There is a lot of talk about normalising the statelet in the North of Ireland. But what has been “normal” here for the past century has been precisely civil unrest, sectarian violence and armed resistance to British rule. The way out of this impasse is to be found in directing discontent towards the road of class struggle.

While many active trade unionists across the country will be pleased to hear that IMPACT and SIPTU among others are planning to escalate the wave of partial actions across the public sector, and that they will be pushing for escalation at the ICTU meeting on March 8^th; at the same time they will be acutely aware of the need to demonstrate to their members that the action is having an affect on the government. We welcome Jack O’Connor’s remarks that workers need to be prepared to escalate the action, but we also recognise that the responsibility for coordinating the action and providing a national focus to the campaign lies firmly in the hands of the ICTU leaders.

Ireland faces the biggest crisis in world capitalism since the 1930s and for that reason there’s never been more need for a socialist response to solve the problems workers face. With that in mind, how do the Labour leadership stand up to scrutiny?

While the public sector workers might not be all out on the streets or on all out strike, it would be a big mistake to think that the government is out of the woods on the question of the wage cuts and the attacks on the public sector. 70,000 SIPTU workers joined the work to rule yesterday and the CPSU have escalated their action and are balloting for full strike action. The workers are digging in for what could be a long haul. At the same time however the employers are threatening to stop deductions of union dues and stopping facility time for union business.

Long discussions into the small hours, shuttle diplomacy and the combined weight of Gordon Brown and Brian Cowen and still the deadlock continues over the devolution of policing and justice in the north. The process is meant to have been agreed years ago, but the deep contradictions in the north mean that every issue and every syllable has to be fought over. The “peace process”, far from solving the problems of the working class has enshrined sectarian division and entombed the leadership of Sinn Féin and the DUP in Stormont, presiding over the minutiae of what is more or less an overblown County Council.

The trade union campaign against the wage cuts announced in Lenihan’s December budget will begin to escalate over the next few weeks as different groups of workers across the public sector take action in what is being portrayed as an ongoing campaign of selective action. Today the air traffic controllers are coming out, which will have a dramatic and very public effect on air travel. It’s likely that the workers concerned in the various selective actions will receive strike fund support in many cases and as such the campaign could continue for a considerable time. But what is the underlying situation and what are the issues for the movement?