THE ULSTER CONFLICT of the British government to placate American public opinion at the time) they abstained from taking up their seats at Westminster and set up their own Dail Eireann (Council of Ireland) in Dublin. The result of this particular unilateral declaration of independence was an armed attempt at coercion by the British government which the southern Irish met with a campaign of rural and urban guerilla warfare, waged by members of the ex-Irish Volunteers, now renamed the Irish Republican Army, progenitor of today's urban guerillas in Belfast. In fact, the Dail Eireann was almost totally inoperative in the period up to 1920 and there was no accept authority in most of Ireland outside Ulster. In Ulster the Ulster Volunteer Force was reconstituted into a special constabulary with three levels of operational organization: "A", "B" and "C", which fought alongside British troops against the I.R.A. in the North, with a ferocity on both sides that ignored all protocols of war. Belfast was under curfew, except for two brief intervals, until Christmas 1924; I.R.A. guerilla attaks were answered with progroms against Catholic districts, which reinforced the sectarian geographical division of the city, reinforcing the territorial segregation of the two working-class communities. The physical I.R.A. attacks within the city were bolstered by a trade boycott imposed from the South. The Ulster Protestant "siege mentality" had at this moment a very palpable reality to feed on. In his writings on Ulster James Connolly had stressed that the separation of the North-East from the rest of the country would cause irreparable damage to the working class movement in Ireland as a whole and before he was executed he had warned against any shooting in the North because he knew from his experience as a trade union organiser in Belfat that any attempt at externa! coercion of the North would only drive the Protestant working class into the arms of the industrial bourgeoisie. Connolly's actions, however, which ended in the class alliance of the Easter Rising, dealt a tremendous, almost knockout, blow to the Southern workers' movement (which had been greatly weakened by ultimate defeat in the 1913 Dublin general strike) in favour of the separatist nationalist movement which was dominated by the Southern bourgeoisie. In the 1918 general election the Irish Labour Party in the South had stood aside to allow the Sinn Fein party a direct contest with the parliamentary Nationalists. The politics set in motion by the Sinn Fein upsurge have meant that the constitutional 51
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