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TPQ
Weekly Worker ☭ People Before Profit has enjoyed modest success as a loose alliance. But if we really want revolution and socialism it must, argues Anne McShane, aspire to become a programmatically rooted mass party of the working class.

Something of a crisis has arisen within what has been the majority tendency of People Before Profit. This matters, even for the Irish bourgeoisie: besides a string of councillors PBP has two high-profile members of the Dáil and one member of the Northern Ireland Assembly.

The Socialist Workers Network is the Irish affiliate of the International Socialist Tendency, led, of course, by the SWP in Britain.1 The SWN was the main initiator of PBP in 2005, and has been its leading force, not least on the six-strong officer board. But now it has lost its dominant position due to the resignation of 15 members, including Dublin Central councillor Conor Reddy, national organiser Aislinn Shanahan Daly and Dublin organisers Damian Kelly and Farah Parvazi. TD Richard Boyd Barrett is now the sole SWNer.

Rumours of conflicts amongst the Cliffites have been circulating for months, but only became public knowledge with the leaking of the resignation letter of the 15 to The Irish Times. It published the gist of it on August 26.2 Disgracefully, the comrades declined to make an open declaration in the workers’ press, so it was the bourgeoisie’s paper of record which first publicly announced the split.

Continue @ Weekly Worker.

An Honest And Open Culture

Friendly Atheist ★ Andrew Wommack has never offered evidence for his extraordinary “miracles”—but he expects followers to believe every word.

Christian Nationalist preacher Andrew Wommack wants you to know that if you’re a Bible-believing Christian, you have the power to raise people from the dead. And it’s not just hypothetical. During an interview with "FlashPoint" host Gene Bailey last week, he delivered one lie after another about all the people he’s brought back to life.

Wommack declared that he knew “well over 50 people that have been raised from the dead” through his ministry. In fact, he added, he knew a preacher in Uganda who visited a hospital with roughly 100 patients, and that man “emptied the entire hospital.”

Bailey: You told me something. We were sitting at lunch one day and… we were talking. I think we were actually talking about this story. And you said, “Well, Gene, we’ve had… there’s been a lot of people here raised from the dead, right here in this campus.” Talk about that.

Wommack: We’ve seen… I’m guessing now… I haven’t sat down and counted. But I could say: We probably have seen four or five people raised from the dead right here on our campus.

Christian Nationalist Preacher Claims His Ministry Has Raised “Over 50 People” From The Dead

Dixie Elliot ✊So we have to believe that Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O'Neill put the case forcefully to the British PM that not he nor anyone else 'has the authority to high-handedly remove any provision of the GFA, including and especially the provision for a referendum.'


And that he backed down.
 
That right there is yet an another example of how Sinn Féin can stand and brazenly lie. We all know that didn't happen at all but it keeps the desperately deluded happy.

Their earliest election posters carrying the slogan, ' Vote Sinn Féin - Smash Stormont' were of course lies.
 
One of the biggest lies came from Martin McGuinness during the 1986 Ard Fhéis.

They tell you that it is inevitable certainty that the war against British rule will be run down. These suggestions deliberately infer that the leadership of Sinn Fein and the leadership of the Irish Republican Army are intent on edging the republican movement on to a constitutional path . . .  Shame, shame, shame . . . 
 
The 'Victory Parade' following the announcement of the 1994 Ceasefire.
 
The list is endless and it will continue to grow.
 
The British PM has the authority to do whatever he wants because the North remains under British rule. And because Sinn Féin are happy to keep the British institutions up and running for them.
 
What is going to stop any British Prime Minister or Secretary of State from removing any part of the GFA?
 
International law? The US and the EU, as some are claiming in desperation.
 
International Law can only make statements that fall on the deaf ears of those carrying out the genocide in Gaza, the US and Israel.
 
So at best we will only get a statement from them criticising Perfidious Albion for doing what anyone with an ounce of sense knew they'd eventually do anyway.

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

Keeping The Desperately Deluded Happy

Right Wing Watch 👀 Written by Kyle Mantyla.

Joel Webbon And Wesley Todd Use The Lindsay Clancy Trial To Justify Subjugating Women


On Monday's episode of the "Christian Nationalism Weekly" program, co-hosts Joel Webbon and Wesley Todd weighed in on the case of Lindsay Clancy, a Massachusetts woman on trial for killing her three children.

