"We’re off our knees," said one marcher. Most came from the Edinburgh area, as well as several contingents from Glasgow.

Many at the protest honored the Irish nationalists imprisoned by the British imperialists who, in 1981, went on a hunger strike to demand political status. Around 50 marched behind a large banner saying "Lochee remembers the Hunger Strikers." One marcher explained that Lochee is a community in Dundee, Scotland, that used to be known as "little Tipperary" because of the number of Irish immigrants who lived there.

People at the march also expressed solidarity with the Palestinian struggle by wearing Palestinian scarves or carrying Palestinian flags.

The action was organized by the James Connolly Society, which has been involved in a long-standing struggle for their right to hold the march and to fly Irish flags at the demonstration.

Connolly, born and raised here, was a revolutionary socialist and central leader of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin against British rule in Ireland. Along with 13 other leaders, he was sentenced to death and shot by Britain for his part in the uprising.

This year the city mobilized large numbers of police, who refused to let anyone join the march once it had started and manhandled people who moved much outside the body of the demonstration.

After the action Connolly Society leader Jim Slaven congratulated marchers on their dignity and discipline. "It shows what we can do when we put our minds to it," Slaven said, "in spite of what the police and the fascists say."

In the early 1990s police would stand back while rightist thugs attacked the march; then the city banned it altogether for two years. In 1993 supporters held a demonstration in defiance of the ban, leading to the conviction of some 30 people for taking part in an "illegal march." But their action effectively pushed back the city’s bar on holding the protest.

This year organizers successfully challenged police demands that they fly only one Irish flag, known as the Tricolor. Connolly Society members told the Militant that cops harassed them while they posted flyers for the protest. One marcher explained that he had joined the action because police raided his next door neighbor’s home in the middle of the night in connection with the march. "I thought I’d better come on the march to find out what it was all about," he said.

The ruling class in Scotland has used systematic discrimination against Irish people to divide and weaken the working class. This has mainly been whipped up on religious grounds, pitting "Protestant" against "Catholic" workers. As the confidence of workers in Scotland of Irish background has grown with the progress of the struggle in Ireland, a section of the ruling class is trying to adjust to this reality and assimilate those of Irish descent.

On May 29, for example, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland passed a motion that it "regrets any part played in sectarianism by our Church in the past." The church referred to its 1923 report on "The Menace of the Irish Race to Our Scottish Nationality," which accused the Irish Catholic population of taking jobs from Scots and being the principal cause of drunkenness, crime, and financial imprudence and called for control of immigration and deportation. "It is time to consign bigotry to the history books, where it belongs," said the church official and national committee.

A group of 40 rightists protested the move outside the Assembly. Their leader, pastor Jack Glass, accused the Assembly delegates of betraying the faith of Reformation leader John Knox. In 1979 Glass led a large mob of Loyalists who attacked and broke up a Glasgow march in support of political status for Irish republican prisoners.

Addressing the protest was Daithi Doolan, chair of Sinn Fein in Dublin. Sinn Fein is the Irish nationalist organization leading the struggle today to get British imperialist forces out of the country and to establish a united, democratic Ireland.

"Look at the number of young people here marching with dignity for a united and free Ireland," Doolan said. "Sinn Fein is no longer confined to West Belfast," he continued. In the Irish Republic, which consists of the 26 counties of Ireland free of British occupation, Sinn Fein won five seats in elections to parliament on May 17, he said. And on June 6 Alex Maskey was elected mayor of Belfast, the first-ever Sinn Fein member to hold the post, bringing to an end more than 100 years of control by loyalist parties that had dominated the Belfast City Council. Loyalist is the name for those "loyal" to the union of Ireland with Britain.

Doolan demanded that London implement the Good Friday Agreement, which established a self-governing body in Belfast and set timetables for the end of direct British rule of the six occupied counties. The Sinn Fein leader warned that his organization would not stand idly by while anti-Catholic violence organized by loyalist forces raged in Belfast and other parts of Ireland under British rule. Doolan was referring to loyalist attacks on nationalists over the past few weeks in the Short Strand area of East Belfast, an enclave with a Catholic population of about 3,000 surrounded by a Protestant population of 60,000. Nationalists in the area have been bombarded with bricks and bottles, fireworks packed with shrapnel, and petrol bombs. A Catholic funeral in the area was attacked by around 300 rightists, and on June 7, 100 masked men with a banner saying, "No Short Strand nationalist or republicans in East Belfast" forced its way into a college campus and threatened to kill Catholic students.  
 
 
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