Is The Good Friday Agreement Dead?

Much broo ha ha is being undertaken, as Biden comes to Ireland, to mark a quarter century of the Good Friday Agreement. But, the agreement was a bad deal to begin with, and its centrepiece, the power sharing executive, has only sat for 40% of its existence, and has not sat, now, for 430 days. The conditions that existed and that led to its creation no longer exist, so the question is, is the Good Friday Agreement dead, never to be resurrected?

Marx noted, in The Poverty of Philosophy, that laws ultimately just rubber stamp real conditions. They may get out of synch, because governments may be ahead or behind – usually the latter – those real conditions, but, ultimately its the reality that imposes itself. So, in Britain, where the more rapid development of capital in the early 19th century had led to a more rapid growth of the working-class, and of conditions in which it was brought together, and led to create unions, parliament was led to repeal the Combination Acts, that previously outlawed such unions. The fact that France introduced such laws reflected the lower level of development in capital in France.

“In England, combination is authorized by an Act of Parliament, and it is the economic system which has forced Parliament to grant this legal authorization. In 1825, when, under the Minister Huskisson, Parliament had to modify the law in order to bring it more and more into line with the conditions resulting from free competition, it had of necessity to abolish all laws forbidding combinations of workers. The more modern industry and competition develop, the more elements there are which call forth and strengthen combination, and as soon as combination becomes an economic fact, daily gaining in solidity, it is bound before long to become a legal fact.

Thus the article of the Penal Code proves at the most that modern industry and competition were not yet well developed under the Constituent Assembly and under the Empire.)

(The Poverty of Philosophy – Chapter Two)

The GFA was a bad deal, because it institutionalised the sectarian nature of politics in Northern Ireland, giving each of the two communities (catholic/nationalist and protestant/unionist) a right to share in executive power, simply on that basis. It made a continuation of that sectarianism, thereby, inevitable, in an age when its material conditions were disappearing. The material basis of sectarianism in Northern Ireland has nothing to do with religious differences, any more than the English Civil War was about religious differences, even though that is the way it is presented, based upon superficialities.

The English Civil War was about the rise of the urban bourgeoisie, whose interests tended to be aligned with those of protestant asceticism – Weber's Protestant Ethic – as against the interests of the Monarchy, whose profligacy was funded from taxes on that bourgeoisie. The material basis of protestant ascendancy in Northern Ireland has nothing to do with the fact that they are Protestants, but with the fact that they were transplanted into Ireland, by England, as colons, to exercise such dominance to begin with. It was on that basis that they exercised a series of privileges over the native Irish population, most of whom were still catholic. In a country that still had communally owned land, they were given land, seized by the English state; some of them were able to accumulate capital, and for those that didn't, they were given privileged access to jobs, by their protestant capitalist brethren, and so on.

For so long as there was a British state, exercising unrestricted mandate over Northern Ireland, the protestant colons could count on that state standing behind them, and ensuring the continuation of those privileges. When the 26 counties, won their independence from Britain, that unrestricted mandate was weakened, but not removed, as the new Republic was too weak to impose its own mandate on the Six Counties, and instead had to compromise with the British State for the creation of the Northern Ireland statelet as a sectarian bear pit from the start. That was reflected by the fact that, the historic County of Ulster, comprised nine not six counties, but, had a border been drawn around the nine, it comprised a majority catholic/nationalist population. The law established, creating the Northern Irish statelet, represented a reflection of the reality that Britain could not hold on to the whole of Ireland, and the purpose of the new statelet was to guarantee a Protestant/Unionist majority, tied to British imperialism.

That reality was also still apparent when, in 1969, Britain sent troops on to the streets of Northern Ireland. The official reason for the troops going in was as a special policing operation – to coin the phrase used by Putin to justify his actions in Eastern Ukraine – as sectarian violence erupted on the streets, as the catholic/nationalist community rallied around the Civil Rights Movement, much as black US citizens had been doing to demand equal rights, but which provoked, in both cases, a backlash from those that currently enjoyed the privileges being challenged. But, within a very short time, it became clear that the British troops were not there to simply keep a neutral peace, but to ensure a continuation of the status quo, and so to turn their fire – literally – on the catholic/nationalist community. The consequence was that, the peaceful civil rights movement became irrelevant, much as its US equivalent became, and the ground shifted towards those offering a physical force defence of the respective communities. In Northern Ireland, that was the Provisional IRA, which, until that time had been an insignificantly small organisation.

