IRISH capitalism, its banks and industries have been entirely bankrupted, and what national sovereignty the country had has also been destroyed, after the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF forced onto the Irish government an 85bn euros loan at six per cent interest.
This measure was in no way an act of support for the Irish people.
It was an act of war, of a type which had earlier been carried out against the Greek workers, to load Ireland up with a further huge debt that the Irish workers and the middle class will have to re-pay, in order that international financial institutions could be convinced to keep their yield rates down on the huge loans that not only Spain and Portugal, but the rest of the EU states, are seeking, or will be seeking, in the immediate future.
The Greek and Irish workers are being sacrificed – through the imposition of huge job, wage, health, and pension cuts – on the alter of international finance capital, for the benefit of the dominant section of the EU capitalists in Germany and France.
The Irish and Greek workers are therefore definitely at the crossroads. One road points to their destruction and their forced emigration, while the other points to a socialist revolution, to defend their jobs, wages, pensions, public services and their basic rights, through the non-payment of the massive enforced debts, and the expropriation of the Irish and Greek bankers and capitalists.
It is this socialist revolution that will unite Ireland, and smash up the European Union of the bankers and the bosses, and lay the basis for the establishment of the Socialist United States of Europe, where the vast productive forces of the entire continent will be used to satisfy the needs of its people and not the requirements of bankers and capitalists.
It is at this sharp turning point, this crossroads in the class struggle, that along come the nationalists of Sinn Féin, who have already made their peace with the British government in the north of Ireland and agreed to the required cuts, to make their peace with Irish capitalism as a whole.
They are ditching any talk that there was in Sinn Féin about socialism, and have no intention of calling for the nationalisation of the banks and the major industries. They are very much taking the same line as the British Labour Party about the vicious cuts regimes that have been established.
This is that the Irish workers will have to pay back the international banking loans, but at a slower and allegedly more amenable pace. Sinn Féin are part of a UK government in the north, and now accept the regime of the European Central Bank in the south.
In his New Year’s message Gerry Adams said ‘Ireland today, North and South, is at a crossroads. The economic policies being pursued by two conservative governments in London and Dublin have imposed significant hardship on citizens.
‘The adverse impact on public services, the economy, and society in both parts of this island is evident. Hundreds of thousands of citizens are unemployed and emigration is again on the increase.
‘Sinn Féin is an Irish republican party. We are a United Ireland party. We believe it makes economic and political sense. Sinn Féin is for the sovereignty, independence and freedom of the Irish people and the right of our people to build our own society. . .
‘In the South, Sinn Féin offers the only real alternative to the conservative consensus . . .’
The opposite to the conservative consensus is the more radical, but still deadly, consensus that there must be cuts, and there must be the repayment of the ECB loans, but at a slower pace.
Sinn Féin accepts the handcuffs that have been imposed on Ireland by the European Central Bank, and is willing to make a common front with all other bourgeois parties that accept the more radical consensus, but are opposed to a socialist perspective.
We repeat that there is only one way out of this crisis for the working class of Ireland and Europe and that is socialist revolutions to expropriate the bankers and the bosses, and the establishment of a Socialist United States of Europe.
