Proceedings at the Workers Party annual commemoration of Theobald Wolfe Tone at Bodenstown, Co. Kildare held on Sunday, 29th June 2014 including the opening remarks of chairwoman Gemma Weir of the North Belfast branch of the Workers’ Party and the main address by Michael Donnelly, member of the Central Executive Committee of the Workers’ Party of Ireland.
Opening remarks by Gemma Weir, North Belfast, Chairing Workers Party 2014, Bodenstown Commemoration.
Comrades and friends,
You are all very welcome her today to the annual Workers Party Wolfe Tone Commemoration.
We are honoured to be here in this special place, the grave of Wolfe Tone, Irish Revolutionary and embodiment of Irish Republicanism and the struggle for freedom, political, economic and social sovereignty.
Tone and the United Irishmen and women strove to put the citizen at the heart of Irish society, to ensure the fullest possible degree of political and economic democracy.
They were part of the worldwide revolutionary struggles and owed much to the influences of the French and American revolutions.
They were part of the battle of ideas raging across Europe, they represented the most advanced political thinking of their time.
We in The Workers Party have used this occasion over the years not only as an act of remembrance of a great man and thinker, but as an opportunity to assess our own situation and to set out what is required to continue the unfinished business of the United Irish movement.
Ireland today remains a country North and South, where the great majority, the working class remain subject to political and economic tyranny.
The need for a party of the working class, The Workers Party, for a socialist alternative to unbridled capitalism, the source today of all evils, has never been greater.
We are faced once again with the task of building the Party as that alternative.
We look forward to a period leading to the Ard Fheis at the end of Sept when we can present a clear political and organisational plan to do just that.
Our main speaker today is Michael Donnelly, Galway, National Education Officer of The Workers Party and member of the Party’s Central Executive Committee.
Main Address by Michael Donnelly
Bodenstown Oration, Sunday June 29th 2014, delivered by Comrade Michael Donnelly
Comrades, Friends, Distinguished Guests.
Today’s Commemoration is not merely a ritual celebration of the life and death of a great Irish secularist and republican; it is much more than that!
First, it is an opportunity to remind both ourselves and the Irish people – particularly the workers – what it was that Tone actually stood and fought for. Second, and despite the simple nationalistic gloss put on it by some self-styled intellectuals and historians, it is to remind us also of just how revolutionary those ideas actually were in the late 18th century Ireland. Third, it is to remind ourselves that the real purpose of the revolution was about far more than the mere ending of English rule over Ireland. Because the revolution that Tone and his comrades led in 1797-8 was not simply about abstract principles of justice; not merely about the rights of an Irish parliament. What they fought for, essentially, was about the rights of all the people to prevail over the elites! It represented a truly serious attempt to learn from the French Revolution and to end once and for all the selfish privileges of the aristocratic and propertied classes as well as to overthrow the tyranny of monarchy; in essence they fought to establish a truly democratic, republican order. An order that would uniquely be centred on the one class of people that could not but support it, and who could not but gain from it: namely the people of no property! This was the true essence of their revolution!
The fourth and most important thing we must recognise is that coming here today is not merely to take part in a continuing celebration of those ideas and actions for today’s Ireland, but also to acknowledge the necessity to learn fully from them if we are ever to challenge successfully the new elites that continue to trample on our rights and livelihoods, both north and south. Times may indeed have changed but oppression and injustice continues, albeit in new, more subtle but equally vicious and insidious forms.
When Tone and the United Irishmen spoke of the ‘Men of no property’ this was no idle, chance usage of mere words: quite to the contrary! For Tone, the people of no property represented the vast bulk of all the people living on the island of Ireland at that time. An Ireland where total power, both economic & political, lay exclusively with a landed aristocracy whose privilege was jealously guarded and whose every action was designed to ensure the continued exclusion of the ordinary people from all aspects of political life, and their continued repression in both social life and economic affairs. In mounting a challenge to that privilege, by politicising the social and legal oppressions then rampant in their society, by linking the personal, the local and the national issues into political ones, and, above all else, by tying it all into the internationalism of the new radical, revolutionary ideas of republicanism, Tone and his comrades presented the sternest, most radical, most fearsome challenge to aristocracy it had ever thus faced on the island of Ireland. What they sought, what Tone struggled and died for, was to establish a true republic of equal citizens, where inherited privilege had no place and where royalty, aristocracy and all forms of inherited privilege would be abolished. Then, and only then, could the people be truly free!
