The Good Friday Agreement: Capitalism, Poverty, Imperialism And The Police State

Many thanks to the person who forwarded this to the Archive.

This is a publication from Lasair Dhearg, dating from 2023, which as its website notes is:

…a growing movement fighting for a 32 County Socialist Republic.

Formed from a small collective of community and political activists in 2017, our primary concern is the economic liberation of the Irish working class and the establishment of a Socialist Republic built upon the principles of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic of 1916 and the Democratic Programme of the first Dáil Éireann.

We believe that Irish sovereignty, equality for all and the economic liberation of the Irish people, can only become a reality upon the establishment of a People’s Republic where all power and economic control rests with the Irish people.

This document, The Good Friday Agreement: Capitalism, Poverty, Imperialism and the Police State, is divided into six sections across twenty pages. These are The Good Friday Agreement; A Capitalist Dream; Endemic Poverty; Imperialism; A Police State and In Conclusion.

The document presents a strong critique of the Agreement and ask:

They said then, 25 years ago, that this Agreement was the start of a new era for the people of Ireland. That it was a day that ‘we should treasure’; that it would hasten ‘the end of violence’; and ‘create new opportunities’ for the Irish people.

“We, the participants in the multi-party negotiations,” it read, “believe the agreement that we have negotiated offers a truly historic opportunity for a new beginning…” If only someone had stopped for a moment to ask, ‘a new beginning for who?’

It argues that the Six Counties is characterised by ‘endemic poverty’ and points to:

66% of homes in the Six Counties are in receipt of ‘state benefits’, a figure that stands in stark contrast to the £43.7 billion moving through the economy in 2020. Someone is doing very well it would seem, but it isn’t the more than 100,000 children now living in poverty. Those children are subject to the daily horrors of deprivation, with the most deprived areas in the Six Counties having a suicide rate almost twice that of the least deprived areas. Indeed, more have died from suicide since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement than those who died as a direct result of the conflict in the preceding three decades.

Neoliberal capitalist economics, wholly adopted as the ideological bedrock of the Six Counties economy by the five main political parties, has devastated communities. The evidence is overwhelming, in that a significant correlation exists between social and environmental conditions and the prevalence of mental disorders. Mental illness is now recognised as one of the biggest causes of individual distress and misery in our societies and cities, comparable to poverty and unemployment.

It notes the armaments industry in the Six Counties.

It is without doubt that a significant proportion of economic output in the Six Counties is inextricably linked to weapons production and the delivery of said weaponry on various military platforms to be used in conflicts across the globe. Mainstream political parties in the Six Counties praise job creation in the aerospace and defence industry and celebrate the ‘successes’ of high-end manufacturing without a second thought for the countless lives lost through imperialist wars worldwide.

And:

Discrimination against the Republican, Nationalist and Catholic community more than two decades on is confirmed by the PSNI’s own statistics, as they lay out in very public fashion that the force, formerly called the RUC, are twice as likely to arrest and charge a ‘Catholic’ in the Six Counties than they are a ‘Protestant’. This lays bare the very clear bias against one community, from a police force that is overwhelmingly Protestant and Unionist.

These statistics, recorded by the PSNI themselves from 2016 to 2020, show that they have arrested 57,000 ‘Catholics’ and only 31,000 ‘Protestants’. Of those that they then charged, 27,000 were ‘Catholic’ and only 15,000 were from the ‘Protestant’ community. This very clearly shows the bias and bigotry within the PSNI; if you are perceived to be from the ‘Catholic’ community then they are twice as likely to arrest you, and then you are more likely to be charged.

Over the past ten years, more than 374,000 people have been forcibly stopped and searched by the PSNI – the equivalent of one fifth of the population of the Six Counties, with children as young as 13 years of age being subject to such searches. Whilst the PSNI holds the third highest Stop & Search rate for British state forces, it had the lowest arrest rate, corresponding to other figures indicating that the powers it utilises are being overused. More than 35,000 of those that they searched were children.

The Conclusion argues that:

25 years of unstable government has not advanced any significant Republican objectives, on the contrary, those who claim to be Republicans in government have thus far rolled back on significant Republican demands. ‘A United Ireland by 2016’ has been replaced with hopes for a border poll; a new hitch for the Sinn Féin wagon. Such calls ignore the fact that such a poll would have to be supported through Stormont legislation and the Unionist ‘petition of concern’ veto, as well as the British ‘Secretary of State’ who can decide if it is in Britain’s interests to allow it, before even winning a single vote, never mind a referendum. Such calls see no realistic proposition of such a poll occurring now or in the near future.

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