Ireland today: interview with Goretti Horgan and Eamonn McCann

Pat Stack talks to Derry based socialists Goretti Horgan and Eamonn McCann about the return of power sharing in the north of Ireland, elections, racist riots, the decline of the DUP and prospects for the left.

Pat Stack

Can I start by asking what you think is the significance of the return of power sharing, and did the strikes that preceded it have an impact on how it came about?

Goretti Horgan

I would say that the restoration of power sharing is significant only insofar as the executive parties, particularly DUP and Sinn Féin, were aware that if they didn’t go back into power sharing soon and make it work, everybody would just give up on it, and that we’d have direct rule with perhaps eventually, some Irish government involvement in it.

Pat Stack

Weren’t there elements of the DUP who would have liked that?

Goretti Horgan

They might have liked direct rule, but they were being told that if there was to be direct rule, there would be more Irish government involvement than previously. We know that the strikes had an effect, because Stormont didn’t sit for three years between 2017 and 2020, and it was only after a public sector strike, a general, public sector strike, that they went back. Similarly, this time, within days of the effective general strike, they’re back. 

Eamonn McCann

I think that the relationship between unionism, the north of Ireland and British governments of all stripes is very important here. The Unionists were saying very strongly, we are not having the return to power sharing. Until the British government took the line that if you don’t have it, we are going to abolish the government and have direct rule, and we will then have to negotiate with the Irish government on what the outcome is going to be. That was a scary prospect for unionism.

Pat Stack

One of the things that caught a lot of headlines here was the fact that for the first time, there was a nationalist majority. What do you think the significance of that is?

Eamonn McCann

It was highly significant. Because, of course, the Northern Ireland state started in 1921/22 on the basis of the dominance of unionists over Catholic nationalists. That was the basis of the one-party state, discrimination and all the rest of it. It remains a significant element. But it is becoming vaguer and is becoming more jumbled and more intertwined and entangled. The direction of travel is towards a united Ireland. That’s not to say that there aren’t huge difficulties in bringing that into effect. People say now we’ll have a united Ireland in five years. I don’t think so. I can remember slogans on walls in the Bogside, and more particularly in Belfast that said, Ireland free in ‘73. Loads of people believed this. Now there’s a nationalist majority in the north. There’s no precedent for it.  A certain arrogance would be involved if anybody tried to pronounce with any degree of certainty how this was going to work out. We don’t know. What we do know is that working class action can change the arithmetic here, and nothing else can. So that’s the significance of where we are now. 

Goretti Horgan

And we do have to remember that, yes, Sinn Féin is the largest party, but that’s as much the outworkings of the fragmentation of loyalism, of unionism, as anything else. There isn’t really a nationalist majority. The majority of those who vote are coming from the Catholic nationalist community. But that’s not the same thing as saying that it’s a nationalist majority. There are now three blocks in Northern Ireland: nationalists, unionists and others, and the others are a combination of people like us who are socialists or environmentalists or identify in some other way, other than Catholic and nationalist. But actually a lot of them would also be soft unionists, who are looking towards the Alliance Party, which is a unionist Party, but they’re looking towards them as being willing to try to make Northern Ireland work.

Pat Stack

I thought the Alliance have now declared they’re neutral on the question of the border.

Eamonn McCann

They’ve always said that they’re neutral. Putting it as gently as possible they’re always more unionists than they are nationalist, although they maintain they are neither. 

Goretti Horgan

One of their former MLAs came out saying she was for a united Ireland, the only member of Stormont from an ethnic minority, and they all came out to say she’s on her own. 

Eamonn McCann

There’s racism in there as well. How dare this Chinese woman come in with different ideas? 

Pat Stack

What’s the significance of the decline of the DUP? And is there anywhere for unionism to go?

Eamonn McCann

The DUP is in decline partly because of the chaotic sectarianism of the DUP itself. They say: when we were in the majority people complained about it. You all complained about it. Now that’s changed, you are talking about majority rule, you gang of hypocrites. That argument is part of the dying death rattle of unionism. Unionism really has nowhere to go. Economically, it has nowhere to go. The idea of a six-county state in the north, permanently attached to Britain. It’s not possible in 2024. 

Pat Stack

I saw one of them on Question Time. Nobody had said anything, and she immediately said, a united Ireland is not inevitable. Nobody had said that.

