People's Voice, No. 5

Many thanks to Jim Lane for forwarding this to the Archive. We intend to post up the remaining issues of People’s Voice over the next three or four months.

This edition of People’s Voice dates from 1969. It has a characteristically topical cartoon on the front cover depicting Craig, Paisley, Hume, People’s Democracy and over all the vulture of British Imperialism. There are a variety of pieces inside, not least an introductory article that notes:

OF all the parties in Leinster house, Fianna Fail should be the last to drag out the question of Partition. No par­ty has been more energetic over the past 30 years in locking up and shoot­ing up Irishmen who attempted to smash what Blaney so recently styled “the sham democracy that is the Six Counties.”

And:

FIANNA FAIL is the most dynamic capitalist party now in the Free State; and in its singleminded pursuance of capitalist interests over the past dec­ade, it has succeeded in fragmenting its traditional grass roots support am­ongst the great body of small farmers; antagonized the working class with its proposed measures to ‘regu1ate’the affairs of Trade Unionism; and stirred up everyone in general with its Crim­inal Justice Bill.

There’s also this interesting point:

You cannot expect the people to react to an abstract international ideology — and an internationalism which does not take into acc­ount the characteristics of individual nations, arid all this entails, is absolutely abstract.

SOCIALISTS who do not take this into account; who do not differentiate between Nationalism, which ie the concrete expression of deeply ingrained. sentim­ents inculcated by the existence of se­parate historic communities for thousands of years, and bourgeois jingoistic patriotism, which is nothing more or less than the base exploitation of such sentiments for the benefit of that par­ticular class; can never expect to get anywhere –and rightly so. Worse still, by such negligence, they are contrib­uting to the continued exploitation of. the People by the bourgeoisie, by allow­ing them to propagate unimpeded their perverse and anti-nationalist brand of patriotism.

Other pieces examine ‘Dublin Postmen’s Fight for Worker Rights’, issues faced by workers seeking pay increases from the Federation of Building Contractors and Allied Employers, the issue of red-baiting in Leinster House, ‘Sanctity of the Family: Capitalist style’ and a report on Stormont entitled ‘The Old Con Game Goes on and on’.

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