The Progressive Unionist Party Annual Conference.

13 Oct 2007

By Peter Bunting,
Assistant General Secretary, ICTU

I stand before you today as the son of a man who was expelled from his workplace by Billy McCaughey.  My Father was forced to go on a journey he did not want to make.  Billy McCaughey made him do it.

Later in his own life, Billy McCaughey made a journey of his own, one that took him far away from where he was in 1971.  Because of that journey made by Billy McCaughey, it is my honour to be here today, offering the Billy McCaughey memorial lecture to you, his friends and comrades.

I feel genuinely honoured today to have the opportunity to address the Progressive Unionist Party’s annual conference.  Like every person in this room, I still mourn the passing of David Ervine, but I must accentuate the positive and start things off by paying tribute to your party activists for having the fortitude to carry on after many had written off the PUP, and the backbone and the brains that it took to have Dawn Purvis elected as a worthy successor to Big Davey’s seat in the Assembly.

It is essential that the PUP perseveres on the political scene.  As a party, and as a set of ideas and as a collection of individuals, the PUP represent something bigger than one seat in the Stormont Assembly.  That is not just hyperbole or a wishful hunch.  Just look as the transfers that come to the PUP under proportional representation.

The PUP attracts second and third preference votes from voters of all parties, on top of those who gave Dawn their first preference. That tells me that there is enormous goodwill for the message that the PUP sends out, and it is the task of your party activists to persuade those well-intentioned voters to give their first choice on the ballot paper to the PUP.

You are also a successful party.  Yesterday, the Water Review Panel made a series of recommendations to the Minister for Regional Development on the payment system for water and sewage.  The unfair system of separate water charges were supposed to be imposed by direct rule ministers last April.  What stopped them from this fraudulent double tax was not the high and mighty making side deals at St. Andrews.  It was not even on the election plans of the big four to campaign on water charges, beyond some vague hints that the might do something about it.

This campaign was won in the small community halls and housing estates from Creggan to Cregagh.  It was won by dedicated community activists and trade unionists and members of what is patronisingly referred to as the ‘small parties’.  PUP activists were heavily involved and the role of Dawn Purvis was crucial in enduring that the doorstep issue of the election was not policing, as the big parties thought.

Water was the issue of the election and it is a great credit to the hundreds of activists from small parties and no party, the womens’ groups and the trades’ councils, and just ordinary people dismayed at the injustice of water charges.

This is a great victory for the PUP and this is a great victory for the trade union movement.  We deserve, I think to do more than coolly reflect upon this.  We deserve to bask in the extraordinary success of this campaign.  A year ago it looked hopeless.  Now, the boot is on the other foot, and the carefully laid plans for the sneaky privatisation of our water service is, well, up the Swannee.

This shows what can be achieved at community and grassroots level.  This is an example and template for future action.  And if you’re wondering what the strange and unfamiliar feeling in your gut is, it is called victory.  Enjoy it. Savour it.  And remember it, because it does not happen often enough.  But if you remember it, then you should want to repeat it someday.  And you will.

You represent a tradition in Northern Ireland’s politics that is not as often celebrated as more divisive traditions.  Yours is a voice of a distinction that is not divisive.  We all know what confessional ‘side’ most of your activists come from.  You are unashamedly for the continuation of the union with Great Britain.  But what makes you different from the two big unionist parties is your commitment to a vision of an articulate and progressive working class playing its full role in the political life of Northern Ireland.

This is a distinction worth maintaining.  As a party, you have challenged the easy assumptions put about that all unionists are highly conservative on all social and economic issues.  The PUP has challenged the cosy consensus on the Eleven-Plus and have instead focused on the drastic failure rates afflicting school leavers from the state schools.  The retention of self-selecting grammar schools is a major contributory factor in the creation of a two-tier education system in this region.

And when I speak of a two-tier system, I do not mean the confessional segregation that we in Congress have long opposed.  I speak of the chasm that operates within each system, state and maintained.  We tolerate a cruel divide that weeds out friendships and life chances for children who have not yet reached puberty.

Let us have an education system for all, and not a two-tier system that is rigged to subsidize the lucky and stigmatize the unfortunate.  This is not, of course, the fault of those teachers who strive to better the life chances of the children.  We have a systemic series of fault lines running through education here, and we should not be surprised when so many of our young citizens fall through the cracks.

When a party like the PUP stands up for justice in our schools, it speaks of a view of society that is instinctively fairer than the one that we have or the various versions of offer from some other parties.  The root of that is that distinction which I mentioned earlier, a distinction which is not a divide.  Let me give an example.

