Communist Party of the Irish Republic Statement: The GFA Stains our Hands with the Blood of Innocents

national | anti-war / imperialism | press release Monday December 10, 2012 17:00 by CPIR - Páirtí Cummanach na Poblachta

The Good Friday Agreement was not the making of peace between the peoples of Ireland and Britain. It was the Irish comprador class returning fully into the bloody fold of empire.

In 1940, Marshal Pétain and the Vichy Régime quickly discovered that peace with an occupying imperial power is never the peace of being left alone. It is, in fact, the obligation to join the imperial project of the occupier. And so it is in the Ireland of the Good Friday Agreement.

The GFA was not peace between the peoples of Ireland and Britain. Irish and British people have been on good terms for centuries, often held together by bonds of marriage and personal friendship. The GFA was the spectacle of an official peace between the ruling Irish comprador class and the British ruling class. Not that these two ruling classes were ever at war, but, the particular circumstances of the emergence of the 26 County Free State meant that the Southern statelet was forced to maintain a level of neutrality in International affairs, and to maintain a claim of sovereignty over the six occupied counties of north eastern Ireland. This contradiction was sometimes the source of official tension between Dublin and London. But, more importantly for the Irish comprador class - it found itself at one remove from the loot and spoils of empire.

The GFA changed all that. With the dropping of the international territorial dispute, the Southern comprador class has openly and wholeheartedly joined with the agenda of the Anglo-Zionist empire. Needless to say, the Irish people, as a whole, have been drawn into this obscene collaboration.

One of the first manifestations of Ireland's post GFA role in the imperial order was the renting out of Shannon Airport for the Genocide of the People of Iraq. One million Iraqi people were exterminated in a vicious war of conquest - and the 26 county statelet collected a monthly rent on the slaughter. Nor did it balk at it's territory being used for kidnapping and torture, as "rendition flights" passed, without control, through Shannon. Shannon Airport, that had once been a symbol of pride and progress for the Irish people, has now become a place of shame, a place made unclean by the silver price of innocent blood.

In July, 2008, former Irish Republican, and current Crown Minister, Martin McGuinness, along with Baron Alderdice of Knock, were sent to Iraq to try to convince insurgents to surrender their weapons to the Anglo-Saxon occupation forces. Since then, McGuinness and Adams have traveled the Globe, trying to convince native peoples, such as the Palestinians and the Basques, to lay down their weapons, and join the Anglo-Zionist order. Only this week, we saw the sickening sight of McGuinness kissing the blood soaked war criminal, Hillary Clinton. We could see from his smiles and body language that he is overjoyed to be included in the powerful ranks of the servants of imperial butchery. It may not be called Pax Britannica any more, but, as well we know, the British Empire did not end in 1945 - it's capital just moved to Washington.

The Free State régime has been fully complicit in supporting pro-imperialist terrorism in Libya and Syria. Minister for Foreign Affairs, Eamon Gilmore, has attended "Friends of Syria" meetings, which discuss the imposition of a US puppet régime in Damascus - by the use of terrorist force. The fact that the Syrians themselves voted for a new Constitution, earlier this year, by a margin considerably higher than the support Barack Obama gained in the US Presidential election, is dismissed as irrelevant. On the day that Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi was brutally murdered, along with up to one hundred other unarmed Prisoners of War, RTÉ News held a studio celebration of this war crime. When Enda Kenny was challenged by Joe Higgins on the official support for the murder of defenseless POWs, Kenny passed the challenge off as a joke. The idea that murdering POWs could be regarded as a crime simply seems beyond him. Kenny's party, of course, has a long record of supporting - and carrying out - the murder of unarmed POWs. Last Saturday, the 8th of December, Republicans remembered the executions of four of the most noble patriots any nation has ever been blessed with: Liam Mellows, Rory O'Conner, Joe McKelvey and Richard Barrett. Today, RTÉ acts as a cheerleader for murderous sectarian gangs in Syria - going so far as to describe suicide bombers, who target civilians, as "activist bombers."

The signing of the GFA has led to the complete collapse of the moral compass of large sections of the Irish people. The time when Irish people were proud of a neutral status in world affairs is now gone. We profit openly and greedily from the bloody crimes of empire. Che Guevara gave a speech to the United Nations in 1964. Éamon de Valera gave a speech to the League of Nations in 1932. Irish people today would be shocked at how similar both speeches are. That any Irish official would deliver such a speech, post GFA, would be unthinkable.

This is where the GFA has brought us - to the point where standing with the Wretched of the Earth, even symbolically, is unthinkable. Instead, we crawl at the heart of imperial darkness.

Páirtí Cummanach na Poblachta
Nollaig 10iú 2012