Articles from 2003 can be found here and from 2004 here

Taken from Socialist Worker Issue 241
NORTHERN ELECTIONS:  WHY YOU SHOULD  VOTE SOCIALIST
 By Eamonn McCann Socialist Environmental Alliance candidate in local and Westminster elections
The SEA had intended to contest the local elections only. We do not really have the resources to fight a Westminster constituency, too. But the stale and depressing nature of exchanges between the mainstream parties emphasised the need for a radically different agenda to be put forward. The contest so far has not been so much an election as two parallel polls, one for Catholics, one for Protestants. Sinn Fein is asking voters to deliver the killer blow to the SDLP and confirm themselves as the sole authentic voice of nationalism in the North. The SDLP's main thrust is to counter this argument. The basic difference between the parties concerns which of them will give the more forceful representation to one community vis-à-vis the other. The main point for the DUP and Ulster Unionists is which of them will have more right on the day after the poll to speak for the separate interests of Protestant/Unionist community.
Those at the bottom left behind
This pattern of politics leaves people who do not fit into either category completely out of the picture. It also means that issues which do not fit into the Orange-Green template are given a low priority, if they get a look-in at all. On both sides, those at the bottom of the pile are left behind. This pattern also makes it certain that as soon as the election is over we.ll be back to stalemate. A vote for any of the main parties is a vote for more of the same - for stalemate and stagnation. Meanwhille, we are told that the North is booming. It's booming alright - for the few. There are desperate problems of poverty, especially child poverty, across the North with half of all children living in poverty. Child poverty is particularly bad in Derry's Shantallow, Creggan and Brandywell, where over 90 per cent of children live in poverty. But no remedy for these problems can be found in trying to advance one community in comparison with the other. In the overwhelmingly nationalist debate in Derry, there is little mention of the fact that the statistics also show Victoria and Caw (Newbuildings, Nelson Drive) are catching up fast in the poverty stakes. The main causes of child poverty are inadequate benefits, low wages and poor public services.
Privatisation
Privatisation and contracting-out cuts jobs and drives wages down. And both destroy our public services. Lack of publicly- funded child care means that lone parents in particular are excluded from jobs. Council workers. pay is being driven down, through cut-backs supported by all the main parties. These causes of poverty cannot be dealt with by pushing one community's interests forward. Increasing benefit levels and defending wage rates can not be achieved in one community only. It would be wrong to say that the main parties are responsible for the fact that poverty is rife across the North. But it would be right to say that they have no policies for dealing with the situation. Behind the scenes they all operate as local managers of capitalism. And they do not even do that very effectively, being focused 24/7 not on any grand plan but on wrong-footing their rivals within their particular community.
Water charges make the point
All the mainstream parties say they oppose water charges and privatisation. But all are equally opposed to a campaign of non-payment.-the only strategy with a realistic hope of defeating New Labour.s plan. The main reason for the reluctance to back non-payment is that it is impossible to fit a campaign of this sort into Orange- Green politics. You can not mobilise against the charges in one community only. Water charges and privatisation will be defeated through a campaign which transcends the divide or they will not be defeated at all. Building a serious non-payment campaign would do more to break down sectarian divisions than any other single idea or development on offer. But parties which are based on representing one community and not the other would be directly threatened by a campaign which mobilised people on a basis which has nothing whatever to do with what community they come from. This is why they all claim to be against water charges but are unanimous in opposing a non-payment campaign. The SEA is in favour of non-payment for the exact reasons the mainstream parties are against it. This is the difference in a nutshell.