Eamonn McCann

The next year, year and a half, will tell a very interesting story, about the economic reasons why there’s going to be a drift towards a united Ireland. As long ago as 20 years ago, the chairman of Ulster Bank, a man called Sir George Quigley said, look, it’s moving towards a united Ireland, we’ve got to get in there, we’ve got to influence it. The disintegration of unionism actually goes back a long way. Some people would say it goes back to the foundation of unionism.

Goretti Horgan

Peter Robinson, the former First Minister, who in 1986 led a  paramilitary ‘invasion’ of  the Republic, Paisley’s anointed successor, recently said that unionists have to start thinking about what they want from a united Ireland, they have to start talking about it. Start thinking about it. And a number of former DUP special advisors, some of whom were on the really hard right of the DUP are starting to say, we can’t just leave this to the nationalists. And of course, the changes in the Republic, the fact that you can no longer look to the Republic and say there’s Rome rule, have been really important.

Pat Stack

Moving on to the recent riots, the racist riots we saw throughout Britain, and we’ve seen in both Southern Ireland and Northern Ireland. In the north were they largely loyalist inspired?

Eamonn McCann

Largely loyalist inspired, no question about that. And the loyalists were aping some of the extreme right people in Britain. A tendency within loyalism has always had a close relationship with the far right in Britain, both in terms of ideology, and as natural bedfellows. Most interestingly it has exploded the notion, which is really just a nationalist fantasy – that you couldn’t be Irish and be racist, because we are an anti-colonial country. That phrase, you can’t be Irish and be racist, was all over the place. There is a far right, a nationalist far right. “We want our saints. We want our country back. Ireland is full.” And that’s exactly what’s been said in France, in Britain, Germany and everywhere else. So, to that extent, the idea that Irish nationalism has some unique virtue is an absolute fantasy. 

And anybody who had their eyes and ears open would have known that, of course, there are racists among nationalists. They may be able to cover it over in a way. They say, we’re for a united Ireland and we’re against British imperialism. But they’re even more against black people, German people, and people of colour coming into this pristine, pure Ireland that they fantasise about. So, the thing is a bit a bit entangled, but one of the most important things is that it has exposed the myth of instinctive or automatic anti racism, and indeed, the myth that generally progressive attitudes define the Catholic nationalist community in contrast to the Protestant unionists.

Goretti Horgan

In fairness to the north, that has been exposed in the south. In the north, all of the demonstrations, the racist demonstrations, have been by loyalists. There were two people with a tricolour flag, but they came up from Dublin. They were from the Dublin far right. I agree with Eamonn that it’s a myth that there’s no racists in Ireland. But in the north, it’s very unpopular within the nationalist community for anybody to say it’s Hamas’ fault that there’s genocide going on, although there are people who think like that. In the same way, it would be very hard for somebody from the nationalist community to join in with the loyalists, and all of the riots were in areas where the loyalists felt at home. On the first really big demo, they were trying to head for the mosque, and they ended up in the Lower Ormeau, which is a nationalist community, and the women there came out and just blocked them.  

That wouldn’t have happened in a similar loyalist area, not because there aren’t women and men in those loyalist areas who’d have liked to do that, but rather that they would be afraid to do it. A group of women who call themselves loyalist feminists put out a statement saying loyalism should not be racist, loyalism should be inclusive, and our roots are inclusive. Then some of the paramilitary groups came out saying, we don’t want this. Not being as clearly against racism as the women had, but saying we don’t want these riots that are attacking newcomers. So, for example, in Derry after on the Wednesday when there had been one of the largest anti-racist demonstrations in Derry for the last 20 years there was a racist protest called for the Friday. The local loyalist groups came out and said, we don’t want this. 

Partly they were saying it because the Apprentice Boys (a loyalist group) were marching on the Saturday, and they didn’t want to mess up the sectarian march. But in Coleraine where there are very clear Nazis, Nazis who unfurl National Front flags to this day, the local loyalist organisations put up on their social media that they wanted nothing to do with this’ and that people should stay away. They literally said, we do not want Nazis on our street, which was pretty good, although these are people who call themselves Nazis, so it’s easier to say it.

Eamonn McCann

One of the news reports from when the loyalists were attacking the homes of migrants was covered on television, and you could hear the shouting, the roaring and the background as these guys were kicking into doors and so forth. At the same time, very loudly, a woman’s voice said ‘this is fucking scandalous’. What I find interesting about it is not that she said it, but that she shouted it in the middle of the riot. There was a local Protestant woman who felt able to do that. And that’s interesting, because that tells you that these guys didn’t really, didn’t entirely dominate the area, and other voices were being raised.

