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- Author or Editor: Matthew Johnson x
This is an introduction to Militancy and the working class: The case of Northern Ireland. I outline the substantive content of the issue, arguing that the dynamics at play render much of our established understandings contestable.
Seán Byers presents a comprehensive overview of the post-crash political landscape in Northern Ireland. His most significant contribution is, perhaps, the most understated: that the Blairite settlement is incapable of resolving the social cleavages that threaten any possibility of harmony. He highlights, again and again, the ways in which apparently divergent actors, such as Sinn Féin and the DUP are brought together through the demands of neoliberal governance and, in so doing, deprive their working class electorates of real change. In this reply, I argue that the current situation highlights the need for genuine transformative politics and that this is most likely to come from Britain, not the Republic.
Jonathan Evershed presents a compelling account of the clear dangers that lie in forms of state-led remembrance. The danger is, of course, that, in commemorating, actual experience is lost. While I do not wish to challenge any of the core claims in the piece, I do think that there is one element that requires greater examination: Evershed’s claim that contemporary Irish conceptions of the First World War as ‘A war that stopped a war’ ‘contributes to a (post)colonial and militaristic nostalgia in British political culture’. While the dangers of that for Northern Ireland are clear, perhaps the greatest risks lie in England, since any such benign account of the conflict serves radically to distort the experience of those soldiers commonly regarded as identifying as British and painted as being motivated by patriotism. Drawing on experience from Tyneside, I argue that, in considering the nature of that conflict, we must remember the many diverse, and often banal, reasons for working class engagement in conflict.