Taken from Socialist Worker Issue 237
WHERE NOW FOR THE REPUBLICAN MOVEMENT?  
THE GOVERNMENTS and mainstream parties want rid of the IRA because its very existence is a challenge to established ideas of law and order and to the stability of the Northern and Southern States. In the wake of the Northern Bank robbery and the murder of Robert McCartney, they are demanding that Sinn Fein ditch the military wing and lead their followers into full acceptance of the political and constitutional set-up.
The socialist objection to the IRA is different. The Governments are encouraged by the fact that the Provisional IRA is less popular today than at any time in the last quarter century in the working-class Catholic areas of the North where it has been most deeply-rooted. This isn’t on account of the supposed immorality of robbing a bank. But the multi-million pound, transnational money operation in which the IRA was subsequently shown to have been involved clearly had nothing to do with leading people to liberation, in any sense of the phrase, or with ending partition. Instead, it indicated that IRA activities aren’t exactly aligned with the interests of the people in whose name it purports to act. The IRA was hanging out with a different class of people entirely.
The brutal killing of Robert McCartney illustrates the same point. Some former members and supporters of Sinn Fein and/or the IRA have concluded that what’s needed is a reformed or refurbished Republican Movement, with a leadership committed to true Republican ideals rather than to personal or political advancement. They largely attribute the current debacle to bad leadership, wrong turnings or sinister motivation on the part of Gerry Adams and his associates. This is an inadequate conclusion.
At the heart of the tradition in which this newspaper stands is the idea that socialism must come from below. That it cannot be imposed or bestowed upon the working class from above, whether by parliamentarians or paramilitaries, but can be accomplished only by working class people themselves organising in their workplaces and communities to advance their situation, ultimately to overthrow the capitalist system.
Commentators have contrasted the role of the IRA in the 1970s in the Short Strand, where Robert McCartney lived, and the role now exemplified by the IRA members involved in his killing. Once they were protectors of the community, it is said. Now they are oppressors. There is truth in this as far as it goes. But it misses the connection between the IRA then and now.
The IRA may on occasion have given the community physical protection, particularly in the circumstances of the early .70s. But it was never answerable or accountable to the community. It has sometimes styled itself the .peoples army.. But it organises and operates out of sight of the people. It was and is, necessarily, a clandestine organisation. Its members are oath-bound to give total allegiance to paramilitary chiefs who, far from finding validation in endorsement by the people, must keep their very identities hidden from the people. This is true of the IRA in defender as well as oppressor mode. It is one of the keys to understanding the transition. Every ruling class voice is currently raised high urging Republicans to ditch paramilitarism, become totally respectable and join the conservative consensus. Forgiveness and glittering prizes are on offer to those who accept. This would represent abandonment of struggle. The SWP urges Republicans who think of themselves also as socialists to turn not to the Right but to the socialist ideas of self-liberation which alone offer a road forward.   

Taken from Socialist Worker Issue 236
Sinn Fein: Armed struggle and isolation or into government?
MITCHEL MCLAUGHLIN was splattered with scorn last month when he told a Radio Foyle interviewer that if the IRA had been behind the Northern Bank job it wouldn.t have been a crime. It would have been a crime, he conceded, if IRA members had carried out the heist for reasons of .personal aggrandisement.. But if the operation had been properly authorised by a competent IRA authority.-which he denied.-it wouldn.t have been criminal at all.
His underlying point was that the IRA embodies the nation, and that its interests and the .national interest. are therefore one and the same. And nothing done in the national interest could be a crime. Taken on its own, this isn’t an outlandish suggestion.  Governments come out with the same sort of stuff all the time.  The .national interest. is regularly used to justify everything from withholding evidence from courts to waging war to telling the poor to tighten their belts.
This perception of the IRA as the equivalent of a government is regarded by virtually everybody outside Republican ranks as a ridiculous delusion. But it’s taken more seriously by Republicans than they often care to admit within earshot of outsiders. It’s at the core of their justification of the .armed struggle..
Since the IRA embodies the nation, runs the theory, the IRA Army Council, tracing its succession back to 1916, has governmental authority. The problem for the Sinn Fein leadership now is that they have abandoned the objective which the armed struggle was intended to achieve. When they signed up to the Belfast Agreement they accepted the .principle of consent.-that the North will remain constitutionally part of the UK until such time as a majority within the Six Counties decides otherwise. This directly contradicts the idea of the nation which underpins the Provos. conception of themselves.
Whether or not they actually did the bank job, this contradiction has now come to the fore and will have to be dealt with. If Sinn Fein wants to continue to progress towards holding government office North and South, it will have to give up the fantasy of the Army Council as the government of the whole island. It will have to accept, fully and formally, the existing two States and the legitimacy of their security forces. That’s what the two governments and the other major parties want it to do.
One of the reasons Sinn Fein would be acceptable in government on both sides of the border.-if they ended association with the IRA.-is that, seeing their Movement as representing .the nation., they don’t advocate the interests of any one class against another. In class terms, they are reconcilers. They can use rhetoric suggesting they are on the side of the oppressed and exploited, while being trusted by their potential partners in government not to destabilise the system which generates exploitation and oppression.
What are their options if they don’t ditch the IRA and go for government at Leinster House and Stormont? Resume shooting and bombing for .Brits Out. and an all-Ireland Republic? There’d be little support for such a course in any of the overwhelmingly working class areas where Sinn Fein is well-rooted. And they wouldn’t be taken seriously anyway, having spent the last seven years extolling the virtues of the Agreement. So, it’s into government, chastened, with right-wing parties on a right-wing programme.-or back to armed struggle and isolation. Rank and file Republicans should ask themselves whether the time has not come to free themselves from the nationalist contradictions in which they are entangled and look for a socialist way forward instead.  