Pat Stack

In England, the anti-racist response has so far proved a real turning point, what’s the response been like in the north?

Goretti Horgan

I’m just thinking about the people who were on the stage in Belfast and in Derry. In Derry, there were six speakers, including the chair, a member of People Before Profit who comes from a Protestant background. One of the speakers was a woman from a Protestant church, who does very good charity work with migrants. Looking at the crowd in Derry, I saw a lot of people that I know from Protestant backgrounds. And definitely in Belfast, the crowd represents the community. The demos were too big to be just the left or even to be just the trade unions. And they were very effective. 

The week of riots was absolutely awful. The riots in Belfast were really limited to places like Sandy Row, which are old loyalist areas that have good reason to feel left behind. But on the Friday, the racists were supposed to be having a demo at five, and the anti-racists said we’re going to be out for four to take their spot. And by five o’clock the racists were outnumbered 10 to one in the middle of the city centre. That was on Friday evening. There was an even bigger gathering on Saturday afternoon. On Friday the police had to push Land Rovers between the two groups, there were probably 1,000 racists there, and 10,000 anti racists.  On the Saturday, there were about 40 racists there and about 15,000 anti-racists. So that says to me, that between Friday and Saturday, people went, well, fuck this. There was also, of course, the cops arresting people, bringing them to court and all that as well. But the numbers were critical and the same in Derry. 

Pat Stack

You mentioned earlier, the question of Palestine and Gaza. There’s a long history of solidarity of Palestine in Ireland. It’s been brilliant here, but I notice, whenever I go back to Ireland , that 99% of the people you talk to are pro-Palestinian, to some degree. 

Goretti Horgan

The north is neither Ireland nor Britain in relation to Palestine. In the nationalist areas, there’s Palestinian flags on every street. You can’t really walk around the working-class nationalist parts of the north without seeing Palestinian flags everywhere. Unfortunately, when you go into loyalist areas, you then see Israeli flags. I had a very funny conversation with a man who I think might have been a little bit drunk. He came up to me and said, I don’t support Palestine. And I said, why not? And he says, because I’m Protestant. And I said, so there’s loads of Protestants who support Palestine. And he said, no, no, no, no, because you see Catholics support the Palestinians, that means that the Protestants have to support Israel. Unfortunately, that’s the way that it’s seen.

But in terms of the island generally do you really think that the Taoiseach [the Irish Prime Minister], or the foreign minister, would have been coming out with the kind of totally pro-Palestinian stuff that they were saying, unless it was the fact that they knew that there was total unanimity and real pressure on them. Yet there’s a big difference between what the street is saying and what the politicians are saying. The Irish Dáil, the Irish parliament passed the Occupied Territories Bill in 2018, which means that Ireland should not be trading with anybody, any company based in the occupied territories. Even though the bill passed all stages the government has never implemented it. So, don’t listen to our politicians and think, oh, they’re great. I have to say, it was lovely to see Leo Varadkar having a go at Biden. Even though he’s a right-winger and everything you had to say, isn’t it great to see a gay mixed race Prime Minister having a go at Biden. 

Pat Stack

I look at some of the Dáil debates, and when you compare what is happening in Westminster with the Dáil, if that was in Britain, they’d have been absolute heroes. 

Goretti Horgan

Sinn Féin has been disgraceful, particularly in the north. In 2016, when Eamonn was in the assembly, he and I got into a lift one day to go up to our office, and this bunch of very clean shaven, besuited young people got into the lift with us, along with Pat Sheehan who’s a Sinn Féin MLA. I assumed they were Americans. I said, are you Americans? No, we’re from Likud, the Israeli political party. That was 2016, since then, Sinn Féin have continued to meet with Likud, and when the genocide started in Gaza, this time round. They’ve always been on the wrong side when it comes to things like direct action against what Israel is doing, and this time they failed to go for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador until it was clear that the entire country wanted that north and south. When you look at their vote in the general election, they will say their vote held up, but when you look at the detail, you can see that people are disgusted with them. Particularly in the Republic of Ireland, you can see that. In the local elections in the Republic, they were right back down to 18%. 