Three decades ago as the cloud of the troubles started to descent upon Northern Ireland, other political agitations were alive in other societies.  One was the politicisation of women.  When faced with an assertion that women were trying to ‘take over’ from men, Germaine Greer answered in this manner.  “The opposite of patriarchy is not some system of matriarchy.  The opposite is fraternity.”

Fraternity. Equality. Liberty. Solidarity.

Those are key words of the distinctive tradition that the PUP inhabits.  And you are not alone.  There are decent and out spoken individuals in those parties that do not share progressive policies, just as there are parties which espouse progressive rhetoric while making room for members that are distinctly reactionary.

We now have a system that ties in the ‘Big Four’ parties into a coalition that threatens to be a permanent fact.  A system like this one requires a watchful opposition.  With one MLA, the PUP can still punch above its weight by speaking truth to power, by challenging the assumption that the compromises reached around the Executive table reflect the entirety of the 1.7 million people living in Northern Ireland.

Thomas Jefferson was in a bad mood when he said that “democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.”  George Bernard Shaw was equally cheery when he sneered that “Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better then we deserve.”

But another voice, the American Jewish Socialist Meyer London, was more truthful and more upbeat.  “Democracy does not mean perfection.  It means a chance to fight for improvement.”

With your seat at the Assembly, you have a base, and an office which is kept busy and a profile. Most importantly, you have the power of example.  You have eyes.  You can see that change is happening at a furious pace.  Some of it is good, some of it is worrying.  You can do all of politics a favour and continue the mission of David Ervine in being as honest as possible, of employing what George Orwell called “the power of facing unpleasant facts.”

The fact is that the Northern Ireland that dominates the structure of politics here is more fragile than it thinks.  The sectarian monoliths are increasingly megalithic.  It is no longer possible to assume that everybody gets their religion, their politics and their football team in one inherited package.  Not all of our children love to wear the stuff their father wore.

More people are telling pollsters that they are secular, or agnostic, or free thinkers, and are also acting accordingly.  Many of our young, especially our bright, protestant young, are moving to England and Scotland for a university education and too many do not come back.  There is no way to measure this, but the ‘brain drain’ must be having an adverse affect on our business culture here.  There must be some connection between us having the lowest rates of business start-ups in the UK and the export of such intellectual capital at the age of 18.

And yet, in too many communities across this region and especially this city, there are places where isolation is such a daily fact of life that this has become commonplace to assume that there will be no contact with people who are not the same as us.  And I don’t mean interface communities which have bourn the brunt of the violence of the past three decades, whose areas are traduced by fear and reinforced concrete barriers and whose teenagers define their self-identity as not being like those on the other side whose they have never met, not even to have and ordinary and banal conversation about girls and boys and sport and Big Brother.

Ten years ago, the Belfast novelist Robert McLiam Wilson looked across his city as it came to terms with life after the troubles, and stared at its fault lines.  He wrote:  “Some call it religion, some call it politics.  But the most reliable, the most ubiquitous division is money.  Money is the division you can always put your money on.”

There are other systems of segregation which are strangling the hopes of decent people and their faith and fatherland have nothing to do with it.  The recent Rowntree report on social exclusion contains some hair-raising statistics.  Did you know that four-fifths of social housing has no principal bread-winner in paid employment?  Consider that for a moment, and consider the causes and consequences.  The causes are generational long-term unemployment and the conspiracy under the last Tory government to massage the figures by encouraging the long-term unemployed to apply for DLA or other forms of welfare apart from the Brew.

There are other causes which are no more shaming.  There are thousands of people so damaged by the violence of the troubles that they are physically or mentally incapable of dealing with the necessities of life, or are simply too afraid to cross their own door or immediate area.  There are thousands of women in particular in interface areas who are state-sponsored junkies, their minds laden and dulled by prescription drugs as a solution to the barbarism they have been forced to witness.

We have the lowest unemployment figure ever in Northern Ireland, but ten times that figure, over half-a-million people are dumped into the category of ‘economic inactivity’.  They are the people who occupy 80% of our social housing.  What must it be like to grow up in such surroundings?

What are the life chances of a boy born around the time of the 1994 ceasefires, and now a grown-up feisty teenager?  Where are the positive role models who can lead by a daily simple example, such as the advantages of staying in school, of going to a local university, of getting a decent job, of providing for his family, of improving his community by running a football club, by helping his elderly neighbours, by joining in a lobby of the council for better street lighting or traffic calming, of getting involved in his trade union and learning the skills of organisation, and leading those changes himself by running for the council?

