Seamus Costello Commemoration.

Wednesday October 16, 2002 11:42

by Britkilla

Seamus Costello Commemoration. Sunday 20 October . Assemble 2pm Bray Town Hall. March to Cemetery. Main Speaker: Bernadette Devlin MacAliskey. This is the 25th Anniversary of the murder of Seamus Costello; he was gunned down by a member of the Workers Party.

Comrades, friends, a chairde,

Seamus Costello once visited America as the Chairperson of the Irish
Republican Socialist Party to speak on a panel at Amherst University. By
all reports, the audience was captivated by his presentation on the
problems confronting Ireland and the Irish working class and the way
forward identified by the IRSP. Like so many times when Seamus presented
his views and the views of the IRSP, people sat up and took notice, for
here was a fresh perspective--here was analysis that went beyond well-worn
cliches and tired slogans.

We believe that this approach, which Seamus Costello modelled in the early
years after the formation of the Irish Republican Socialist Movement,
continues to this day in that movement, and we believe that the IRSP's
preparedness to provide fresh and thought-provoking analysis of Irish
affairs and to offer original tactics that are well suited to address the
problems they are aimed at. An example of this is the party's proposal for
Non-Aggression Pacts, intended to provide the working people of Ireland
with a means to create a workable and lasting peace for their communities
without the intervention of foreign imperialists and native capitalists.
The Non-Aggression Pact proposal is not a "more of the same" "peace
process" designed to impose upon the working people of Ireland a settlement
designed to meet the interests of their exploiters and it is not simply an
agreement between paramilitaries from either side of the sectarian divide.
Rather the proposal envisions labour and community organisations from both
working class communities asserting themselves in a manner that confines
the paramilitary organisations from acting against the interests of their
own community and it provides the working people of Ireland, who have
suffered most from the violence in the six counties with a means to gain
greater control over the course of their daily lives, both separately and
collectively, and thereby to have the opportunity to recognise where they
share a commonality of interests.

Likewise, we believe that the IRSP's proposals on community policing and
restorative justice demonstrate a genuine concern for the empowerment of
working people in Ireland today. This policing proposal isn't a design for
existing paramilitary organisations to be handed a monopoly on the
maintaining of order within the nationalist and loyalist communities--it is
not the extension of proposals for the PIRA and UVF to take over policing
within their respective communities to also include the INLA. Rather it is
a proposal to put real power into the hands of community activists, trade
unionists, women activists, and other members of these working class
communities. It is also a proposal that seeks alternatives to the youth of
these shattered communities being unnecessarily dragged into a criminal
justice system from which there is no escape, which is focused on
transforming anti-social behavior into socially responsible behavior, and
which doesn't believe that the manner in which to deal with the scourge of
addiction is to attack addicts with baseball bats.

The ability of the IRSP to offer original and appropriate recommendations
to working class communities is a legacy bequeathed to the party by Seamus
Costello. The continuation of these fresh and bold proposals is a tribute
to Seamus's memory.

Men like Seamus Costello make history, but so too does history make the
man. When Seamus led a large contingent out of the Official Irish
Republican Movement and set about forming the IRSP and INLA, Irish
republicanism had become dominated by two equally stale and ineffective
alternatives. One was a simple, romantically backward-looking militarism,
while the other was a bureacratic social democracy--though none too
democratic internally--masquerading as revolutionary socialism, mired in
the mistakes made in other nations and plodding in the failed tactics of an
earlier generation. Such a circumstance called out for an approach which
was truely revolutionary and which could provide bold military action where
called for, but action that was rooted in a political course mapped out
with the genuine interests of working people as its prime directive. Seamus
Costello was there to answer that call, just as James Connolly had been at
another time in Ireland's history.

Today once again, Irish republicanism is dominated by those who see the way
forward either through participation in the state structures of the ruling
class and the board rooms of capitalists, by a backward-glancing romantic
republicanism divorced from the reality of Ireland's people today, or
through a return to apolitical militarism. Once again, the circumstances
cry out for a revolutionary approach, which takes the reality confronted by
the masses of Ireland--who are its working people--as its prime focus. It
calls for those who will not become ensnared in bourgeois parliaments and
useless talks with occupying governments, but who can avoid the trap of
engaging in an armed struggle which lacks a popular base of support and
holds little possiblity of moving events forward. We believe that the IRSP
continues to meet that challenge and in doing so, that it provides the
greatest tribute that can be paid to the memory of Seamus Costello--the
emulation of his example.
So long as that remains true, Costello has not died, for he lives on
through the party he forged.

Peter Urban
North American Coordinator
Irish Republican Socialist Committees