“This is the 10th anniversary of this march. Ten years ago, the council said, ‘You’ll never have another republican march in Edinburgh.’ Well, we’ve shown them and it’s because people like you are prepared to come out on the street,” Jim Slaven of the James Connolly Society, which organized the march, told the rally afterwards.

In 1993 the James Connolly Society broke a ban on the march and went ahead with the demonstration. The police arrested 50 people and Slaven was jailed for refusing to pay a fine for organizing an “illegal” protest.

“In 1994, the Society stood me in the council elections on a republican platform to highlight the issue,” Slaven told the Militant. “By the end of the campaign people were asking candidates on the doorstep why they were banning the Connolly march. We also took the fight to them and held protests anywhere we could. It became more cost and trouble than it was worth for them to maintain the ban.” Last year, the group scored another victory by pushing back police demands that they fly only one Irish tricolor on the march. Despite provocative numbers of cops partly in riot gear, who made a show of examining flags, march stewards ensured that the event passed off successfully.

Eoin O’Broin, Sinn Fein councilor for North Belfast, addressed the rally. “Irish unity is going to happen!” he announced to cheers and applause. Referring to London’s cancellation of the elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly that should have taken place on May 29, he said, “The Good Friday Agreement is an essential part of our strategy. Why else would they cancel elections that would lead to further gains for Sinn Fein? Because they don’t like the results. They can run from us but they can’t hide. When we do have elections our political strategy will be there for all to see.”

In a later interview O’Broin said, “People are furious at what has been done. The British government just said that ‘the results will not be beneficial to the peace process’ and so they cancel the election. They are worried about challenges to David Trimble’s leadership, but the Unionists are only as strong as the British allow. We will be mobilizing people to get this message across, which will also empower them.”

David Trimble is the leader of the Ulster Unionist party, the main party in the six counties in the north of Ireland occupied by London that defends maintaining Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom. Sinn Fein is the party leading the struggle for a united Ireland.

O’Broin pointed to the 5,000-strong demonstration to commemorate the 1981 hunger strike in Belfast on May 4 and the many mobilizations across Ireland and in London and New York on May 29 to protest the cancellation of the elections.“We’re also looking to make August’s internment commemoration march following the West Belfast festival big this year,” he stated.

The Irish struggle takes on particular importance in Scotland as the Irish and those of Irish descent are the largest immigrant group, making up about 16 percent of the population. Large numbers migrated following the Irish famine of the 1840s, settling mainly in the central belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh and including these two cities.

Systematic job discrimination on the basis of religion parallel to that in Northern Ireland persisted until recent years. Its legacy still divides the working class today. A recent BBC poll showed that more than 13 percent of Scots had experienced some form of “sectarianism”, with Catholics four times more likely to be subject to attack as Protestants. One in five of those affected were physically assaulted.

“I’m on the march because I like to be seen to be involved with things I believe in,” said Billy Hughes from Granton in Edinburgh. “I’m half Irish myself. I think Irish people are discriminated against by the majority, labelled as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.”

“I’m in a flute band to support a 32-county socialist republic of Ireland,” said Kelly Phinn who plays in the Volunteer Tom Williams Republican Flute Band. “What else can you do to be involved?” A fellow band member who asked that his name not to be used said that he joined because, growing up, his was the only Catholic family in the close (apartment block). Pro-British, anti-Catholic Orange flute bands would make a point of stopping outside and banging their drums to intimidate the family inside.

Orange marches and loyalist band parades continue to be a feature of life here.

A season of marches was approved by West Lothian council on March 25, the largest involving up to 12,000 marching through West Calder, a town of around 4,000 people. This was in spite of residents’ concern over the size of the march and the consequent disruption. Local councillor Eddie Malcolm backed the decision saying, “I will defend the rights of anybody to march or protest providing it stays within the laws of the land.” In the neighbouring county of North Lanarkshire, councillors banned a Republican march in the town of Wishaw on January 25, hours before it was due to start on the pretext of “a threat of significant disorder.”

Jack McConnell, the First Minister of the Scottish Parliament approved of the decision, saying that when processions are used to promote sectarianism, he would expect the police to “take action.” He has made no comment on the frequent Orange marches through the town.

In a blow to this denial of democratic rights, organizers have won an agreement to hold their march June 14. “They’re trying to make us hold it at 9:00 a.m.,” said a member of the Crossmaglen Patriots RFB from Wishaw, “but we’re pushing to have it later. I don’t think they’ll get away with banning it at the last minute this time.”

At the end of last year, McConnell pledged to “end an attitude [sectarianism] which, like racism, is a stain on Scotland’s reputation.”

In reality, this campaign has been a cover to push back growing expressions of Irish nationalism.

“The focus on the Irish community is ironic,” wrote Slaven in An Phoblacht/Republican News, “as it is our community that suffers disproportionately from intolerance and discrimination. The victim community is blamed for provoking the attacks.”

The British rulers push the notion that “both sides are as bad as each other” in irrational religious hatred, a myth that allows them to pose as neutral arbiters and hide the reality that it is London that creates and benefits from divisions among working people. In this framework, McConnell backed proposals requiring Catholic and other state schools to share facilities such as dining rooms, assembly halls, and playgrounds.

The state has funded Catholic schools in Scotland since 1918. They now account for about 18 percent of pupils in over 400 schools.

Though other state schools are routinely referred to as “secular” or “non-denominational,” they are in reality Protestant. A correspondent to the Herald newspaper recalled “visits by the local minister, being dragged along to the local kirk and singing from the Church of Scotland hymnbook.”

Damian Brogan and Lawrence Connolly explained on the Connolly march that they did not agree that separate schooling caused sectarianism. “One of the reasons there was a separate system in the first place was that Protestants wouldn’t have their children taught alongside Catholics,” Connolly said. “If they want to fight sectarianism they have to admit where it comes from in the first place. There are Catholic schools all over the world and you don’t have the same problems there.”  
 
 
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