I suspect that I am addressing several men who have done just that, but had to pass more significant hurdles, such as getting used to life after imprisonment, of making the decision that they could make a real difference by being militant for change, rather than being militaristic for the status quo.  And that is just the men.

The real lions of such communities over the past decades have been, of course, the lionesses.  The Myna Wardles and the Debbie Watters.  Women like Pearl Sagar, women like May Blood, the only peer or peeress I can think of who deserves the title she was bestowed – a working peer.

Oh, did I neglect to mention Dawn Purvis?  Dawn is a shining example of the possibility of change through the ballot box.  She shifts the possible to the probable, that some day soon there will be others like her on the benches of Stormont, making trouble for the right reasons, and making improvements for her constituents, who stretch beyond East Belfast.  A woman like Dawn Purvis understands that her job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  I don’t know if Germaine Greer has ever heard of Dawn Purvis, but if she has, she ought to be proud of her.

Dawn has written her own rulebook but we know that she had some fine mentors, especially Davy Ervine. In turn, Davy had his role models and exemplars – men who made similar journeys as Billy McCaughey.  Men with iconic status in their neighbourhoods, such as Hughie Smyth, Gusty Spence and the late Billy Mitchell.

Davy had his peers, who are still out there working to give good people the chance for better lives, like Billy Hutchinson in Mount Vernon and Tom Roberts of EPIC.

They too, understand the importance of being militant for a change, making real and lasting changes to the daily lived experience of politically isolated and often demonised people.

These people were also the architects of the PUP’s founding statement of aims, the one that promotes “the political, social and economic emancipation of the people of Northern Ireland and, more particularly, of those who depend directly upon their own exertions by hand or brain for the means of life.”

Once upon a time, there was a party that knew this.  A century ago, exactly 100 years ago last January, the first ever Labour Party conference was held in this city, at the Wellington Hall in Belfast.  It was addressed by Kier Hardie, one of the great orators of his day.

The same conference also left in its wake, one Liverpool-born man who would convulse the trade union movement in Ireland – James Larkin.

Within month, Larkin had organised the dockers of Belfast and history followed like a clap of thunder.

Belfast was paralysed as its dockers and carters organised themselves into effective trade unions and went on strike for a fairer deal and abetter life.  If went on for months and won hearts and minds of the public.  The Independent Orange Order was a vital player in the dispute.  The police mutinied in support of the strikers and Dublin Castle had to send in thousands of troops and cavalry to impose order on the streets.

The lessons of that time were learnt by the trade union movement across this island.  The lessons were also learnt by many of the strikers, who learnt the skills of agitation and street politics.  It is quite true, as John Gray observes in his history of the strike, that many of the tactics of 1907 were used in 1912 by the same men – this time in opposition to the Home Rule Bill and in support of Edward Carson.

And the early radicalism of the Independent Orange Order echoes still.  Its founding document was known as the Magheramourne Manifesto, and it chimed with such ringing phrases as this: “We stand once more on the banks of the Boyne not as victors in the fight, nor to applaud the noble deeds of our ancestors, but to bridge the gulf that has long divided Ireland into camps, and to hold out the right hand of fellowship to those who, while worshipping at different shrines, are yet our countrymen … and to co-operate with all those who put Ireland first in their affections…”

This was the time when Ireland was united, albeit under the Crown.  The manifesto has been interpreted in many ways, but it is justifiable to argue that the small farmers and working class Protestants addressed in 1904 were being urged to find commonalities with their Catholic equivalents, rather than fine points of division.

It called for a single and secular educational system.  It harangued landlordism and the Tory minded who “made the Orange Institution a stepping stone to place and emolument for themselves and their families.”  If argues that fairer economic treatment for all of Ireland would undermine the separatists.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Solidarity, Unionism.

There is no contradiction between unionism and equality between British or Ulster Unionism and trade unionism.  Nor should any unionists fear political ostracisation by declaring themselves as socialists.

There is a long and decent history of working class radicalism in this region that has never been properly recognised, but nor has it ever been fully quenched.  It is like a crimson thread running horizontally through the vertical stripes of green and orange and red and blue.  It is the threat in the 1920s by Northern Ireland Labour to official Unionism, which lead to the electoral system being changed from Proportional Representation to first-past-the-post.  Despite that, and the years of the Red Scare, Belfast in particular was a centre of Labour success right up to the late 1960s.

