Victory for the the anti-imperialist movement twice the total for the Communist Party standardbearer, and also got a large proportion of the Sinn Fein preferences after those cast for its own candidates. Sinn Fein had advised its supporters to cast preference votes for PD.
I accompanied a team of PD doorto-door canvasers in West Belfast one
The May 15 local elections in Northern Ireland were a watershed in the development of the anti-imperialist struggle. The revolutionary nationalist
›olitical organization, Sinn Fein, succeeded in holding the mass vote that it won in the wake of the H-Block prisoners' hunger strikes in 1980-1981
It did so despite a whithering propaganda barrage from the capitalist media and all the established authorities in the British Isles and despite a new reactionary electoral law.
Using the pretext of combating impersonation at the polls, the hatcher government pushed through a bill opening the way for harassment of electoral workers and in general making it much more difficult to vote, especially for the poor and the young. The new law requires that the need for building broad mass-action prospective voters present iron-clad identification, drivers licences, passports, and the like, documents that the young and the poor, who vote predominantly for Sinn Fein, do not have. Many people were stopped from voting at the polls by police and Sinn Fein must have been the major
Despite all these obstacles, however, the revolutionary nationalists won over 12% of the total vote and sixty seats in the local councils.
Gerry FOLEY
BELFAST - "Sinn Fein has translated the emotional support it won in the
H-Block campaign into a formidable politsaid, commenting on the
"They succeeded in disciplining their vote and using it to maximum advantage within the proportional represenresult of these was a major victory for the anti-imperialist movement. It has revived people's hope in final victory."
A Sinn Fein leader I talked to in
Belfast on the eve of the election explained that their fundamental objectives in this organization and to consolidate discipline their vote, that is, to "build an ideologically secure base." He pointed out that in the elections for the Northern
Ireland Assembly, the first elections that
Sinn Fein contested across the North, their inexperience in electoral politics and a lack of consciousness on the part of their voters had enabled Austin Currie, a particularly despised bourgeois Catholic politician to gain a seat on the strength of Sinn Fein transfers.
That was an example of the sort of thing they wanted the other hand, the Sinn Fein noted that the representative party leadership understand that they have to give more thought to the problem of into the vote for the further cutting
Social
Catholic bourgeois the party,
Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP).
"For that we need a political program"
he said. He stressed that the party was still very inexperienced as a political organization and thought that it would take five or six years to put it into the shape they wanted. One of the major objectives of Sinn Fein election work, in fact, was to build up an intermediate
The election of a whole body of elected representatives now presents Sinn Fein with new and more complex political
For example, the response of the pro-imperialist Unionists has to call for a boycott of Sinn Fein councillors. Even the SDLP has floated the idea constitutionalists" against the "men of violence."
the same time, the powers of local government in general from the Thatcher government. Obviously also, the problem of integrating the work of Sinn Fein councillors into the organization's overall revolutionary perspective is a complicated one.
Sinn Fein began before the elections to prepare for tackling these problems by setting up a mechanism for political direction of its councillors by Sinn Fein it showed a fresh openess to discussion of political problems and collaboration
"Most militants thought that the most important thing in this election was to assure the biggest possible Sinn Fein vote, John McAnulty, an outgoing Belfast councillor and leader of People's Democracy, Irish section of the Fourth International, told me. "We agreed with them in general. But we also thought that it was important to run our own campaign to begin to raise the questions of strategy and perspectives of where we were going to go after these elections." (Two PD leaders were elected to the morning just before the elections. They got a generally quite friendly reception, and most of the younger people bought copies of the PD paper, Socialist Republic/ Poblacht Shoisialach
McAnulty pointed out that he underthe desire of Sinn Fein leaders to strengthen their organization but he that they would not neglect movements at the same time. He thought that in particular it was important to build a united-front movement in defense of Sinn Fein's democratic rights on the councils, among other things in order to reach sections of the population that still support the SDLP on the basis of parliamentary illusions.
In fact, the SDLP remains a major obstacle to the anti-imperialist struggle. It is still the majority Catholic party, having gotten about 16 percent of the this time and about 100 council MeAnulty stressed, Northern nationalists still have illusions in the so-called New Ireland Forum promoted by the Dublin «solving, government as a problem. A broad campaign is necessary to expose it more effectively.
This was an unusually quiet election. But at the same time there were signs of deepening reflection on the part of anti-imperialist example, for the first time a significant amount of the campaign material in the Irish language - indicating the growing affect of the massive nationalist cultural movement set in motion by the H-Block campaign.
Historically, Irish-language movement has been associated of Irish society. Its new growth indicates that a massive vanguard has rededicated itself to working for a new Ireland, and their thinking can certainly move on to of political did that of the Gaelie enthusiasts who built the movement that dealt British imperialism its first major defeat in Ireland in 1916-21.