Why are the British troops here?
To police the newest solutions for the more efficient exploitation of Catholic and Protestant workers in Ireland.
We are opposed to British troops, not particularly because they're British,
But because they have come as policemen for a society run by the British, German and American industrialists.
A society in which the Protestant and Catholic will be expected to work quietly together for minimal wages
In modern factories that will amass for their foreign shareholders,
Profits far greater than those ever extracted from Ireland before.

If the battle cries of the coming months are to be "I hate the Prods, I hate the British and I hate the Catholics",
And if those who fight have no wider understanding of what they are involved in,
T the workers of Belfast, Protestant and Catholic, face a tragic bloodbath while their masters
The unionist owning class and the foreign industrialists,
Face, by contrast, a temporary inconvenience followed by decades of supremacy over an impoverished and confused pool of cheap labour.

That is why it's not enough to say "Fight British troops".
Some in the IRA may well claim that to do so is to fight the true fight against British imperialism,
But remember this, for every family happy to sleep under the tricolour,
There is another living without a decent roof over it's head and a Fianna Fáil puppet state to the south.

In 1916, Connolly fought in alliance with middle-class nationalists, he did not live to see the southern worked betrayed by Sinn Fein.
He fought in circumstances far more favourable than those in the North today.
It would be tragedy indeed, for the North,
If the best and most militant of it's socialists were to meet their fate fighting behind barricades in Catholic areas.
Faced by the British army and most Protestant workers,
Simply because they had failed to understand the real requirements for a revolutionary moment in the North until it was too late.
Every time an anti-imperialist moment has developed in the North, the forces of imperialism have relied on sectarianism to divide the working class,
And have relied on one erroneous section of the working class to defeat revolt,
Why hand them the workings of victory yet again?

When working class people march because they have no jobs,
When tenants in slums go on rent strike, when workers demand fair wages or control of their factories,
When fishermen seize their fisheries from foreign business interests,
When small farmers rise up against the great landowners,
Then the British army will intervene as always,
But then we will be fighting the true struggle against imperialism in Ireland.

We must fight the British troops on our own ground,
When they are actively defending British economic interests in Ireland,
And not when they are merely standing between warring sections of the Irish working class.