"The most dangerous thing in the world is if serious political resistance in the North can be confined to a republican ghetto. That is how the establishments North and South have succeeded in the past. The republican ghetto is much bigger today, but it is still a ghetto, a minority of a minority. It was when the resistance spread beyond that ghetto - in 1968-69, in 1972 after Bloody Sunday, in 1981 during the hunger strikes — that the British became seriously worried their position in Ireland."
Frame-up of Birmingham
Six
At the same time, beginning in early December, Anglo-Irish collaboration began to run into a mine-field, made still more explosive by truculently reactionary character of the Thatcher government. The first blowup was over the appeal of six people condemned to life imprisonment for the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974. The six were sentenced on the basis of confessions and forensic evidence in a lynch-mob atmosphere. Evidence was submitted that the confessions were extorted by violence and intimidation and that the so-called forensic evidence was unreliable. Even the violently anti-IRA bishop, Cathal Daly, expressed his low opinion of the British justice that convicted them and refused to admit its error.
No prosecutions after shoot-to-kill inquiry
Then came the conclusion of the so-called Stalker Affair, the driving out of the police force of the official assigned to investigate a series of apparently deliberate murders of unarmed suspected IRA men by British forces in Northern Ireland in 1982. Stalker's accusations were essentially confirmed, but the British attorney-general announced that there would be no prosecutions of the individuals involved The scandal was magnified by the Thatcher government's bellowing calls for sanctions against Stalker.
This scandal was followed up almost immediately by a report that a British soldier sentenced to life for murder in Northern Ireland was being released after serving only a few years. And then a Catholic who had been repeatedly harassed by British forces was "accidentally" shot while crossing the border to play football. At the same time, the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), which criminalizes Irish people living in Britain or travelling to and from it, was made a permanent part of British law.
On top of that, the Thatcher government could not bring itself to observe the least diplomatic niceties in dealing with its Irish collaborators. "Taking the Irish seriously is something British governments are not good at," The Economist commented on February 20. It noted that the British authorities have been ignoring the conditions for extradition included in the Irish extradi-
They failed even to warn the Irish government of the decision that there would be no prosecutions coming out of the shoot-to-kill investigation. The timing of the announcement on the PTA was also considered an affront by the Irish bourgeois politicians, The Economist indicated
So, a public split is opening up again between the Irish bourgeois authorities and their imperialist overlords. At the same time, the Irish question has been propelled again to the forefront of British politics. In all, the conditions seem to be coming together for a revival of a broad movement against imperialist and pro-imperialist repression and oppression.