Eamonn McCann

I don’t know anywhere else in Europe where the Palestinian issue has such a direct effect on electoral support. It’s a very interesting phenomenon.

Pat Stack

That brings me on to the south and what’s happening there. For several years, you had the gay marriage referendum, the abortion referendum, the growth of Sinn Féin as the sort of left, reformist opposition and so on, challenging the two main parties. The successes of People Before Profit, which I know also happened in the north. And now there suddenly seems to be the emergence of a far right, the racist demos, Sinn Féin’s underwhelming vote, the referendum result. Do you think there’s a change in mood, or is it just a small vocal minority who don’t represent much?

Goretti Horgan

What’s happening in the south is just like what’s happening in England, except worse in terms of the housing crisis. In Dublin to get even the smallest flat, far out from town is likely to cost you £2,500 a month, while the average wage would be about £3,000 a month. So how the hell are you supposed to live? People can’t afford to have children because they don’t have housing, and housing is so expensive, and childcare is so expensive, so it’s amazing that the far right hasn’t got more of a hold. I would argue, People Before Profit would argue, that it is precisely the radical left in Ireland that has stopped the far right from emerging sooner and growing larger than it has. You identified Covid. A lot of the far-right activists cut their teeth on Covid denial. But the left is not big enough, we’re not in enough places. 

Eamonn McCann

There are great similarities between what’s happening in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe. We tend, for historical reasons, to see ourselves as different and don’t have the political rhythms that apply in other places. This is self-delusion of course. Goretti was talking about the shortage of housing, the cynical manipulation of the housing market by the mainstream parties and all the rest of it, the abject poverty, the lack of prospects for the future for children in large working-class areas. It’s understandable. And this is a lesson everywhere, of course there’s nothing new to this. Slogans like Irish homes for Irish people, that’s a very powerful slogan if you’re living in a terrible city and you’ve been on the housing list for 15 years. And as you see people with black and brown faces around the area, the myth that we don’t have houses because the immigrants are getting them. Now, that’s not a uniquely Irish experience, far from it, but it does contradict the self-image, and so people are uncomfortable with it. Even the main parties Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour, Sinn Féin, have all bent, if not broken, over the immigration issue. 

Pat Stack

Back to the north. What is the attitude of the left and of the victims’ families to the Northern Ireland Legacy Act?

Eamonn McCann

The families of people who have died in the troubles are extremely angry about the Legacy Act because they see it as an attempt to put all the crimes of the security forces, the RUC, the UDR, the British Army, in the past. That applies, for example, to the Ballymurphy massacre by the Parachute Regiment before Bloody Sunday. They murdered 11 people in Ballymurphy. What they’re saying now is that the Legacy Act is in the interest of peace, we should forget all that. There’s real anger among the relatives of the dead. Real seething anger to the extent that I don’t believe it’s going to happen. Of course, Starmer promised to not just abolish the Legacy Act but to replace it. We still have no idea what the British Labour government is going to do. 

But it’s a big issue, and it illustrates something. It’s simple that we’ve been told for years, all this is in the past. Put it behind you, all the sectarianism, all the squabbling between communities. People do want that. They do want an end to the sectarian squabbling, but not at the expense of forgetting about the crimes committed against our communities over a period of 50 years. It’s more than 50 years since Bloody Sunday, but the children and the grandchildren of the people killed on Bloody Sunday have not forgotten. Why should they? They still want justice, and that’s true of hundreds of people across the North, including people from loyalist communities. You’ve got this strange unity between, for example, unionist parties, loyalist paramilitaries, the IRA communities in the north. 

Pat Stack

The Dublin government.

Eamon McCann

Yes, absolutely.

Pat Stack

And as always, the legacy of British collusion. It appears there may be more revelations around the Stakeknife scandal. Do you think there’s a lot more to come?

Eamonn McCann

If you look at the most investigated atrocity by security forces on earth. It’s Bloody Sunday. They set up an inquiry into Bloody Sunday, which was the second inquiry under the 1921 Tribunals of Inquiries Act, absolutely unprecedented and arguably not constitutional, because you had had an inquiry under the law chaired by the Lord Chief Justice, and a few years later, after agitation by lots of people, they have to have another one. 