The trade unions were active in issues that went beyond the relations between employer and worker.  There were walk-outs in the shipyard over hikes in bus fares.  That spirit lived on in some politicians who joined other unionist parties, especially in north and west Belfast.   Let us also remember the constitution of the PUP, imported wholesale from the British old Labour – Clause 4 included.

But like many parties of the left, you are facing what a Tory intellectual called the ‘Progressive Dilemma’.  How do progressive people maintain a belief in the principle of equality while recognizing the fact of an increasingly diverse society?  The welfare states of Europe were planned and implemented at a time when national populations were relatively homogenous.  In other words, it was easier to share the wealth among people who were identifiably ‘just like us’.

If Northern Ireland can act as a society that is a model for what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences”, how then are we to balance our rights as citizens with our duties as hosts.  Cross-community nativism is the worst possible answer.  We are in a global economy.  The heavy engineering jobs that once formed the backbone of industry here are now in South Korea or Mexico.  We all know that education and permanent upskilling of the workforce is the key to any future viable economy.

We are also attractive for workers from other countries, some for a short stay, but others are putting down roots, just as generations of people from here have made new homes across the Irish Sea, the English Channel, or in the New Worlds of Australia, Canada and America.

We need to avoid the mistakes we have made with each other for generations being replicated on migrant workers.  We should remember that we are no more an amorphous community than are THE Poles, THE Lithuanians or THE South Africans.  They are like us and not like us.  They are individuals.

We often speak with real feeling about our experiences of struggling for equality.  We can pat ourselves on the back for the necessary changes made to help every person reach their full potential as human beings.  But we cannot allow ourselves to think about our new fellow workers as being parts of some homogenous bloc, as we often do about ‘Catholics’ or ‘Protestants’.

What does a nurse from the Philippines have in common with a fruit picker from Latvia?  Are dreams and emotions the same for a Portuguese food processor and a Ukranian plasterer?  Do all Polish plumbers dream the same dreams?

Of course not.  No more than a catholic barrister is ‘the same’ as a catholic barman.  Therefore, integration has to be based on the first principle of citizenship, not in the legal sense of applying for permits and passports, but a more globalised idea of citizenship based on the individual value of humanity.

Let me tell you about something I saw in Dublin in the 1980s.  The people then living in inner city were the most deprived in the country.  Bad housing, high crime, generational unemployment and were bad enough scourges, and then along came heroin.  By the end of the decade, cheap heroin had thousands of young people in its grip, and the practice of sharing needles assisted a chronic epidemic of HIV and AIDS.  It was estimated that over 8,000 people in Dublin’s inner city had what they called ‘the virus’.

 Then their mothers revolted.  They formed groups with names like ‘Mothers against AIDS’, and they fought the authorities for basic rights for their sick and dying sons and daughters.  They lobbied and demonstrated for clean needles, for drug rehabilitation and for medical care in the face of medical and political establishments that viewed them and especially their children as pariahs and scum.

There were communities not noted for their tolerance towards homosexuality but hard campaigns make fine alliances.  Just they saw AIDS victims as their loved ones, as complicated and decent human beings, they could see the individuality and humanity of gay men who were also fighting the system for that most basic of human rights, the right to life.

Similar mothers learnt the same lessons in Liverpool and Glasgow and Edinburgh.  That’s the personal becoming political.  By looking outwards and feeling inside that allies make strange bedfellows, but allies make you not only stringer but also wiser.

We are where we are.  The ‘national question’ has been settled for a long time to come.  What we have is a struggling economy with social evils that afflict all faiths and birthplaces.  As ever, we can struggle together, or agitate apart, but we all know that as allies, we have a better chance of winning tangible improvements in the lives of our members, your voters, and all their and our families.

That is the deal that history has dealt us.  Let us pick up our cards and play to win.

And so, in summary, let us return to the life and times of Billy McCaughey.  Let us consider the man he was in 1971, and the man he became.  Like Billy Mitchell and Gusty Spence, age did not wither him.  Rather, it made him more of a man, not in the sense of cheap machismo, but as a full and rounded person, at peace with his own presence and being.

Billy McCaughey was prepared to kill for what he saw as his people.  At the end of his days, he had lived for more people than he could have ever dreamed about in 1971.  He was part of a wider community than his immediate neighbours, of his fellow believers.  I would like to think that he died with a far wider definition of what constituted the brotherhood of man and the common wealth of humanity.

I would also like to think that, if my father had lived long enough to witness the full life of Billy McCaughey, then he too, would have recognised him as a brother and a comrade.

On that fraternal note, I thank you for listening, and wish you the best for your conference.

Thank You.