The main inspiration behind the "No to War Campaign" which has been taking to the streets since NATO began bombing Yugoslavia, is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The campaign is an offspring of the 1991 "No to War in the Gulf Campaign" and sibling of the recent "No to Bombing of Iraq Campaign". The two main speakers at its press conference in Dublin last Monday were Mr Kevin Wingfield, a member of the SWP and chairman of the campaign, and Mr Richard Boyd Barrett, Dublin secretary of the SWP.
Green MEP Ms Patricia McKenna and Mr John de Courcy Ireland of the Labour Party were scheduled to be there but did not attend. Ms McKenna's press officer arrived later with a statement. Both did speak, however, at a campaign rally outside the GPO on Thursday night.
There is some unease about being associated with each other among campaign affiliates. What they agree on is that the bombing should stop, but that would seem to be it. The SWP has no time for the UN, for instance, which the Green Party and Labour see as a solution to the Kosovo problem. For holding such views both Ms McKenna and Mr de Courcy Ireland were damned as "liberals" by some speakers at a SWP meeting later on Thursday night. As irritating to SWP members is the Labour Party's "ambiguity" on the bombing.
At that SWP meeting in an upstairs room in the Trinity Inn on Dublin's Pearse Street on Thursday night and attended by about 50 earnest mostly twentysomethings, the word "liberal" was used regularly and pejoratively. It was used as a term of suspicion where Ms McKenna and Mr de Courcy Ireland were concerned and as plain abuse when discussing such renegades as Mr Fintan O'Toole and Mr Ken Livingstone who have supported NATO's action in Yugoslavia.
Leaflets distributed at the meeting suggested it was intolerable that Mr O'Toole ("a B52 liberal") could conclude that the US might be capable of "genuine humanitarianism". Mr Livingstone's suggestion that Mr Tony Benn's opposition to the war was like someone standing back while a gang of thugs raped a woman was described as that of "someone who relies on the likes of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, to deal with the thugs."
Where the SWP is concerned the war involves "two evil forces," Slobodan Milosevic and US imperialism. Meanwhile the Western media "is trying to immunise people to the reality of war". It was Lenin, in his book Imperialism, The Highest Form of Capitalism, who explained it all, the meeting was told. Lenin pointed out that ever-growing capitalism ended up with military competition between states. The system had to be changed.
And Trotsky had pointed out the solution to the Balkans as far back as 1912, they were told. Peace would come through democratic solidarity by the working class, coming from below. The tinder was there, Mr Boyd Barret said, before being destroyed by economic sanctions and NATO bombs. Militarism and gun-boat diplomacy were not the solution. And the major powers had been using humanitarianism as an excuse for war all this century, beginning with "little Belgium."
The Garda estimated that about 150 people attended the campaign's march from the Dail to the GPO on Thursday night.