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Christopher Owens 🔖 reviews a work by a Belfast author.

. . . I’ve talked to kids, they’ve written me, and they go, “Well, I’m frustrated. We’ve had this band for a year and nothing’s happening.” And I’m like, “Man.” See, that’s a mistake a lot of kids make. They have ambitions for something to happen to their music, and fuck, just do it because you like to do it, you know. That’s what we did it because it was fun. We couldn’t believe that we could actually, you know...I don’t know what context that was taken in, but...if you sincerely believe that it’s like something that satisfies your soul, which I did, then that’ll happen to you. If you’re just doing it with some kind of like false ambition...thinking somebody’s gonna discover you...then it probably won’t happen. But if you do it just because you wanna do it, then good things will come to you.

Something of a cliche but Guided by Voices frontman Robert Pollard tells the truth.

This quote makes me think of Belfast based author Jonathan Traynor. Four books in two years (with another due soon), he writes out of a love and passion for story telling as opposed to social media clout and having bookTokers recommend his work without ever reading it,

For his second book of 2026, Traynor offers up Fist Can Be a Verb. A collection of short stories, poems and essays, it has a similar function to Stephen King’s Night Shift in that it has connections to his other works (two stories were originally part of Race the Undead) but also showcases where he’s going next as a writer.

I’m written before about how a good short story collection should be something that can be dipped into at leisure and enjoyed in isolation. It really is an art form in itself, a highly underrated one.

So how does Fist Can Be a Verb match up?

Opener “Hero dwarf Stephen” surveys the aftermath of an epic battle between two giant dragons and an army of elves. While the former have been killed by the titular hero he has been mortally wounded in the process. Although only a page and a half long, it manages to depict a devastated world as well as be both oddly moving and amusing at the same time (the name reminds me of Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python).

“When a blow job is not just a blow job” has a porn obsessed, self-righteous arsehole bore the reader about the power dynamics involved in oral sex, all the while thinking that he’s being matter of fact, even giving us the title of this collection. Coming off (ooh er) as a left-wing version of the Viz character The Male Online (ironic considering the narrator attacks the Daily Mail), Traynor writes him as somewhere in between a lecturer and a pornographer. Maybe one that could have been expanded by a few pages.

In a change of format ‘Blind, stupid and unable to face facts’ is a polemic about the average person getting shafted by the state who are utterly unprepared for the time bomb that awaits us:

. . . the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency recently... said that there will be more people over 65 than children by 2027. ‘There are projected to be more deaths than births in 2030 with that trend then continuing indefinitely,’ said the BBC report on April 28th, 2026, regarding the release of this latest data set. The trend is not new. The politicians, officials et al know this but deliberately look away. Yes, it is a deliberate decision to look the other way. To not consider consequences.

It’s heartfelt, well-argued and just a little bit angry!

The rest of the book continues in the same format established by the opening three tales/polemics and demonstrate how effective Traynor is as a writer where he can have you laughing one minute, filled with melancholia the next and then pondering implications for society afterwards

While not the best book he’s put out this year (that goes to Earl Black) it’s certainly a notable diversion to take the readers on. And, as Neil Young once noted, that’s where you meet the most interesting people.

Jonathan Traynor, 2026, Fist Can be a Verb. Independently Published.

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

Fist Can Be A Verb

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Thirty Five

 

Religious Derangement Syndrome @ 7

 

A Morning Thought @ 3208

Anthony McIntyre ⚽ Over the past eight years the English national soccer team has established a consistently impressive albeit not successful record. 


World Cup semifinalists twice, quarterfinalists once, Euros finalists twice. While it has brought no silverware it would be parsimonious to deny the team some kudos.

Dull but worthy is perhaps the best way to describe the England sides of the past decade. A motley collection of epigones who seek to emulate, but never quite manage, the great squads whose names have been inscribed on the most coveted trophy in world soccer.

In a nutshell, England simply are not good enough. Rather than bemoan their exit and scream for the head of Tuchel, their fans should give the coach credit for having guided them to the last four in the tournament alongside illustrious names like France, Argentina and Spain. Those three have panache whereas England are pedestrian. The generosity needed to pardon Tuchel for a crime he did not commit is unlikely to come easy to boiled bloods when five minutes is what stood between them and a Sunday clash with Spain.

Before the kickoff, I felt England had a chance of making it through to the final, thinking that Argentina might have shot their bolt in the victory over Egypt. I had no dog in the fight despite having plumped for Argentina in most World Cup tournaments since 1978, always feeling disappointed when they go out. If the soccer is good, I'll be more than happy no matter who wins. My son was much more partisan and passionate, rooting for the South Americans while hurling abuse at the England players. His uninhibited delight at both Argentinian goals was even more unbridled than my own celebratory outpourings over my sixty plus years of watching the game. When I asked him why such hostility to the English team when he was a serious Liverpool fan, his answer: Liverpool are not English, they are Scouse.

I'm not complaining about him. I recall only too well my delight when Poland stopped England even making the 1974 competition in West Germany, when Argentina knocked them out in Mexico 1986, when Germany blocked their progress in 2010, when Iceland humiliated them in the Euros in 2016. On each occasion I was like a dog with two tails, not knowing which to wag.

