The CPI defied its own Constitution (Part 1)
Readers of our site often comment on the content and on our style of approach. One comment we received from a person we believe to be a member of the CPI complained that our claims against the CPI or Socialist Voice are not specific enough and that they are more subjective than objective. While we do not agree, we start our response with a quite specific piece that, hopefully, will be specific enough to elicit a response from the CPI itself.
The Constitution in place at the time of the events described below had been adopted by a Party Congress in 2006. An amended Constitution was adopted in September, 2022. The relevance today is that the CPI leadership defied the Constitution that was in place at that time – immediately prior to the adoption of the 2022 Constitution. The subsequent fallout from the actions undertaken at that time continue to adversely impact on the members who were expelled and on the prospects for the future of the CPI.
First, the relevent articles:
Article 24. All party members must re-register every year in order to maintain continuity of membership.
That is the only mention of this clause in the Constitution. There are no qualifications. You reregister, you remain a member of the Party.
The process for dealing with disciplinary matters is catered for in Articles 33 and 34:
Discipline
Article 33. The appropriate area committee shall have the power to remove from office in the area or suspend a member for breach of party rules or conduct or action detrimental to the party. In the case of removal from office or suspension, a member may
(a) appeal in writing to the NEC within twenty-one days of being notified of such decision and
(b) make a further appeal in writing to the next national congress.
Article 34. The NEC shall have the power to expel members for any of the above reasons. Members shall be notified of expulsion and the reasons therefor through a circular letter to the branch secretaries or through the party publications. In the event of an appeal to the NEC, the NEC shall establish an ad hoc appeal committee on the basis of nomination from the branches and consisting of one member of the appropriate area committee (with no vote) and four other members, none of whom shall be a member of the area committee concerned or the NEC, which appeals committee will examine all aspects of the case and, if it thinks fit, interview the member concerned, and make an appropriate recommendation to the NEC.
In bypassing Articles 33 and 34 in their entirety and instead, using article 24 – regarding re-registration – the National Executive Committee (NEC):
- completely bypassed the constitutional requirements
- removed any constraints that are intended to protect members from unfair or unjustified charges
- denied members any right to represent themselves
- denied members any right of appeal
Area structure
Article 16. The Communist Party of Ireland shall be organised into two areas. These shall be (a) the Northern Area, which shall cover Northern Ireland, and (b) the Southern Area, which shall cover the Republic.
In discarding article 16 relating to the area structure of the Party, the NEC not only defied its own Constitution but deliberately scuppered any possibility of a resolution of the existing difficulties that existed between members of the Party in the northern area and between members in the northern area and the southern area. The Betty Sinclair Branch consisted of members from both north and south of the border. But, this created a problem: who did the Branch report to – the Northern Area Committee or the Southern Area Committee?
Never mind the details! Never mind the Constitution! Never mind the sensibilities of members from the north who were already in dispute with their comrades in the south! The minutes of a Betty Sinclair Branch meeting in November 2020 show that despite unresolved issues “…….the NEC endorses the branch continuing to function on a cross border basis.” At that same meeting a senior member of the NEC declared that the NEC had the power to interpret any article of the Constitution and in which ever way it saw fit. The die was cast.
Article 45: The National Executive Committee is empowered to interpret these rules and to lay down procedures in all matters.
To invoke a necessity for interpretation, the issue must be unclear to start with. None of these particular articles is unclear in any way.
The rift between the northern members and the southern members widened and eventually the re-registration scam was employed to impose both unprecedented and unacceptable conditions on re-registering members on a number of pretexts.
One of the unprecedented conditions was that members from the north were, despite neither Constitutional requirement or established precedent, required to send their completed forms to the ‘head office’, which not surprisingly, was in the south. This was a deliberate provocation and imposed precisely because the NEC knew it would be unacceptable to the members involved.
In declining to accept properly completed re-registration forms and in imposing conditions on the re-registration process that had neither constitutional provision nor historical precedent was a deliberate tactic to ensure the forced departure of a large number of members who the NEC had decided should no longer be members of the party.
It removed the requirement that the NEC would need to have valid reasons to initiate a disciplinary process and created the conditions for a good old-fashioned purge.
This method also allowed the NEC to expel members while denying them any recourse to appeal – despite the fact that access to an appeal process is expressly provided for in the constitution.
In addition, it allowed the NEC to secure expulsions which then allowed it to avoid the constitutional requirement to inform other members of the Party and units within the Party of an expulsion and the reasons for an expulsion.
This was the key element: without genuine disciplinary causes, the NEC could not publish the reasons for the expulsions which in practise, allowed the NEC to expel any member for any reason – any reason – and avoid having to ever even mention it outside the NEC.
To sum up, in the Communist Party of Ireland members could be:
- tried in secret at branch, regional and national levels
- be subjected to inquiry processes that have no criteria
- denied recourse to external good practices when no such guidelines exist within the Party
- found guilty of a disciplinary accusation for which a member had never been charged
- required to agree not to do something in future which the member had not done in the past
- expelled on the basis that a member failed to comply with an impossible condition
- expelled without right of appeal
- have conditions imposed on a re-registration process for which there is no constitution provision or historical precedent
- expelled for declining to accept such unilateral conditions
- denied any appeal process if expelled via the re-registration ‘process’
- denied the Constitutional protections that are designed to ensure democracy and fairness and due process
- forced to accept interpretations of Constitutional articles that the NEC – at its absolute discretion – could impose
- denied the right to know if and/or why a member had been expelled
The wording in the 2006 Constitution is very clear and easy to understand. It was reasonable and perfectly workable. It is what applied to the events that took place in the Party prior to the adoption of a revised constitution in 2022.
Either this is a correct appraisal of the irregular methods adopted and implemented unilaterally by the NEC and the leadership, or it is not.
If it is not a correct appraisal then we invite the CPI to correct our interpretation of those events.
If the CPI does not want to respond directly to Guerrilla Communists, it has its own publications, the Party website and Socialist Voice, where it can publish any response.
Part 2 of this appraisal will deal with the fallout from these aberrations, but first we want to give the CPI an opportunity to respond to this post.