But, British imperialism was seriously on the wane, and had been for half a century. Most notably, the basis of imperialism, as against colonialism, is the requirement of large-scale, multinational industrial capital, to sweep away all of the monopolies and restricted markets that were the hallmark of the colonial empires, such as that established by Britain, and other European states, in order that, particularly, US multinational capital could settle everywhere unimpeded, and, thereby, exploit available labour supplies, based upon the extraction of relative surplus value, which itself requires, access to well educated workers, able to use the technologies that provide the high levels of productivity that produce the relative surplus value.

US imperialism ruled the roost after WWII, and its was its multinational industrial companies that acted as the spearhead, and its ties were more well established with the catholic/nationalist population, which had been the source of much migration to the US to escape the conditions in Ireland, in the 19th century, particularly during the famine caused by English policy in Ireland, in 1848.

US multinationals, began to set up in Ireland, with no regard for the old protestant privileges, and, indeed, with hostility towards them. The process accelerated with British and Irish membership of the EEC in 1973, and, with the creation of the EU, and its insistence on minimum standards required for a level playing field in a single market, the old protestant/unionist privileges were an anachronism that could no longer be tolerated. Its precisely why the DUP supported Brexit, in a doomed attempt to prevent the continuation of that, and in the hope of turning back the clock to the heyday of unionism, and its ties to a British imperialist state, with unrestricted mandate in the province. The fact that it has been able to forge an alliance with a Tory Party captured by the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie that grew rapidly from the 1980's onwards, and with similar motives for supporting Brexit, is a further anachronism that represents something like an eddy in the forward movement of the stream of history, rather than a new direction of flow.

When the Good Friday Agreement was signed, it simply reflected these changed conditions. In 1999, with no prospect of Britain committing economic suicide by leaving the EU, and as a new long wave upswing of the global economy got underway, the material basis of unionist privileges disappeared. Capital flooded into Ireland from the US and Europe, ending the monopoly that unionist capital had previously enjoyed, which had been the basis of unionist workers employment privileges, and so on. In fact, Ireland, like the rest of Britain, had labour shortages, leading to an influx of European workers, with no historical connection to the old sectarian divides. But, the agreement reflected material conditions in another way, which was that both PIRA and the British state understood they had fought each other to a draw, whilst the unionists were a rapidly diminishing quantity, both politically and demographically.

In fact, the Good Friday Agreement was more beneficial for the protestants/unionists for that very reason. Their day had already passed, and the writing was on the wall for the end of their supremacy, just as it had been for the white minority in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Without the old protestant ascendancy and privileges, there is really no basis for the unionist parties whose politics is based upon them, other than as a reactionary drag on bringing reality and appearance into alignment. But, in doing that, they inevitably undermine the interests of the majority of protestants in Northern Ireland too, as the effects of Brexit have demonstrated, even as mitigated by the Northern Ireland Protocol, which itself demonstrates that Britain no longer exercises the unrestricted mandate over Northern Ireland it did, and which the DUP desperately seek to restore.

But, contrary to the needs of the DUP, the British state, no longer even able to exercise unrestricted mandate within its own borders, as it has to comply with EU regulations to continue its trade relations, has even more had to relinquish its mandate in Northern Ireland to the EU, also under pressure from the US, apart from the blimp that was Trump. The Good Friday Agreement was supposed to give both communities equal rights based on power sharing, but, in fact, it simply institutionalised the existing sectarian divide, in conditions where the material basis of that divide was being destroyed by the day, as a result of the economic development that imperialism brings about, especially within the confines of the EU. What it actually did was shore up the position of the protestant/unionist community, and increasingly the interests of the unionist politicians even against the interests of the community they purport to represent, by abrogating the basic elements of democracy.

At the last elections, Sinn Fein won the majority of seats, which would have meant it nominated the First Minister, but the Executive has not met, as the DUP simply refuses to participate. As a measure of the failure of the agreement that is manifest. The GFA, as a sectarian arrangement that abrogates basic principles of democracy no longer reflects the material reality that exists. It is used as a means of arguing that Northern Ireland needed special arrangements following Brexit, but its not the GFA that makes such arrangements necessary. It is the needs of the Northern Ireland economy, and of its people that requires that no border exist between it, and the EU, with which it trades every day across that land border. In fact, that reality shows why, the actual border, if there is to be any, is that between Ireland as a whole, and the British mainland, which simply reflects the reality of a United Ireland, within the EU.

If the GFA did not exist, giving the DUP a veto, then the last elections would have seen a nationalist majority in the parliament, and any boycott by the DUP would simply have seen its more rapid demise. Its time for the GFA to be buried, and for a consistent democratic settlement in Ireland, whose only rational conclusion is a United Ireland within the EU.