The Twilight of Unionism: Ulster and the Future of Northern Ireland by Geoffrey Bell

Author:Geoffrey Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

By ‘third party’, Clifford meant Britain, which he thus exonerated from responsibility for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century divisions in Ireland. Thus, it was ‘the different stages of capitalist development in the North and South’ that were ‘the foundations on which the border was erected’. As was true of many of those who claimed Marxist or left-wing ideologies in the 1970s, Clifford was not short of polemical anger against others on the left. In developing his arguments he criticised the Communist Party of Ireland, Michael Farrell and People’s Democracy, Eamonn McCann, and Irish nationalism in general. Their shared sin was that they got the Protestant working class all wrong:

The section of the ‘left’ which came under the influence of the Catholic bourgeois nationalist left, propounded a theory elaborated on the notion that the Protestant masses were stupid bigots. The intense energy which they [the Protestant masses] displayed to the Union cause was put down to stupidity … Some [on the nationalist left] tried to conjure up an appropriate material interest for the masses in the form of imperialist bribery. The ‘stupid dupes’ of the Orange Order were said to be a labour aristocracy defending their bribes … you need to be very much lost to the world to be able to feel in the Shankill and the environs that you were in the stronghold of an entrenched labour aristocracy.12

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