killing two people.
Many people interviewed in the press said the bombing was only to be expected, given the lack of any progress towards negotiations. They gave the lie to the claims of Britain's prime minister John Major and Unionist politicians that Protestants bitterly oppose talks. A poll published in the October issue of the Shankill People newspaper in Belfast reported that nearly half the Protestants in the north of Ireland support negotiations without preconditions.
The explosion was a rude reminder to Prime Minister John Major and the British government that they had not defeated the Irish Republican Army when the IRA declared a unilateral cease-fire 17 months ago. London responded to that initiative by throwing up obstacle after obstacle to talks. The bombing came less than two weeks after Major's outrageous proposal for an "elected" negotiating body - in an occupied and gerrymandered sliver of the country of Ireland - that many see as a return to the days of the pro-British Stormont rule. The bomb was a shot across the bow, as one man in Belfast put it.
The cease-fire led to a reduction in tension and more relaxed lives for working people and youth in the north of Ireland. At the same time harassment by the armed forces of the state did not cease. As Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams put it in an article in the February 12 Guardian, "We watched as Private Lee Clegg [who had been jailed for shooting dead a young girl] was released and then promoted...as Irish prisoners were mistreated in English jails, as plastic bullets were fired at peaceful demonstrators, as RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] raids wrecked nationalist homes. We pointed out, with growing desperation, that there could be no negotiated peace without peace negotiations."
Major's stalling flows from the weakness of the British ruling class. They have no plan for what they want to come out of negotiations, but know that they cannot expect to take at the negotiating table what they have not won on the ground. However in today's world of increasing instability, economic crisis, and competition between the imperialist countries, they are forced to confront the fact that 75 years of armed repression have failed to break the resistance to British rule in the six counties of Ireland still corralled inside the United Kingdom - as the British state is properly called.
The driving force of this resistance comes from the Catholic working-class ghettoes of the north, where two weeks ago 10,000 people marched in protest at the 1972 massacre of civil rights demonstrators by the British army. The march was bigger than in previous years and included for the first time substantial numbers of people from the south of Ireland, showing the effect of the cease-fire in making people more confident to engage in politics.
The British government is also under pressure from its rivals in Washington. The economic and political interests of U.S. imperialism would be far better served by a united Ireland subject to its domination than the current partitioned market in which British imperialism cannot establish stable conditions for business. That's why the Clinton administration has taken its distance from Major and sought to play the peace broker in Ireland. But the U.S. imperialists will have to confront in their turn the aspirations of the Irish people, who have not spent 700 years fighting to throw off British oppression only to kowtow before another master.
There will be no peace in Ireland until it is independent and free. Workers and youth worldwide can help by throwing our weight behind the pickets to defend Irish political prisoners, the marches demanding the British troops get out of Northern Ireland, and the call for all-party talks now.