Clancy and her attorneys argue that she cannot be held criminally responsible for the murders as she was suffering from postpartum psychosis at the time, and Webbon and Todd actually agree, but for virulently misogynistic reasons.

Webbon and Todd, who are both overtly misogynistic, argued that women in general can never really be held responsible for anything they do because a woman simply "doesn't really have the same level of agency as a man."

"The Bible is correct," declared Webbon. "Women really do have less agency than men. And because they have less agency, they also, in political society, must have fewer rights."

"Since the 13th century—influenced by Christendom—in England, the law system said women are covered," Todd declared.

They're underneath the umbrella of their father and their husband. They could not transact property. They could not enter into legal agreements. They did not have the same responsibility.

'Take Away Their Rights'

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Eighty Four

 

Pastords @ 60

 

A Morning Thought @ 3256

Aaron Edwards ★ Writing in Aide Memoire.

I joined a panel of experts on BBC Radio Ulster's Talkback programme on 13 August to discuss a new report on loyalist paramilitary transformation. I was asked about the idea of a tougher policing response. Here’s what I said.

They haven’t gone away you know - the murals near where I used to live remind me
of the continual failure of paramilitary transition. That’s before I even
think about the lived reality in estates like Ballyduff.

William Crawley: When people talk about an off ramp and suggest that if these paramilitary groups do not take the off ramp, we should move to a full policing response… Within that claim, is it implied that we haven’t had a full policing response yet? We haven’t actually done that job?

Aaron Edwards: I think it is. I think there is a full blown sort of nuclear option here. It’s provided for in the Terrorism Act 2000 and it has led to successful prosecutions in GB. I’m thinking of Anjem Choudary who was the director of an Islamist organisation, prosecuted under the Directing of Terrorism legislation, Section 56. That could be applied, I suppose, but given the sort of semi-detached nature of legislation in Northern Ireland, that’s something that obviously legal experts would need to consult. But the thing is that there are levers that can be pulled, coercive levers. You talk about sticks, I mean, that’s one - another would be as Duncan (Morrow) has mapped out.

One of the sticking points here is gatekeepers. We could simply just, as a society, and the governments could just decide that they’re going to work around those gatekeepers, because a lot of money has been channelled into the coffers of these groups, some of these groups have been aligned or associated with paramilitary groups. There needs to be a kind of option there to penalise, you know, not just to monitor, not just to sit back, you know, and wait for this thing to happen organically.

I think that they’re definitely are levers of the state, or both states can pull. You know, that’s just an example of a couple of them. But I think that in the report, one thing that hasn’t been mentioned is the suggestion that perhaps, the so-called good paramilitaries, the “peace leaderships”, could inform on those criminal elements within their ranks. I mean, that’s a non-starter, surely, because in some of those organisations, you have people all the way up, from the top to the bottom, who are involved in criminality.

What are they going to do, inform on themselves? And so there is complicity there, and I think that that this has to really rotate around the idea of the organisations being hierarchies but also networks. And what I mean by that is - the UDA is a good example - there are some of those groups that are targeted by the Paramilitary Crime Task Force in North Antrim and Londonderry/Derry, for instance, they haven’t been given any funding, so, but they sit, or they nominally sit, on the LCC. So, really, I think there needs to be a coordinated response.

I do agree with the report authors that there has to be a more structured and coordinated response to this. And I think that that’s something that people would welcome. Not continual funding, not a continual talking shop, but action.

William Crawley: So, you take the money question either altogether, say, we’re up for engagement with a deadline, but this is it. This is the last round of that.

Aaron Edwards: Yeah, because they’re only there (because of the money). I mean, I’ve talked to a lot of loyalists in the kind of middle management space as well, who, who say that, you know, within these groups - or associated with these groups - who say that they’re, that, you know, they’re not, they’re not, they would have done it by now.

William Crawley: How would that work, though? I mean, we’re taking the money out of it. We’re saying we’re up for engagement and then you say, our ambition is to make you go away. That’s our engagement and you don’t get a reward in terms of money for going away. Well, what’s the point? What’s the point of that from their point of view?

Aaron Edwards: Well, as Chris Hudson has said, they’re about papering rooms with these declarations of intent. Actually show them and work through them, you know, line by line. This is what you said in 2015. This is what you said in 2018. This is what you said last week.

William Crawley: I doubt they’re worried about logical inconsistency, these guys.

