The New IRA’s latest car bomb outside Dunmurry police station involved the brutal kidnap of a driver forcing him to convey a live explosive device with the aim of killing PSNI officers, and anyone else unfortunate enough to happen to come within its range. The action follows a previous similar incident in Lurgan last month and was followed by a wider threat by the group to kill informers and attack
the homes of PSNI officers.
In response, state forces have conducting raids in the greater Belfast area, arrested on individual and preparing to step up their presence and checkpoints.
The latest edition of armed republicanism
The Good Friday Agreement which marked the end of the ‘Troubles’ has failed to deliver on the expectations of 30 years ago. It has institutionalised sectarian division not overcome it and politically has
resulted in a politics dominated by the administration of the austerity policies enacted by consecutive Westminster parliaments. Working class communities – both republican and loyalist – have been left to fall
further and further into poverty, low pay and under-resourced public services. While criminality offers some a way out, others are returning to the old methods of resistance.
The New IRA appears to have reorganised and the attacks were reported to have came as a surprise to the state forces. But regardless of whether their campaign escalates or collapses amidst mounting repression, it is doomed to failure and is a dead end.
Such attacks proceed from the false premise that a small vanguard can bomb or shoot its way to a united Ireland.
In the same way as with the previous Provisional IRA campaign, any “dissident” republican paramilitary campaign is doomed to fail. The obstacle to a capitalist united Ireland is not just British rule but
the opposition of a significant section of the northern working class. While demographics have changed substantially – it remains the case that the road to capitalist reunification would inevitably involve the
large scale coercion of Protestants and the prospect of a further carnival of reaction.
The “dissidents” reject the Good Friday Agreement, but offer no alternative other than a return to the failed “long war” that proceeded it.
Individual terrorism
Individual terrorism substitutes the action of a small self-selecting (and usually highly infiltrated) paramilitaries for the mass movement of the working class. It can not defeat the forces of the British state but
instead offers an excuse to crank up repression and drives a deeper wedge between Catholic and Protestant workers.
The Dunmurry attack proves the point. Detonating a gas cylinder bomb in a residential area, while families slept and police evacuated locals, does not weaken British rule – it alienates the very working-class
communities republicans claim to defend. As Peter Hadden, a leading member of the Committee for a Workers’ International until his death in 2010, wrote in 1994 “the only force capable of ending capitalism… is the working class,” not “armed actions carried out on behalf of the community who can only look on”.
A socialist alternative
The New IRA is the latest dead end in militant republicanism and represents a re-run of a failed strategy that divides the working class, strengthens the sectarian status quo and offers nothing but more pain.
Militant Left uphold an alternative socialist strategy to defeat the divide and conquer of imperialism and bourgeois nationalism. That involves the building the unity in struggle of the working class – Protestant and Catholic and other – for socialism and against division, sectarianism, state repression and capitalism.