Damn the EU: We want our country…The 1986 Single European Act          [1987]

[The article below was written by Desmond Greaves in the May 1987 issue of the Irish Democrat, on the eve of the referendum in Ireland on the Single European Act. This treaty gave the then European Community its single “internal” market, to be bought into being by a major extension of qualified majority voting among the EC Member States. It also presaged a future  European Monetary Union. This referendum was precipitated by the legal action taken by economist Raymond  Crotty before the Irish  Supreme Court, in which that Court lain down that treaties that surrender sovereignty in Ireland must be put to popular referendum – the Irish Government at the time having sought to ratify this treaty by simple parliamentary majority vote.]

Damn Your financiers – we want our country

Nobody will dispute that Captain Boyle would be as right today as he was in 1923. The world is in a terrible state of chassis.

The crisis affects every aspect of social life – economic, political, cultural and military. There can never have been an epoch in world history when tensions were so acute, and their origins so deep-seated.

What is the reason? The reason is that historical development has put a question mark over the survival of capitalism.

I’m not talking about the corner shop. I’m not talking about the plumber and his two sons. I’m not talking about the labour-only contractor, little as I like him, or the man who runs a family business with a hundred workers. These are all capitalists. But they are only fleas on the backs of the real big boys.

What I am talking about are the mighty transnational agglomerates, with turnovers as big as the budgets of whole States, people with their hands into everything, in every country they can get into, who move investments from country to country like chessmen on the world board, and who take the vital decisions elected governments are supposed to sell to their deluded peoples.

And do I really say history has set a question mark over such eminently successful institutions? I do, and I’ll explain why. The aim of any capitalist is expansion. Admittedly he doesn’t always get it, but the greater his capital the better his chances. What happens when a thousand multi-millionaires all try to expand? They get so vast that the world is too small to hold them. To put it crudely, it’s shit or bust.

Of course they can try to expand into each other’s gardens. We see the result when American claps a hundred percent tariff on Japanese goods and threatens a trade war that could plunge the lot of them into a devastating slump.

They can try to expand into the so-called Third World. That has been going on for some time. The result is one country after another crippled by mountainous debts. What is the shape of things to come? Brazil has declared a moratorium. She cannot pay. Castro suggests all the others do the same. What wouldn’t they like to do to Castro! If they take his advice the whole structure of international finance could come tumbling down like a castle built of cards.

They could try to expand into the socialist world. But the socialist world will only let them in to a limited degree and in a subordinate position. There were one or two indiscretions when Reagan took office. It was suggested that the United States should put it to Russia to let them in or American would bomb them a way in. A dangerous game. And Reagan restricted himself to calling them names.

There is only one field where expansion is limitless – the field of armament production. It is production for storage. It is production for intimidation. It is production without a consumer; nobody needs to be paid wages to buy it; but it is paid out of wages that are not paid. Only a thoroughly frightened population, scared of an external enemy, would tolerate it. So the arms race feeds fear as ever more fantastic methods of fighting are invented, and the time when the arms end up being consumed draws ever closer.

Can anybody tell me that what I have described is a recipe for stability? It is on the country a recipe for instability, for blundering from crisis to crisis, impelled first by this, then by that immediate interest, so that is impossible give a straight answer even to Mr Gorbachev’s simple peace proposals, which unless the peace  movement bestirs itself, may be thrown back in his face on some absurd pretext, or, if they are accepted, are accepted in such a way as to keep the mad dance going.

But it can’t go on forever. Does anybody believe that armaments can be piled up and up, and the holocaust will never come? That nobody will ever drop a match? That debt repudiation, let alone revolution, will not sweep the Third World?

Whether it is military or financial chaos, without question chaos threatens. And what can be done about it?

One can either fall in with the imperialist rat race, make the best of it and help to keep it going as loud as possible. After that the deluge. Or one can endeavour to opt out of it, and that means resistance, economic, political, cultural, and if forced to it military.

The first option is that of Garret FitzGerald, Bilderberg man, hobnobber with Euro-American Japanese bankers in the Trilateral Commission. The second is that of what can be called in its broadest sense Republicanism, within which, as James Connolly argued, the most consistent strand is the socialist.

