File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9710, message 612


Date: Thu, 30 Oct 1997 14:44:18 +1000 (EST)
From: Gary MacLennan <g.maclennan-AT-qut.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Irish Presidential election


I read Rebecca's comments on the Irish election with considerable interest.
 I agree totally with her about the execrable nature of the main political
parties -Fianna Fail,  Fine Gael and the Irish Labor Party.  But there were
a couple of shades of emphasis that I did not share with her.  And I would
like to comment on these.

Firstly I think it is significant that most of the candidates  were female.
That  shows something of the modernizing process that is underway in
Ireland.  

Secondly the attempt to cash in on the family connections to the legendary
Michael Collins availed Banotti nothing.  It looks like the Civil War is
well and truly over as a political determinant in Irish public life.

However I do think that the election of McAleese was important in terms of
the Northern Irish situation.  I tend to think that her endorsement of Sinn
Fein, even though denied a thousand fold, is important.  Certainly the
unionist establishment wrote attacking her before the election. But
Rebecca's point here about how the media & the establishment's attack may
have actually assisted McAleese is most important.  And it needs to be
explained.  Certainly it is what made me welcome McAleese's victory.  

I think Rebecca starts from correct premises. Fine Gael and Fianna Fail are
both bourgeois parties. However she ends up neglecting crucial differences.
The rejection of the anti-republican campaign initiated by Bruton of Fine
Gael is important.  It reinforces that in the South of Ireland people are
turning towards Sinn Fein - in small numbers perhaps, but there does appear
to be something of an upsurge of Irish Nationalism.

Which takes me to my final point.  The Irish bourgeoisie abandoned
nationalism in 1922.  But the nationalist project was incomplete.  Just as
Marx argued that the American Civil War was in some ways the last round of
the War of Independence so the current troubles in Ireland are the
resumption of the incomplete struggle for true independence from Britain.
The bourgeoisie have no interest at all in waging that struggle, but
material circumstances dictate that Ireland must continually seek to
finally break from Britain.  In Ireland as elsewhere the Repressed
continually returns.  And it did so yesterday with McAleese's victory.

regards

Gary


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