THE ULSTER CONFLICT the Provisionals are re-arming far a fresh onslaught may presage a freezing of the present deadlock which is all they can achieve. During the Fine Gael-Labour coalition in the Republic from 1973 to June 1977 the Official I.R.A. contracted into their political wing which now calls itself "Sinn Fein - The Workers' Party", eschews the "Hibernian nationalism" of the Provisionals, describes itself as the "vanguard of the Irish working class" and unsurprisingly states that "the struggle to defend, consolidate and expand the state sector is the single most vital task confronting the organised working class at the present time". The strongest force in the North now is the Protestant working class. It demonstrated in a self-managed general strike in 1974 that it would resist all attempts to coerce it into a union with the South by the device of a Council of Ireland. The incompetence of the Unionist leaders in 1972 in meeting the challenge of the Provisionals' attempt to destroy the province led to the introduction of direct rule by the British government, which accelerated the trend of the Catholic towards adopting a nationalist attitude to the Ulster conflict. This was precisely the effect that the Provisionals wished to achieve, since it is on the maintenance of nationalist sentiment that they thrive. They even managed to impose it on the Social Democratic and Labour Party which has to retain grassroots Catholic support to survive. The SDLP was set up to channel Catholic agitation into parliamentary expression but now it has to adopt the equivoca! attitude of never saying whether it supports or rejects the state in Ulster. It is unlikely that a withdrawal of British troops would lead to a Provisional victory since the withdrawal of the "B" Specials, a host of Protestant terror organizations have risen to take their place and have even come to occupy a similar position to the Provos in the Protestant ghettos. To an extent both sets of "guerillas" have an interest in the continuation of the conflict, and a first step towards a real solution of the problem would be their extirpation by the communities they prey. The only hopeful sign in this direction has been the "Peace People", originally a movement of housewises springing from revultion against the violence to attempt to persuade men to give up their weapons. It has been criticized however, far its failure to call on the British Army to de-escalate its violence, and the movement seems on the verge of splitting up 71
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