Taken from Socialist Worker Issue 235
Migrant workers. rights: Unite and fight
THE ORDEAL of Oksana Sukhanova sparked widespread concern across the North in January and prompted a series of articles about the plight of immigrant workers. But there.s no sign of employers or mainstream political leaders learning lessons. This is because what.s at issue here are workers. rights and racism. And powerful interest groups don.t put a high priority on either. The 23-year-old Ukrainian had both her legs amputated in Belfast’s City Hospital after being found sleeping rough in freezing weather in Coleraine. Oksana had been paid off by McKeon’s poultry factory in Rasharkin. The company insists it behaved properly. Indeed, Oksana had been treated no worse than immigrant workers generally. That’s the scandal.
Most immigrants are cheap labour, on minimum wages or worse. Their permits mean they can’t change jobs. When their contract is up, employers can dump them. In many trades, like the meat trade, they tend to live in poor accommodation provided by the employer or by the agent who brought them in. When they lose their job, they become homeless too. It.s rare for immigrant workers to have their few rights explained. Those, like Oksana, who can’t speak English, have no way of finding out.
Employers enjoy a disposable, two-tier workforce with cheap transient labour used to meet fluctuating demand. There are around 25,000 immigrant workers in the North. Skilled engineers tend to earn the minimum £4.85 an hour. In 2002, mushroom pickers were found to be paid £1.20 an hour! The Simon Community says increasing numbers of migrants are arriving at their door. Non-British and non-Irish people account for up to 25 percent of Simon’s clients in Coleraine.
Virtually all immigrants in the North experience racism of some sort. How could it be otherwise when ministers talk of society being .swamped., local politicians play on irrational fear and newspapers spew lies about .scroungers. every day? What happened to Oksana won’t shift official attitudes. The Government and the bosses hope the new workers will create downward pressure on wages by filling shortages and undermining unions. bargaining power. They see immigrants as workers who won’t burden the state (with the cost of their education, for example) and can later be denied benefits and pensions.
What’s happening here is an attack on workers. rights and the welfare state, couched in the language of race. One positive practical response has come from the ATGWU in Dungannon which has combined with the South Tyrone Empowerment Project (Step) to unionise immigrant workers alongside locals and to combat racism in the community, through practical programmes and by encouraging all workers to stand up for their rights. This is a model to be followed. There was genuine, widespread distress when Oksana’s experience emerged. Campaigners need to understand that sympathy from ministers and employers is double-edged . welcoming immigrants as a cheap alternative to local labour, but hostile towards immigrants and local labour linking up. What’s needed is a fight for full union rights and for open borders to admit workers of all countries on the basis of equality.  

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