This article was first printed in the April 1939 edition of Workers International News: The theoretical journal of the Workers International League. The International Marxist Tendency traces its history back to the WIL, which although it was based in Britain also recruited members in Ireland. It is interesting to note that some 71 years later the political differences between Marxism and the narrow militarism of sections of the Republican movement seem so familiar. The Marxists in 1939 clearly explained the blind alley of individual terrorism and the need for a mass movement to overthrow capitalism.  Over the last period we have argued the same position in relation to the "armed struggle" recently launched by the CIRA and RIRA. The real strength in Ireland lies with the working class in Belfast, Dublin, Cork, Derry, Limerick, Galway, Waterford and throughout the land. 

A recent paper on the public spending of the Stormont Executive confirms that cuts are on the way, which will affect jobs and services. How will this affect the delicate political balance set up by the Good Friday Agreement?

After the recent decision of the INLA to renounce the armed struggle and its call on its members to take the political road, an analysis of this important turn from a Marxist point of view by Gerry Ruddy was published in The Red Plough. We believe it puts the Marxist case very clearly and make it available here for our readers.

Following a wide scale and carefully orchestrated police operation aimed at disrupting ‘dissident republican’ activity and two nights of rioting in Lurgan, it would appear that the north of Ireland’s social peace has not been in such a fragile state since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement eleven years ago. These were the sort of scenes that the British state and the leaders of Sinn Féin and the Unionist parties all told us were a thing of the past.