The recent Tory direct rule budget has demonstrated how the occupied Six counties of Ireland remain firmly within the grip of British Rule and at the mercy of perpetual capitalist austerity despite almost two decades having passed since the Good Friday Agreement promised a progressive section of our people that mechanisms existed to break free from the Tory nightmare.
In 1998 the Irish Republican Socialist Party openly opposed the Good Friday Agreement, stating in confidence that it would not end the miserable position of weakness which progressive northern republicans and socialists have found themselves since the partition of Ireland itself.
The helpless situation in which the northern working class now find themselves – faced with a budget drafted not to suit Ireland but the interests of London and riddled with financial trickery to further starve the health service while boosting the public prowess of the DUP – vindicates the said opposition of the Republican Socialist Movement.
Twenty years of political impotence has been twenty years too many and the fruits of capitulation are evident in a Tory budget which is as a meager as any Thatcherite initiative of the past and which makes only a further mockery of the career politicians of Unionism and reformist nationalism.
It is without any fear of contradiction or condemnation that the IRSP now repeats its demand that Good Friday’s only remaining prospect for progress be initiated. All progressives, republicans, socialists and working-class activists must unite now in demand of a border poll on Irish unity and independence with the direct aim of breaking the connection with England and its ever present Tory masters.
Should Britain fail to furnish Ireland with a border poll in the near future then the credentials of Good Friday can be safely consigned to the dustbin of republican history.
A further twenty years of political failure and impotence is not an option for the long-suffering Irish working class.
