THE ULSTER CONFLICT England into the politics of the island in the early 17th century, has had a decisive effect on the internal structure of Northern Ireland and on its relationship to the Republic of Ireland, the Northern working class, on whom the sectarian conflict wreaks the most devastating damage, are almost irretrievably split on religious sectarian lines. It is the working class which provides the majority of the combattants and it is in the working class d~stricts that most of the fighting and killing takes place. Going by Marxist analysis the Ulster working class ought to ben one of the most class-conscious in the world. When Ireland was partitioned in the early 1920s almost 50% of the Irish industrial working class was incorporated into the new state of Northern Ireland wrich comprised only a third of the total population of the island. Ulster's position as the industrial power house of the island was clearly reflected in the statistic that in 1907 industries centred in the Belfast region provided £ 19.1 million of the total of £ 20.9 millions' worth of manufactured goods (excluding food and drink) exported from Ireland (3). This economic predominance was the reason why the Ulster industrial capitalists were willing to go to war to prevent themselves from being incorporated into an independent, nationalist Ireland: they feared that a nationalist administration, dominated by Southern, mainly agricultural, interests would erect tariff barriers that would exclude them from lucrative British imperial and American markets. But by themselves the industrial capitalist class would have been impotent against the forces opposing them. If they were to defeat the Home Rule movement they had to have the Protestant working class with them. And that working class were with them, massively, enrolled in the Ulster Volunteer Force. The theoretically warring factions of Protestant working class, Protestant industrial employers and aristocratic Protestant admi ... nistrative elite were united in the Ulster Unionist Council dedicated to maintaining the Union of Ireland with the rest of the United Kingdom of England, Wales and Scotland (4). Obviously the economic perception of the Ulster Protestant working class was that their interests would be better served by maintaining the link with Britain than by throwing in their lot with the rest of Ireland, but if that had been the only (3) L.M. Cullen: An economic history of Ireland since 1660 (Batsford, London, 1972) p. 161. (4) Ireland was united with England, Wales and Scotland in 1800 after the abortive United Irishmen uprising of 1798. 51
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