Somewhere among what I refer to as an important political archive and what Mrs Mac calls “all those useless old books and papers taking up space” is an original copy of this pamphlet produced by Peoples Democracy in 1980 which you can download here.

I’d forgotten how good it was until it popped up on Cedar Lounge Revolution, the site for lefties too stubborn to quit.

The pamphlet is a statement of a distinctive current within Irish Marxism, the mainstream of which has always preferred to focus on economic issues as a way of mobilising the working class. Bigger political questions, of which imperialism is the most important, tended to be seen as either a capitulation to nationalism or straightforward Catholic sectarianism. Sometimes it’s hard to see where the line lies between some Marxists, the union bureaucrats and outfits like the liberal unionist Alliance Party.

No such confusion is to be found in this pamphlet. It argues that the main reason the British introduced the non-jury Diplock courts was that entirely Protestant juries would be certain to convict every Republican activist put before them. That would confirm what everyone already knew, that the justice system was as sectarian as the rest of the northern state. Judges accepting confessions extracted under torture was a preferable option.

The struggle inside the prisons started when the movement outside was at a low point and the politics of the Republican Movement seemed set to keep it demobilised. They insisted that support for the prisoners’ demands had to be accompanied by support for the armed struggle, a precondition which excluded many potential sympathisers and activists.

Fianna Fail and the Catholic hierarchy are harshly criticised. Both of them felt that they had the right to negotiate on the prisoners’ behalf without reference to the mass movement that was building up outside. The Irish bourgeoisie is identified as a bulwark of the partitionist settlement.

Chances are that the issue of prisoners’ demands is likely to burst open again in the next two or three years. Militant Republican groups who have learned nothing are trying what didn’t work last time; the southern economy is actively creating tens of thousands of disenfranchised unemployed youth and the northern government is just about to start making big cuts in its expenditure. The national question in Ireland hasn’t gone away and this little pamphlet, written in the heat of a previous struggle contains valuable lessons.