Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Even a cursory glance at the daily newspapers in the North bears out that sectarianism is alive and present and intruding negatively on the everyday lives of ordinary people across communities. Sectarian actions and statements regularly emanate not only from minorities in both Protestant and Catholic communities but also from politicians and political parties on both sides of the divide. The Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998. Far from overcoming sectarian division, the Assembly and the power-sharing Executive established under the Agreement have been a big factor in maintaining division. The political structures established under the Good Friday Agreement and the so-called D'Hondt system amount to the institutionalisation of sectarian division.

The political structures in the North encourage political parties on both sides to appeal to sectarian divisions in stirring up issues that divide communities in order to consolidate their political support and draw attention away from the failure of the power sharing institutions to resolve the social and economic crisis that inflicts so much suffering on the people of Northern Ireland. Unionist and Nationalist politicians and political parties are equally culpable in stirring up tensions in the dispute about flags and emblems. Loyalists who insist on marching through Catholic communities create fear and anger and intensify divisions between communities. Equally, Sinn Féin, in publicly commemorating in Castlederg the deaths - every death is a tragedy and hugely to be regretted - of republican activists killed in bringing a bomb to bomb the town, in an area where dozens of Protestants had been killed by republican activists, stirs up fear, anger and divisions between communities. How could it be otherwise?

The political parties represented in the Northern Ireland Executive trade sectarian insults on these issues. However, they unite in implementing the vicious austerity programme dictated by the Tories and the Liberals at Westminster that savages the liveihoods and living standards of working-class people across the board. Yesterday, in the Northern Ireland Assembly in Belfast, both Unionist and Nationalist parties supported a vicious cut to the pensions of 250,000 public servants. They also agreed to raise the retirement age of workers to 68 years. These are the same austerity policies implemented by Fine Gael and the Labour Party in government here and by Fianna Fáil before them. In the North working-class people, particularly working-class youth, suffer hugely from unemployment, poverty, inadequate housindg, as well as sectarian divisions. Clearly, working-class people, both Protestant and Catholic, can have no confidence whatsoever that there will be a better future under either the Tories or the Liberals, the British Labour Party, the Irish Labour Party, Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil or, as experience demonstrates since the setting up of the structures in the North, Unionist and Nationalist parties represented in the Executive. None has a way forward to offer. That is the reality. They all base themselves on the crisis-ridden economic system sustained by the capitalist financial markets and the capitalist system. Neither can they place any confidence in big business Irish-Americans or Republican Party former activists such as Mr. Haass. What do they have to offer?

The real danger is that the failure of the political establishment to solve the severe problems of working-class people in the North will create a dangerous political vacuum which vicious and violent sectarians are attempting to fill, basing themselves on the alienation of working-class people, particularly young people, with the horrific vista of misleading a new generation of youth into supporting paramilitary and sectarian organisations. Workers and working-class communities in Northern Ireland desperately need their own independent political organisation, movement and political party which could unite them in a common campaign against austerity from both Westminster and Dublin, a common mobilisation of workers against the attacks on their living standards and the horrific effects of the crisis. That was the approach of Connolly and Larkin in their day. That is what was seen in the engineering strike in 1919 and the outdoor relief movement of Protestants and Catholics united in 1932. It is still the only way forward. The way forward is through independent mobilisation of the working-class and political organisation across sectarian divisions, with a radical programme of socialist policies to overcome the crisis, and a new party for the working class.

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