IRSP: Costello Commemoration Speech

national | miscellaneous | news report Friday November 01, 2002 12:10 by pat c - Irish Republican Socialist Party DublinIRSP at hotmail dot com Republican Socialist Press Office 4 Cavendish Row Dublin 1, Ireland 01 8735620

Speech delivered by John Martin, IRSP Political Secretary

20 October 2002 Bray, Ireland Speech delivered by John Martin, IRSP Political Secretary Comrades, friends, socialists, republicans: I have been given the honour to speak on behalf of the organisations that Seamus Costello founded. That is, for me, a great honour and one that I hope I can adequately fill.

20 October 2002
Bray, Ireland

Speech delivered by John Martin, IRSP Political Secretary

Comrades, friends, socialists, republicans: I have been given the
honour to speak on behalf of the organisations that Seamus Costello
founded. That is, for me, a great honour and one that I hope I can
adequately fill.

I know that others will speak of Seamus the man and of their memories
of him. My own memories include a fierce argument with Seamus in
1969, 33 years ago, in downtown Belfast on the merits of radicalising
the civil rights struggle.

Needless to say history proved Seamus right. Seamus's experience, his
farsightedness, his political acumen, his leadership skills were all
lost not only to the Republican Socialist Movement when he was
assassinated but lost to the people of Ireland. The loss of such an
outstanding leader damaged our movement but it also removed from the
scene a workers' leader who I believe would never have allowed the
class question to be isolated and then removed from the struggle for
national independence.

The Good Friday Agreement has benefited the middle classes not the
working classes. As we predicted when the Good Friday Agreement was
signed, sectarianism has not only been institutionalised, it has
spread like wildfire. This movement took the extremely difficult
decision to recognise that the will of the Irish people was for the
implementation of the GFA and for peace. We acted accordingly and the
INLA ceasefire has been as solid as any. We have respected the
wishes of the Irish people. We now call on the Irish government to
respect their own Good Friday Agreement and immediately release the
last remaining prisoner to qualify for release under the Good Friday
Agreement, Dessie O'Hare.

Today there is a neo-liberal economic agenda at work and it has been
accepted almost totally by all the mainstream parties, both north and
south. Republicans in government in the Stormont Assembly introduced
public/private partnerships that by all the available evidence are
bad for the public sector. The privatisation of public utilities is
an utter disgrace, an attack on social ownership and a worship of the
worst excesses of capitalism. The Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrats
are doing the same while the left sits and fumes impotently.

However it ill becomes a member of the Republican Socialist Movement
to engage in verbal criticisms of other socialists and republicans if
we have not removed the mote from our own eyes. There is no better
time, nor no better place, than within sight of the grave of our
founder, Seamus Costello, to acknowledge our errors and faults.

This movement lost sight of the goals of our founders. We swayed from
mindless militancy to irrelevant political posturing. We failed to
learn the lessons of history and repeated them. In place of socialist
theory and strategy, we elevated action to the fore and in the
process lost the idealism and politics that had originally motivated
the movement. We for a time lost sight of the importance of the class
issue in the national struggle.

Consequently, without a firm ideological base we floundered, betrayed
our ideals and lost many good comrades. It's no wonder that in the
past comrades walked away, disillusioned and demoralised with the
movement. We gave the media and our political enemies the opportunity
to portray our movement as a feuding, failing and futile
organisation. Our failure was in essence a failure of leadership.

At the grave of the greatest leader of the republican left since
James Connolly, that is a hard, harsh, but necessary thing to say.
But if collectively we failed, individually we had many fine comrades
and volunteers who kept the flame of republican socialism alive. I
need only mention a few names - Miriam Daly, Ronnie Bunting, Noel
Little, Ta Power and Gino Gallagher - to make the point.

Other names can't be mentioned here but I particularly want to here
mention and praise the staff and volunteers of the INLA, whose
discipline and defence of nationalist areas in particular over the
past summer was in the best traditions of republican socialism. Daily
in those areas violence continues unabated as the poison of
sectarianism enflames working class areas. The INLA has been active
in defence of those working class areas. That poses no threat to any
ceasefire or threatens anyone except sectarian and racist bigots.

