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Stormont House: “Toe the line” Sinn Fein told

Little was made of Martin McGuinness' recent trip to Washington. Even less will be made of his return. He had looked for support in renegotiating the Stormont House Agreement and had been sent away with a flea in his ear. He had earlier collected the order of the boot in visits to David Cameron and Theresa Villiers.

Sinn Fein were looking for a way off the hook of welfare cuts in the North. They were told in no uncertain terms that if they did not support the welfare cuts then the Stormont administration would be closed down. In order for the Tory war against the working class to succeed there must be no exceptions. No help was to be had in Dublin. Fine Gael are masters of class war and Labour have committed electoral suicide in order to enforce austerity.

The only words of comfort were a generalised statement of support from Jeremy Corbyn and a warning from PWC of the extreme weakness of the northern economy and the impact of the cuts - devastating if the Tories cared about workers.

Fig leaf

· In reality Sinn Fein are not an anti-austerity party.
· They signed off on the Stormont House austerity.
· They later balked at only one section - welfare cuts - while ignoring the mass privatisations and job cuts.
· Their ministers in Stormont are enforcing mass redundancies.
· They have agreed a "fantasy budget" that assumes welfare cuts.
· Their shadow "anti-austerity" budgets in the Dail are inside the constraints set by the Troika and claim that they can deliver growth while paying every last cent of sovereign debt.

What Sinn Fein are looking for is a fig leaf. In the latest round of diplomacy they have been told that there are no alternatives and no exceptions inside capitalism. They must fall into line or Stormont will close down.

Loss of patronage

As decision day comes the enormity of this loss becomes clear. The level of bribes, kickbacks and patronage in Stormont is almost past counting. The level of impunity was shown around Casement Park, where safety concerns were dismissed and the whistleblower is to be moved aside.

The nationalists, the Church and the Dublin government will seek revenge on Sinn Fein if this central support for class rule is removed.
Power in Stormont is presented as the prize of the struggle to their supporters. What will they say if it sinks below the ground?
All this can be avoided if they sign up to austerity. But they have been warned by their southern cumann that a place in a coalition government, apparently within their grasp, will melt away if they lose their anti-austerity credentials.

No-one can say which decision Sinn Fein will make. Politically they and their middle-class supporters have never been more committed to the Northern state. A recent statement from Minister John O’Dowd was a call for greater and more systematic repression of local republican organizations, followed by the party’s role in preventing a civil rights march. Feile an Phobail, Sinn Fein’s cultural showcase, has never shown a stronger commitment to “deep conversations” with the loyalist far right, the Orange Order and the Police.

The rock and the hard place remain.

Either the unstable edifice of the peace process collapses and the British emerge from behind the scenery to admit that the North's colonial status has never changed, or it achieves the stability to be found at the end of George Orwell's "Animal Farm," with the pigs morphing into the human oppressors and the North re-emerging fully blown, as the poverty-stricken sectarian dung-heap it was at the beginning of the civil rights struggle.

 


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