This is the Tone we come to celebrate; the Tone we want to learn from; to emulate and, above all else maybe, to complete what it was that he, his Comrades and the people, fought for. Because the ideals that they promulgated in 1798 are as just as vital and as necessary today- perhaps even more so- as they were back then!
In that context then we can readily see continuity between the time of Tone and the Ireland of today.
In the Ireland of today we face the challenge of a new elite. One maybe without the old titles of aristocracy but still no less aristocratic for that. This new aristocracy includes the bankers, the financial speculators, the gombeen property builders, the multi-propertied landlords, the native and trans-national business corporations and of course their ever true and loyal friends in the mainstream political parties as well as within the highest reaches of the state apparatuses. It is an aristocracy whose members don’t wear crowns or carry sceptres; that mightn’t live in castles surrounded by moats (although some clearly aspire towards even that!). But they are wealthy none-the-less; enormously so! And the powers that they wield are equally enormous and truly frightening both in range and scope. Powers that even the nobles and aristocrats of Tone’s time would have been jealous of. Powers that permit this tiny band of unscrupulous, philandering, plundering, wealthy few to exercise such unprecedented, enormously disproportionate and fundamentally undemocratic control over all aspects of politics. Powers that ensure that no political decisions will ever be made that might disrupt their wealth-making; that ensure no plans allowed that might ever involve them paying even a mere cent more in tax; nor plans permitted that can truly tackle the poverty and pain, the profound injustices endured by so many in today’s Ireland, both north and south. Above all else this power is exercised to ensure that their privileges and wealth, their status and dominance, will remain intact, undiluted and undiminished by any challenge to it. And the lot of the weak, the poor, the underprivileged, the ordinary workers and their families will continue to be a bleak and dark one, forced to lay submissively at the feet of the new landlords; the landlords of capital!
In short this is the new Ireland; where the swaggering gait of wealth and privilege is adored and glorified; where the ordinary is spurned and scorned, and where the poor and the destitute are accused of being so simply because they are lacking in so-called basic moral fibre, drive and energy! They lack the entrepreneurial spirit!
What drivel! Poverty and unemployment are not factors of chance in an otherwise good society. Unemployment, low wages, poor health and education opportunities are not failures on the part of weak individuals, but represent the direct and unavoidable outcome of policies deliberately pursued by a state and its apologists that sees its primary tasks as being to organise, promote, defend and ultimately reward privilege; where profoundly unequal access to wealth is neither accidental nor unfortunate, but represents the actual cornerstone of privilege. There is a basic maths at play; the more the wealthy few possesses, the less the many can ever have!
In contemporary Ireland, both north and south we have witnessed a rapidly growing inequality. This we all know. Yet, if the various media of information, the newspapers the TV and radio shows were to be believed, we ALL are equally affected by this so-called ‘downturn in economic fortunes’. This is the new myth propagated by the elite, that when the latest crash happened in and around 2007-8 everybody was affected! This was and still is the story-line. Be grateful it seems: you’re in the same boat as the Denis O Brien’s, the J.P. Mc Manus’s, or the Denis Haughey’s!
We can believe that just as much as we believe in a moon made of cheese or the tooth fairy!
Yet, this is the line put out time and time again. We have ALL suffered! And we ALL must bear a proportional share of the pain necessary to re-kick the economy into life! This is the BIG LIE!
The wealthy are not suffering! Not now! Not then! Not ever!
What is deliberately ignored and avoided at all costs in this false narrative is the fact that during this very period of supposed economic downturn, the same elite that squatted at the top of the heap before the crash are not only still there but they have become even wealthier! They have more now than ever they had before!!