When the police and the forces of the state turn a blind eye to
sectarian attacks is it any wonder that republicans have to take to
the streets to defend areas from sectarian attacks. Seamus
Costello's vision of an army of the people is as relevant today as it
was in the early seventies and is implemented on the streets of
Belfast. Those republicans in front line working class communities
neither by word or deed will heighten or enflame sectarian tensions.
That was not the way of Connolly, Mellows or any other republican
socialist. It is not our way.

Time and circumstances change. The rank and file of this movement
under Gino Gallagher's leadership took back control of the
movement and reasserted the primacy of politics. The leadership of
this movement is committed to collective leadership and full
consultation with the membership and to developing and expanding
republican socialist ideas in the working class movement. However no
movement deserves to continue to exist if it is only concerned with
its own history, it's own problems and its own dreams.

It is now time for republican socialists to turn towards the mass
organisations of the working class if we are to influence the future.
It is what Seamus did and it is what we now need to do. If this
movement cannot attract the most class-conscious members of the
working class to its banner then it will be judged by its own
standards a failure.

Today as we come to the slow ending of the armed conflict that has
engulfed us all over the last three generations it is time to re-
affirm our first principles. What did they who died for a Republic
think they were doing? Was it for an abstract freedom? For glory? For
the freedom to exploit others? For the copper fastening of partition?
For the restoration of Stormont? For a capitalist Ireland?

It was for the right of you and me and all citizens born on or living
on this island to have political, economic and social freedom in a
Republic that really did cherish all the children of the nation
equally. That is the Socialist Republic.

Our movement is made up of ordinary men and women, who live ordinary
lives but who want, what is considered extraordinary today, the right
to live in a Republic that is democratic, inclusive and based on
socialist principles. Our political life in Ireland has become so
dumbed down that a photo opportunity means more than a political
manifesto, idealism or beliefs.

Who today stands by the Republic of Connolly? It is those ordinary
men and women, who are, whether in the INLA, the IRSP, fighting in
the prison camps for political status, standing on a picket line,
taking strike action, involved in mass action and in day to day trade
union activity, in community and tenant associations fighting the
drug barons and the armed criminals and trying every day to alleviate
the hardships of working class life - they are the real defenders of
the Republic. Not for them the easy allure of the Yankee dollar. Just
the ongoing republican struggle for a socialist Ireland.

Friends and Comrades, we know what side of the barricades we stand
on. It is on the side of the oppressed, the exploited, the
marginalised and the derided. Wherever in the world there is
resistance to imperialism, we are in solidarity with the resisters.
We make no apology for our anti-imperialism.

Last week in Belfast a fitting memorial was erected to the memories
of Ronnie Bunting and Noel Little, and like today it was good to see
old friends and old comrades who have been to the forefront of
radical political struggle in Ireland for more than thirty years.

I am reminded of one critic of Marx who said that he had "founded no
lasting political party, had led no successful or unsuccessful
revolution, had produced no major finished work that amounted to a
systematic exposition of the critique of capitalist civilisation to
which he intended to devote his life and a six volume work. Yet his
thought was to shake the world."

"Yet his thought was to shake the world." Think of that.

Three weeks ago I had a conversation with a working class member of
the PUP, who when he heard I was an Irp made a point of coming up to
me and telling me that he had been greatly influenced into politics
by reading the early ideas of the Official IRA and the writings of
Seamus Costello!

Seamus was a man both of his time and ahead of it. Seamus Costello
was a republican, a socialist, an internationalist and a leader. He
was and is an inspiration. He left a political party, the IRSP, and
an army, the INLA, and he left a political set of ideas that still
have a relevance to the people today. The movement is still in
existence, a survivor of three decades of conflict in spite of all
that was thrown at us.

We stand here today a to affirm that republican socialism is still
moving forward in struggle today. We have restored the ideas of
Connolly, Mellows and Costello to the forefront of our thinking. As
we look around us today we represent hundreds of years of collective
experience of radical, principled struggle.

It was from the likes of Seamus Costello in particular we learned the
principles of republican socialism. Surely it is not beyond us to
delve deep into our collective experience and emerge re-invigorated,
re-energised and recommitted to advancing the cause of republican
socialism in Ireland.

Let us today, no matter who we are when we walk away from this
graveside, re-commit ourselves to the liberation of the working
class, to the establishment of the republic and to the raising of the
class struggle in every area of struggle we can.