Aaron Edwards: Well, I mean, if you’re going to use, as the report authors suggest, the Declaration of Transformation from 2018 as a roadmap. Clearly, you need to do a kind of a bit of an exercise in taking stock of where things have been in the past, almost a decade. So they’re going to be held the account. They going to have to be held in account and they’re going to have to put themselves forward, even to their own membership. I’m not talking to the wider public because a lot of this is happening behind closed doors or… behind masks. So, clearly, you know, if they’re serious, I think they need to drive it through themselves as, as hierarchies, these (paramilitary) organisations.

My new book, Enemies Within: The Explosive True Story of Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, Northern Ireland’s Most Infamous Paramilitary, will be published on 10 September by Merrion Press. Click here for more details.

Aaron Edwards is the author of critically acclaimed books, UVF: Behind the Mask and Agents of Influence: Britain’s Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA. His next book, Enemies Within: The Explosive True Story of Johnny ‘Mad Dog’ Adair, Northern Ireland’s Most Infamous Paramilitary, will be published by Merrion Press on 10-September 2026.

More Stick, Less Carrot

Geordie Morrow 🖌 with a painting from his collection of art work. 

Oil on board, 44” x  34”

⏩Geordie Morrow is a Belfast artist.

Batteries Not Included

Anthony McIntyre ☠ I missed last week's vigil - got caught up in other things. 

While it can't be helped and life has its own way of intruding on our best intentions, missing the vigil that Drogheda stands With Palestine has put in place since the onset of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It makes me feel guilty, as if caught with my hand in the cookie jar: that feeling of  having done something I shouldn't have.

In truth, rather than make me feel guilty it should remind of the honour it is to be part of a body of people for whom genocide is anathema, from which they resile with every fibre of their moral being. Missing the honour of standing here should serve to remind me of just how honourable a stance is taken each Saturday at 12 noon. 

Even when it is dry, warm and the sun bathing our faces with its rays, we can still think of the title of Arthur Koestler's renowned novel, Darkness At Noon. We gather to protest the darkness that has enveloped Gaza in gas chamber like-fumes every single noon for almost three years. We also gather to proclaim that even when governments act like little Mary Sun Shine, there is no amount of rays emanating from their corridors of power that are bright enough to herald the arrival of a new dawn. Western societies need to fumigate not placate the malignancy of the reach of the Israeli lobby. Effective measures alone can dispel the darkness. What sort of commitment to ending a genocide is to be found in banning Palestinian students from this country but allowing IDF war criminals to enter at will and unhindered?

While Steven Pinker in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, makes the point that, if we are prepared to go back far enough in the past, genocide has been a regular feature in human history, for long the rule rather than the exception. Pinker was no in any way justifying genocide but rather trying to demonstrate that society has progressed quite some way to a point where genocide is very much the exception. 

For we who gather here on a weekly basis, no matter how prevalent genocide was in the history of our species, or how rare an event it might today be, it has never been right, has always been wrong, and is as wrong in Gaza as it was in Eastern Europe when the Nazis perpetrated the most heinous crime in human history: the war of extermination against the Soviet people, part of which included the Holocaust against the Jews. 

While evil sounds more like a religious concept than a secular one, there are instances where its use in justified by secularists. The Nazis were indeed evil but they were not uniquely evil. Hutu Power which carried out the 1994 Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis - which the West also denied was happening in real time - was also evil. Israel, like the Hutus and the Nazis, is not uniquely evil. But it is evil nonetheless. 

This may be underscored by the recent activity of Israel's national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir. The Guardian columnist and author Owen Jones who has tried to refrain from comparing Israel to Nazi Germany - I am not really sure why - has relented and very pointedly labels Ben-Gvir a Nazi. His reason was simple. Ben-Gvir posted a Computer Generated Image video of emaciated, weeping Palestinian civilians being sent into a Nazi style death camp. Jones commented:

What do you say? Not even any subtlety there . . . Look at it it. Look at it. It could not scream Nazi more loudly. Now look, I have shied away in general from comparisons with Nazis. But what else are you supposed to do when the National Security Minister is literally positing CGI videos of what are mocked up Nazi death camps and senior Israeli leaders are talking like Nazis, unequivocally, whilst committing every single war crime and crime against humanity there is to commit, indeed including genocide?

That is why I try to make this vigil every week. Israel's Nazi like activity occurs every week, every day, every noon. This vigil, no matter how small, helps ensure that a speck of light reaches into the darkness at noon, every noon.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

It Could Not Scream Nazi More Loudly

The Fenian Way ✍ “Many's the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing."