Bloody Sunday was carried out by the first battalion of the Parachute Regiment. They arrived in Northern Ireland a couple of days before the Ballymurphy massacre. They were there in Ballymurphy, led by General Michael Jackson, later Chief of Staff of the British Army. He was in charge on the day. Then on the Shankill Road in October 1972, just six, seven, months after Bloody Sunday, the Parachute Regiment killed two people on the Shankill Road, Robert Johnson and Richie McKinney. They were working class men. Richie McKinney, poignantly, had arrived home the day before after spending years in Canada, and had come home to visit his family. Shot as he went out for a walk. The other lad was a local drunk, and he was coming out of the Manor bar, on the Shankill Road, and he was shouting, the meek shall inherit the earth and such things when a paratrooper shot and killed him. Now, those are loyalists, from a solid loyalist place on the Shankill Road. Lots of people on the Shankill Road would have known the families of these guys, and that’s still lurking there. 

Pat Stack

Finally, the left, through organisations, like People Before Profit, have enjoyed success in recent years, politically and electorally. How do you see the prospects for the left today in Ireland? 

Goretti Horgan

I think it all depends on what’s happening on the streets. It has always been the case that the left does well when there’s a strike wave or a wave of activity of some kind from the working class. We were pleasantly surprised with the recent local elections in the Republic. We increased our vote. We didn’t increase our national vote, but that’s because we didn’t stand in every single local area, but we increased our number of councillors. In the north, it’s somewhat different. There is definitely a polarisation in the north, and there’s a constant worry that the left just gets squeezed out because of the levels of polarisation. That has happened. You said earlier that we’ve had successes in the north. But actually, we’ve gone backwards. We used to have two MLAs, now we only have one. We used to have six councillors, now we only have two. 

We can do really well on the ground and have good people who know what People Before Profit is and know what we stand for. But as soon as the DUP says we’ve got to make sure that Sinn Féin aren’t the largest party, Sinn Féin says, let’s make sure we are the largest party, and we lose the first preference vote. When Eamonn lost his seat the number of seats in the constituency had been reduced from six to five. In some of the Protestant areas, people told us that they’d given Eamonn their number one. But when the seats were reduced, the DUP went around to them saying, if you give your number one to People Before Profit this time, there will be no Unionist seat in Derry. It did come down to between Eamon and the DUP person, and in that sort of situation, that’s what I mean by us getting frozen out. 

Similarly, with Gerry Carroll, who managed to hold an Assembly seat despite the polarisation, there’s now been boundary changes in his constituency, which means that there’ll be a much larger Protestant element to West Belfast, which before was almost entirely nationalist. Our voice, our message, is a class message, and not a nationalist one. We always say we’re neither orange nor green, we’re red. Even though that is the case, we are very open about the fact that we’re a 32-county organisation that stands for a socialist united Ireland and unfortunately, many Protestants see that as being nationalists. The media presents us as being nationalists. Again, and again the media says we’re nationalists, no matter how often we say we’re not, we are socialists. They just say but you’re for a united Ireland. That makes you a nationalist.

Eamonn McCann

It’s very difficult in Ireland if you’re radical, if you’re revolutionary, if you’re a well-read Marxist, to differentiate yourself from left wing republicanism. Lots of Republicans like to be thought of as left wing. Even though it’s evident when you read their stuff, that they’re united Ireland first and socialist second rather than the other way. So, there’s delusion everywhere. I sometimes think that the Republican tradition has caused as much trouble as unionism.

Something else about the left. You have to factor in the role of the trade union bureaucracy, which has been disgraceful from start to finish. In the south Sean Lemass, the former Fianna Fáil Taoiseach, back in the late 1950s and mid-1960s, he said that the Irish Congress of Trade Unions was as decent and harmless a bunch of people as you could hope to meet. There’s the usual conservatism of the trade union bureaucracy that they want to keep in with the Northern Ireland executive. They want to keep in with governments and they’ll argue, well, that’s the way to have influence. 

Goretti Horgan

They won’t take on sectarianism in the large engineering workplaces. Even people who were real left wingers, revolutionaries in their time, when they get into the union bureaucracy, then they will just say, what can we do about it?

Pat Stack

It’s incredible. I know that was always their stance during the troubles. You’d have felt by now they’d be a little braver on this question. 

Goretti Horgan

There is a new Unite regional secretary in the north, a woman called Susan Fitzgerald, who is a Socialist Party member, and I am kind of keeping all fingers and toes crossed that she will be better than former members of ours who had similar positions and just climbed up the greasy pole.