The Ard Comhairle of the Irish Republican Socialist Party send comradely greetings to all our supporters in North America.

This is a time of severe repression and outright treachery, both by the forces of British imperialism and their quislings of the so-called Irish Free State. The IRSP, having as our ideal the goal for a just society, which we see can only be achieved by national liberation and socialism, will now, as in the past, always come under severe repression by the very threat we pose to British imperialism and the corrupt capitalist forces of the twenty-six county State which prop them up.

St. Patrick's Day 1984 was a stark example of how the Free State government have degenerated when they sold out a fellow Irishman to the power that subjugated the Irish people for 800 years. It served to prove what James Connolly saw quite clearly 68 years ago - that unless we encompassed the class question with the nationalist one, all we would achieve is a transfer of power from one corrupt capitalist state to another. Our class oppressor and our national oppressor now stand starkly exposed as our natural enemy.

The crossroads we have come to show we have turned the full circle and Ireland, in all but name, is now a thirty-two county British colony once again.

Dominic McGlinchey, being the true revolutionary he is, posed the biggest threat to all the forces ranged against us. Dominic could be likened to that other great revolutionary, O'Donnovan Rossa. O'Rossa was hated, feared and maligned by his British oppressors and a massive propaganda campaign was mounted against him in an attempt to alienate him from the mass of the Irish people. The powers that be in the Irish Free State learned their lesson only too well from their British overlords and used the same tactics via the media in order to portray Dominic as the mindless terrorist of our day.

The extradition of our comrade will in fact be the "Achilles Heel" of the present Irish government. Just as the IRSP's exposure of the Heavy Gang tactics of the Coalition Government of 1975 brought to an end their reign of power in 1977, so too will this extradition being an abrupt end to this Government at the next election.

The facts are that the Irish people themselves were given every opportunity to stop Dominic if they so wished. British tactics such as bribes of upwards of pound 50,000 were off-Bred and in some cases torture tactics - such as a gun being put to the heads of Irish nationalists - were used in the quest for information by the Free State forces. The fact that Dominic remained free for so long, in a succession of safe houses outside the republican socialist movement, served to prove that the heart of Ireland is still alive and that the people recognised Dominic for what he was and is, namely, a champion of Irish working class rights.

It is important to remember our other comrades now incarcerated because of the use of British tactics. The use of paid informers has hit our organization hard over the past two years. Large sums of money and immunity from prosecution were offered to selected people to imprison many of our comrades. By now, it has become perfectly clear to all, that these informers did not have any inside information - no weapons were exposed and the infrastructure has remained intact.

The informers' usefulness lay in another direction. They were provided with a shopping list of party activists and at the show trials, recited in parrot fashion the names of our members which has resulted in many of them being imprisoned for life. Before these trials ever take place! these "touts" are used to introduce a form of selective internment where many of our top party members are imprisoned for up to two years on remand on the word of these paid liars.

In some cases, these traitors have admitted they did not even know the people they were offering evidence against, which has resulted in some instances in the judges themselves calling them liars.

The system, however, continues and it is vital that its corruption be exposed. We recognise that whereas Britain used brute force in Ireland, it has been seen to be sensitive to international opinion and so this is one of the issues we would like this Conference to discuss-how to expose these informers for what they are and to expose those who use them.

Most of you by now will have a good idea of what the Irish Republican Socialist Party stands for. In very simplistic terms, it can be brought down to three main points:

1. The ending of British imperialism in Ireland,
2. To change the Irish society from a competitive one to a co-operative one,
3. The maintaining, at all costs, of Irish neutrality.

These three points are in fact all intertwined and are based on the fundamental principles of Marx, Lenin, James Connolly and Seamus Costello.

British imperialism has now been more defined and the IRSP has been and still is in fact, the only party in Ireland which has seen the clear direction its course has taken. Britain itself, is now part of a much broader form of imperialism in that it is now an integral part of the whole Western economic strategic bloc.

Let us not forget that the West does not have the nuclear bomb simply to annihilate Russia. The West has the bomb to maintain its economic hold and world domination of its corrupt system - capitalism. This Western bloc comes under the heading of North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Because of the change in NATO strategy in the middle 70's, Ireland has now changed from a military backwater on the fringe of Western Europe, into what Americans might call a "vital piece of real estate". Our telecommunication systems, radar stations and airports have now become vital to Britain's and NATO's early warning defense system. The IRSP has been aware that Irish facilities have been used by NATO. Mount Gabriel, the radar station in West Cork, was a necessary facility to that system. The Irish National Liberation Army, committed to the protection of its people, chose to plant explosives in that radar station, firstly to make the people aware of the use of Ireland by NATO but more importantly, to insure that Irish military neutrality is not sold down the sordid road as has that of some other unsuspecting nations. Just as the Irish Republican Socialist Party sees the partition of our country as a stumbling block to a just and peaceful society, so too do we see the absolute necessity of preserving our neutrality in order to endeavor to lower international tension and to strive for a just and peaceful world.

In that light therefore, the forthcoming visit by the United States President, Ronald Reagan to the house of his ancestors, will not be viewed by the IRSP as an exercise in nostalgia but rather as a visit by an arch aggressor of all just and peace loving nations.

This is our goal - our ideal - we fight for the liberation of our people. It would be contradictory, to say the least, to strive for just conditions for the producers of the wealth of our nation, if at the same time, we did not strive for the preservation of their life on this planet. The curse of multinationalism in this country has condemned our people to economic slavery. Instead of building a strong industrial base via our indigenous natural resources, the capitalist rulers of Ireland chose instead to bring these industries in with big tax inducements, reducing the workers to the eventual level of total dependence on what is profitable rather than what is necessary.

These multinationals have never created any spin-off industries in order to expand employment and assist in the development of the wealth of Ireland. They extracted what they wanted from our land and then in a time of recession, pulled out, leaving us the legacy of the biggest dole queues in Europe.

At the present we also have in Ireland - not ready to pull out yet - multinationals producing for the U.S. Defense Department components for Cruise missiles and the like. This is how the government of our country view both our neutrality and our people. Our struggle for national reunification, economic independence and our commitment to a just country and eventual just and peaceful world are all interdependent and part and parcel of the one struggle.