Now that the Irish Constitution is up for alteration to the order of neo-imperialism, it is just as well to spread out the alternatives clearly and see which way things are going.

Economically, recent governments have carried out the orders of the EEC, the political expression of the Transnationals in Europe, bound by the Treaty of Rome, the treaty that binds them all to preserve capitalism at all costs. The result is the worst unemployment in the history of the State, and an attempt to fleece the workers to pay capitalist debts. Are we in the First World or the Third?

Politically, our hands are being tied more tightly. The chain is getting shorter. In one field after another the ability to defy the financial overlords is being diminished. The aim is “European Union”, something that was explicitly excluded when Ireland entered the EEC in 1973 on the spurious, lying promise that it was a purely economic arrangement. Political freedom is the right to manage your own purse. And already the political is shading into the military as the great betrayal proceeds.

It is in the field of culture that the most insidious changes have been introduced. Some twenty years ago British newspapers pointed to the national content of Irish education as the great obstacle in the way of securing military control of the country. Obviously to change elementary education you must change the teachers. That meant subverting the universities and colleges. With a few individual exceptions the academics fell in with the new fashion. Before World War 2 Julian Benda wrote about the “Trahison des clercs”. They did it in Ireland too. They always do.

It also meant England’s buying her way into the newspaper and publishing world. Ireland’s national pantheon was systematically plundered of its gods. Support for the Irish language was slowly slackened. Every anti-national influence was tolerated and encouraged. Last year for the first time since 1921 British wars were officially commemorated in Dublin and James Connolly’s grandson was present at an Armistice Day service.

As Ireland was lured back into the British sphere of influence it became clear that the Irish in Britain must be included in the brainwashing. When the Six-County troubles began in 1968, the BBC hadn’t a single expert on Ireland. There was no Irish desk and they used to ring the “Irish Democrat” to find out if a town in the news was in “the north” or “the south”.  Because the object of Partition had been to keep Ireland out of British politics the slogan was “don’t interfere”, so no outlook, no system of beliefs, was necessary in inspect of Ireland

Now the situation had changed. The cultural assimilation of Ireland meant a system of opinions and beliefs must be created that corresponded to the new political requirements. Thus “Irish Studies” were born, and the chickens came clucking after the scattered grain. Nobody seems to have suspected that Sir Keith Joseph [British Education Minister and policy adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher] might have seen that that the grub was laced with ideology. Of course it is not sufficient just to condemn anti-national brainwashing. It is necessary to participate in the studies and see that the contradictions in the imperial position are brought to the fore. The ruling class does not always produce the results it desires. In Ireland officialdom’s frowns and parsimony turned the Gaelic League back into a fighting organisation. 

The anti-national developments listed above should not be seen in a purely Irish context but in relation to world developments and the crisis within imperialism. At the same time they are in accordance with the special pattern of Irish history as can easily be shown.

It was the argument of James Connolly’s “Labour in Irish History” that because it arose from a system implanted in Ireland by England, Irish capitalism was only able to talk nationalism and at all crucial times betrayed the struggle for independence. And remember independence doesn’t mean painting the pillar boxes green, although that’s no harm. It means taking measures to safeguard employment, develop local resources for local advantage, enter into freely negotiated agreements with other countries, in a word to manage one’s own household. Irish capitalism, said Connolly, was linked with British capitalism by a thousand financial strings, and in a crunch situation these always proved stronger than the interests of the Irish people.

It was always the right-wing party that gave in. Redmond handed over the Volunteers to the British Army. Griffith, the apostle of capitalist freedom, accepted the “treaty” of 1921. Garret FitzGerald agreed to the British stance on the occupied  Six Counties, and this shameful capitulation is the only – repeat the only – visible result of the confidence trick known as the Anglo-Irish Agreement.  He himself admitted that his sole interest in the Six-County issue was an destruction of the IRA, and he didn’t even achieve that, for the ructions are hotting up rather than calming down.

The Single European Act is therefore no isolated event. It is the latest and most scandalous climb-down in Irish capitalism’s road of shame. The forthcoming referendum is an opportunity for the Irish working class, the people who have seen their livelihood systematically undermined for the benefit of the transnational monopolies, to cry halt, and declare “Damn your financiers, we want our country.”

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