United Irishman, Vol. 33, No. 7

Many thanks to the person who forwarded this to the Archive. This edition of the United Irishman from Official Sinn Féin is one of a series of United Irishman and Starry Ploughs that date from the feud between the INLA and the OIRA in Spring/Summer 1975 and which have been posted up in sequence this Summer.

This edition has a front page that has the quote ‘Freedom for all Irish People’ from Cathal Goulding. It also has photographs from Bodenstown and an outline of why ‘[Minister for Finance, Richie] Ryan’s budget fails to bluff workers.

The editorial deals with both the Budget in the Republic of Ireland and under the heading ‘Reform’ the Official Sinn Féin/Republican Clubs campaign ‘Sectarianism Kills Workers’. This suggests that:

The RUC are making strenuous efforts to blot out the memory of 1969. This will be difficult while there remain leading figures in the ranks who have a record of sectarian partisanship, to put it at its mildest. Reform of the RUC is still a top priority.

The report on the Bodenstown Annual Wolfe Tone Commemoration is exhaustive, reprinting the oration by Cathal Goulding which covers a broad range of issues from Sectarianism, Intimidation and Rights.

And when the Provisionals ceased their provocation, when it seems there might be hope, out of the ashes of destruction, born of hatred and sectarianism there arose the Irish Republican Socialist Party and its Peoples Liberation army, as if to ensure that bigotry might not die, repression might not wither and sectarian incitement might not fade.

He continues:

Unity is our struggle, comrades. We will not be diverted from it by any force, however vicious or murderous its attack, whether it comes directly from the British Army of occupation or from groups who might as well be their agents as the so-called standard bearers of revolution. Unity of the working class remains our aim, as our enemy remains British imperialism in all its forms and our objective remains full freedom – social, economic, political and cultural – for all our people.

Later he argues:

The RUC and the UDR are not and never can be acceptable forces of the administration of law and order, whatever emerges from the Convention, whatever kind of deal is done by the middle-class opportunist politicians, whatever the role of the new regime. As the Republican Clubs have made clear, nothing less than the abolition of the UDR and the RUC will be considered satisfactory. And the RUC must be replaced by a police force which is not armed and does not have hand, act or part in political affairs.

Other articles include the Sinn Féin Platform which quotes Tomas MacGiolla on the economic crisis. There are a number of reports on RUC and UDR oppression in the North There’s a two page spread on Nadezhda Krupskaya, wife of Vladimir Lenin. On international affairs there’s a two page article on Vietnam and the back page has a long piece on the need for an oil refinery in Dublin Bay and suggests that that suggests that ’A really big building site in Dublin would do wonders for trade union organisation’. and ‘The Anglo-American oil companies must love those who are now engaged in an agitation against the building of an oil refinery in Dublin’.

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