The predictable howls from all quarters, bar a very conspicuous one, greeted the pronouncement from British direct ruler Andrew Burnham that a border poll is ‘off the table’. Like a theatrical cue card all the players in this political farce saw these remarks as their moment to take centre stage and deliver their shibboleths with suitable indignation or glee, only to realise that once they had done so, a cold reality dawned that they have zero control over the British script.

What was equally exposed was the vacuous nature of slogan politics, tribal politics, sectarian politics, partitionist politics and the greatest whore of them all, electoral politics. And all of that before we delve into the ignorant abyss of the implications of not studying in detail what you have irreversibly subscribed to.

In a carefully crafted and impeccably timed intervention Burnham was actually telling us what is on the table, only, and what is required of the principal actors (who have absolutely nowhere else to go) if the British and Irish governments are to treat them like grown ups. And the endorsement of this British position was confirmed by Dublin due to their strategic silence amidst the rhetoric and din.

The lynchpin of the Good Friday Agreement is the complete control ceded to the British government regarding issues of sovereignty and constitutional change. The British direct ruler has just exercised that control. What is left to domestic politics is the responsibility of administering devolved issues within the Stormont Assembly.

Their ability, and suitability, to do so will not be measured by their posturing on issues outside of their remit and control. And this is why Burnham’s remarks were as much aimed at unionists as it was nationalists. Some of the more astute unionist commentators recognised this fact and urged moderation over the usual triumphalism.

Both Provisional Sinn Féin and the DUP face the same conundrum posed by Burnham’s intervention; Stormont not working will no more usher in a border poll than it will secure the union in a post-Brexit and Scottish Referendum environment. The only way they can be relevant to their electorate is to make Stormont work and that is wholly dependent on British funding, who simply cannot contemplate funding a failed entity.

Both parties stepped into the shoes of their respective predecessors, UUP and SDLP, and both now realise the shoes do not fit as comfortably as they thought they would. You can’t play opposition whilst in government. Stormont, regardless of its status, is an instrument serving British interests. And that is the trap closed.

But republicans were also caught short, the broad nature of the response falling into the ‘we told you so’ category. Like most others, republicans reacted to what they wanted to hear rather than sit back and listen to what the British and Irish governments intended everyone to hear.

It can be no coincidence that a former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar should weigh in on the heels of Burnham with talk of the inevitability of Irish unity once agreement can be reached over a protracted period of time. That agreement is not confined simply between Unionist and Nationalist, it must also find agreement with the British establishment.

We can no longer entertain outdated notions of why the British remain in Ireland. The Six Counties are not as British as Finchley. The right to walk the Queen’s Highway was deemed silly by that very same Queen. The sacrifices and sufferings of Irish generations under their occupation mean nothing to a people who learn more about their history from Netflix than they do from their schools and universities.

The waltzing choreography of British long-term interests in our country are being played out in unison with Dublin’s incremental compliance. The political reasoning behind partition alters and adapts to the differing needs of the British establishment to preserve it. Those contemporary needs have a definitive international and security dimension to them as the world enters yet another cold war scenario.

Almost every day we see an assault on the neutrality of the Southern state, the primary weapon for which is ridicule. Its latest manifestation concerned the recent EU Defence Ministers meeting in Wicklow. Much was made of the fact that the security apparatus surrounding the gathering was dependant on a Royal Navy ship hovering outside of territorial waters.

Prominent Statist commentators call Ireland the ‘weak link’ in the European defence system and that we live a ‘charmed existence’ due to the benevolence of other EU countries who spend more on their defence budgets to ensure Ireland remains safe from the ‘threat of Russian aggression’.

This is the type of lens through which Westminster views her interests in Ireland. And what republicans need to urgently recognise is that the core issue of our national sovereignty may well find more strategic value in issues like neutrality to promote that sovereignty as a pragmatic and practical solution.

We cannot allow our position on national sovereignty to be constrained by simply defining it as an historic right and position ourselves as the gatekeeper of that stance but rather promote it aggressively as a solution to a range of issues that continually capture our people’s attention.

The kingdom of heaven comes in a way not foreseen by man: perhaps the same can be said for a sovereign republic.

⏩ The Fenian Way was a full time activist during the IRA's war against the British. 

On The Table

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Eighty Three

 

A Morning Thought @ 3255

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