If you have any doubts at all about what I say in this , then just take a look at the recent work by the French economist, Thomas Piketty, which presents clear and incontrovertible empirical evidence of just how the rich have grown richer despite, maybe even because, of the current economic situation.
To take one example from Ireland: in the south successive governments, both the current one of Labour and Fine Gael no less than the previous one of Fianna Fail, the Greens and PDs, bailed out, and continue to bail out the bondholders and shareholders of the main failed financial institutions. We know this so there is no need to re-state the case against that bailing out of greedy bondholders. But there is more at play than just this. This bailing out came of course at an enormous financial cost to the state, and in order to pay for it the state borrowed mind-boggling sums from the World Bank, the European Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But, in addition to this, the state also issued bonds that in real time are simply loans from private financial speculators in the main. Again, nothing particularly unusual in this, as it is common practice in that area. What is quite revealing, however, what really is quite shocking, is that almost half of the bonds issued are owed not to foreign speculators or financiers, but to LOCAL ones! Irish ones! So the state has borrowed from the local rich in order to re-pay those same local rich people the money it borrowed from them previously simply to make good their earlier losses!
In short, the taxes PAYE ordinary workers’ pay are increasingly being diverted from the health services, from public welfare and education programmes and instead are being used directly to pay these very same rich people. This is the reality of the so-called lack of money for public spending. What originally was designed to pay for health-care, for public sector wages, for our children’s education and services is now instead being diverted to the wealthy. Public money is now the source of a major part of this elite’s collective income!
So, in effect, what we now have, both north and south, is a new welfare programme; but it is a welfare programme no longer designed for the public use and good but for the idle, rich, financial speculators! In the darkest sense they are almost literally the blood-suckers of the poor!
This, then, is the new Ireland that we live in.
So what is to be done? Comrades, a lot is to be done! A lot must be done!
First, just as in Tone’s time there is an urgent need to build a radical organisation that is capable both of identifying the causes of our problems, and of offering radical alternatives to it. Second, it must be a one that is inseparable from that great class of people that pays for the rich and idle speculators: the class of workers! This demands a WORKERS’ PARTY!
No other party can truly represent the interests of the new dispossessed, the ordinary working people. Given that is these workers’ taxes that are paying for the state’s bond and debt re-payments, given that it is workers’ energies that make the products, that provides the goods and services which gives the speculators their profits, then it surely is time for workers to control collectively what is rightfully theirs! To own what they have made by the sweat of their labour, their toil. This historically determined task still remains to be completed! And it can only be completed by workers organised and led by their party: the Worker’s Party!
Again: WHAT IS TO BE DONE? A lot, Comrades!
Just as in Tone’s time, in Lenin’s time, we need to organise, organise, organise! Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!
To do this and to lead the way and advance the workers’ cause we need more workers to join the Party.
We need more branches, and we need a clearer sense of ideological direction.
We need members to be ever conscious of what it is that we are and who it is that we represent; of what it is that we must and what it is that we can do; where it is specifically that we are going. And, even if the pace of movement is slower than some may wish for, it must also be recognised that a revolutionary party can only go as fast as its slowest part! With current levels of class consciousness amongst the workers still, regretfully, relatively low, it is painfully clear that much more needs to be done. For only a class that is fully conscious of its position is one that is truly ready for revolutionary change.
This then is the double-duty of the Party: to enable by our actions a constant flow of consciousness-raising ideas towards all workers, and simultaneously to promote specific, concrete actions based on that new awareness. For it is only by promoting heightened class awareness that we will also witness a growing party. And it is only by radical ideas and deeds – but by neither alone- that we will succeed.
And succeed we will, Comrades, if we continue the admittedly difficult, arduous but necessary tasks of building the Party, of extending its links with the workers that we represent and finally leading those same workers to ultimately victory in the future.
This is what we should take from this celebration of Tone and the United Irishmen of 1798. To re-dedicate ourselves to the clear and urgent necessity of reclaiming this island from the greedy grasp of the wealthy, exploiting elites and restoring it to the only people who really matter: workers and their families.
Thank you comrades for your attention.