THE PRO-Imperialists won the May 27 referendum on the Single European Act (SEA), allowing them to continue binding the country closer to the more specifically imperialist and military aspects of the EEC. The vote had been provoked by a Supreme Court ruling that Dublin's adherence to the SEA was unconstitutional. KEN MOORE reports on the results from Dublin. THE TURNOUT was an all time low of 44 per cent. The yes vote was concentrated in farming areas, that have benefited from EEC agricultural subsidies, and middle-class urban areas. The no vote was strongest in the urban working-class neighborhoods, such as Theresa's Gardens in the south inner-city area of Dublin, where the no votes outnumbered the yes votes by
Two coalitions fought for a no vote. One, the Constitutional Rights Committee, followed a non-class and non-political approach, including right-wing Catholic forces that argued that getting too close to the EEC would bring in "evils," such as abortion and divorce. One of the slogans they raised, for example, was "Don't let your TD [teachta dala, member of parliament] bring in VD"! Prominent figures in the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child and Family Solidarity campaigned for it.
This coalition was also supported by Sinn Fein, the Communist Party, and other progressive forces who thought that the propan international level, which will end up impoverishing all wage earners in the capitalist world. It is better to fight back together in every country against any austerity policy, and to fight against unemployment on an international scale by demanding a drastic reduction of the working week without loss of wages.
It is better at one stroke to wipe out the third world debt than to encourage lower wages there. It is better to fight for anti-capitalist solutions to the crisis and for a socialist perspective on a world and continental level than to continue the race into the abyss long-term mass unemployment, social regression, poverty, "the dual society", the strong state, a dismantled workers' movement and war. * er strategy was to go for the maximum vote against SEA, without raising any "divisive" political questions. Needless to say, this did not stop the right from pushing its own reactionary point of view.
The other coalition took the name "Cosain" ("Defend"), the Coalition for Peace and Neutrality. It was led by Irish CND and was headed up by Roger Cole, a socialist republican member of the Labor Party, Carol Fox of Irish CND and Peadar Kirby, an activist on third-world issues. It gathered together third-world solidarity groups, peace groups and left-wing activists. It included groups influenced by liberation theology.
In practice, both coalitions worked together, and the lines between them were blurred in constituency groups.
The three bourgeois parties - Fianna Fail and Fine Gael and the Progressive Democrats — had no real campaigns. The first, which traditionally makes a nationalist appeal, was a bit shame-faced, as they had indulged in some populist nationalist rhetoric before gaining power in the recent general elections. In the Dail [parliament], they
The Workers Party, a sectarian "socialist" party left over from the "Official" wing of the republican movement, campaigned for a no vote, issuing its own literature. This was a major bid by them to be seen as the only credible left-wing opposition to the EEC.
In the Labor Party, only the left wing fought for a no vote. The party leader, Dick Spring, advocated a yes vote. The major unions, such as the Irish Transport and General Workers Union and the Workers' Union of Ireland supported a no vote.
In the campaign against the Single European Act, no major forces put forward a clear anti-EEC position, offering a socialist alternative. That was needed, in particular since Ireland has the highest unemployment and emigration rates of any state in Western Europe, with a third-world-type debt that is strangling working-class tax payers. In the absence of believable alternatives to the EEC and its consequences, many people accept it.
People's Democracy, the Irish section of the Fourth International, put this position at a public meeting in Dublin, and a layer of activists responded to its plea for a consistent left-wing anti-EEC position. *
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