Vol. 71/No. 13      April 2, 2007

To maintain its rule after partitioning Ireland in 1920, the British rulers subjected Catholics in the north to discrimination, with the cops enforcing this arrangement. When a civil rights struggle erupted in the late 1960s, the British government imposed a military occupation to repress the rebellious Catholic population. Today London maintains 8,500 troops in northern Ireland.

In January, cops revealed they had colluded with pro-British paramilitaries in the murder of 10 people in Belfast, giving the killers immunity and blocking searches for their weapons.

As the fight for Irish self-determination unfolded, the slogan “Disband the RUC!” became popular. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was the forerunner of today’s police in northern Ireland. Like the RUC, the PSNI is overwhelmingly made up of Protestants. Irish freedom fighters did not just “distrust” the cops, as Mosquera noted, but recognized that they were a part of the state that fought to prevent Irish independence.

Unable to break the resistance, the British government in 1998 signed the Good Friday agreement, which instituted an elected assembly in the north. London was to reduce its military presence and the Irish Republican Army agreed to decommission its weapons, but London has stalled on implementing some of its promises.

London is keen to draw Sinn Fein into administering the new setup, including the cops, and has used the establishment of the assembly to pressure it to this end.

The January Sinn Fein conference adopted a motion to “authorise our elected representatives to participate in local policing structures.” British prime minister Anthony Blair applauded the decision as “historic.”

The cops have not changed their role. They are not neutral. They defend the system that exploits working people and maintains imperialist oppression and a divided Ireland. The cops that colluded with loyalist paramilitaries were only doing their job—whatever is necessary to back British rule, including organizing executions. This is not limited to northern Ireland: the police killing of electrician Jean Charles de Menezes in London in 2005 was not a “mistake” but part of the cops’ role in the British rulers’ “war on terror,” which includes moves to expand cop detention without trial.

Brutal methods are also used by the cops in the Republic of Ireland, where the capitalist rulers have sought to block any common struggle with fighters in the north. In the 1970s the Irish cops ran a so-called Heavy Gang that beat confessions out of “terrorist” suspects.

As capitalism heads deeper into crisis, the rulers will intensify the use of such methods against struggles by working people. In Ireland these struggles will combine with the fight to end British rule, in which working people and their allies will need to rely on their own actions, not on the institutions of the enemy class such as the cops.

Sinn Fein’s decision to back the PSNI is consistent with the course its leadership has been pursuing. This has included reliance on armed actions in the past, in combination with political maneuvers, to reach a negotiated accommodation with the oppressors.

Such middle-class leaderships have been at the helm of other national liberation struggles. They have not proved capable of mobilizing and leading workers and peasants as the backbone of a revolutionary democratic movement that would fight to end imperialist domination, give land to the tillers, establish the right to armed self-defense, and the organization of the working class in order to act in the interests of the producing classes. But that is the political course necessary if British rule is to be taken on and defeated in Ireland.

Without clarity on the character of the cops, opponents of British rule will find it difficult to wage an effective struggle for national liberation.  
 
 
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