The game last night started out as no soccer spectacle. The Argentinians behaved a bit like Paraguay in their game against France, fouling and spoiling. Once they felt they had the measure of their English opponents they began to hunt the ball rather than the man. And when they went a goal behind that was the touchpaper that set them alight.

That moment has led to Thomas Tuchel coming in for a lot of flak for his decision to go Southgate once Anthony Gordon put the English in front. He hoped to see the remaining 35 minutes of the game out with a preponderance of defenders, seven at one point. His detractors including Mark Goldbrige thought it insanity and have demanded that 'the fraud' be sacked.

My own take was that Tuchel had little choice. The match stats indicate that even before the Gordon goal England was not a serious attacking force.


Kane and Bellingham posed no threat and with Declan Rice reduced to sluggishness the main goalscorers for England throughout this tournament never looked like getting the type of service they could convert into goals. Tuchel observing this seemed to have calculated that England's strongest card lay in defending, that the English defence was equal to the Argentinian attack. His option was to press forward and risk getting hit on the counter by an explosive attacking phalanx. Blow for blow there was no way England could have outscored Argentina. As physicists like to say the maths speak for themselves. It was a gamble but Tuchel could only play with the hand he had to get the optimal result from the equation on the board. His misfortune may have lain in the timing of the Gordon goal. Had it arrived twenty minutes later his defence strategy might have come off.

While it no longer bothers me if England do well - I have developed a similar attitude to Manchester United - I still find the sweet taste of Schadenfreude irresistible. The memes, the banter, watching former blanketmen delirious with delight at England's misfortune. 


I share the view of my friend Caoimhin O’Muraile, who when I was with him in Dublin this afternoon, told me in his working class English accent that while he was pleased England lost he bears no ill will towards the players. Like myself he is an avid supporter of an English soccer club. He does think, however, the English national team should be treated like Israel for the crimes the British government has perpetrated in Ireland. My attitude does not extend as far as wanting the side barred from competitions. Argentina, with its current far right president and history of military repression, could as easily provide grounds for wanting it shunned. What grates most with me is the it's coming home attitude of many fans and pundits, that sense of entitlement which allows the World Cup to be looked upon as some treasure that the imperial centre has a right to plunder and place in the metropolis.

England is a good footballing side. The record in recent years speaks for itself. But they are not an elite side. And only the elite can lay claim to the most coveted trophy in the sport.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Not Simply The Best

Recommended by Gary Robertson.

Prophet' Donna Rigney Claims To Have Opened A Heavenly Portal Over The White House And Mar-A-Lago

Dodgy Donna

Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭  The other day I picked up an interesting little pamphlet written by the late Peter Fryer.

Peter Fryer was an English Marxist and member of the Communist Party, later the Communist Party of Great Britain, who was on the staff of the party’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, later to be renamed The Morning Star. Peter was despatched to Hungary to report on the events taking place there in October of 1956, an uprising against the Stalinist regime which was subservient to the Soviet Union and which the people were pretty pissed off with, and that is an understatement. 

Fryer was sent by the CP to report on the events which were occurring and the party, which were themselves Stalinist, did not like the report Peter sent back. The CP then in turn supressed his report according to this little pamphlet, Hungarian Tragedy, first published in 1956 then republished in 1986. The events of Hungary during this period are a subject I have not revisited for a number of years which prompted me to pick up this easy read. The questions asked were, was the Hungarian rising a fascist led coup against socialism? An attempt to return the country to ‘capitalism and landlordism’ of the past? An American sparked rising under the control of Washington? These were claims made by the Soviet Union, with a certain amount of justification, prompting their invasion.

These questions were interesting because the USA had and has a track record of fuelling coups and uprisings in other countries against systems they do not approve of! There can be little doubt the US were certainly interfering on the periphery of the uprising but to what extent? Were they financing it? Were they in league with ‘fascist’ and ‘reactionary’ groups trying to direct the revolution into resurrecting ‘capitalism and landlordism’? If they were the US would never admit to it but let’s say their fingerprints were on the gun, a smoking gun! I would not write off this possibility as quickly as Peter. Stalinism is a cruel distortion of socialism used by the western media on behalf of governments as evidence why socialism will never work. Don’t listen to them, they are talking crap and they know it! Most of us owe the Soviet Red Army a world of gratitude for defeating the Nazis at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943. Without these victories of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany it is unlikely the Western allies would have won the day, certainly as early as they did. It was the Soviet Red Army which stormed Berlin in 1945 hoisting the red flag over the Reichstag. If Nazi Germany had prevailed at Stalingrad, we could all be speaking German now. 

However the Red Army operating in Hungary were not in the same vein as those liberators eleven years previous. After the Second World War the political configuration was completed by 1949 when the so-called ‘Hungarian Peoples Republic’ was formed. This so-called socialist state (which it was not) had little if anything in common with Marxism or even ‘Marxist Leninism’, itself becoming a distortion of the works written by Marx, Engels, and even early Lenin.

The Hungarian Revolution began on 23rd October 1956 as a protest initially against the Soviet Union’s geopolitical interference and domination of Hungary through the Stalinist government of Matyas Rakosi. Students on this protest were shot dead by the AVH (the Stalinist Police) which moved the situation from a protest to a revolution. The revolution was not about reinstalling capitalism, according to Peter Fryer, but about establishing true ‘socialism’ in Hungary. One problem was, in hindsight, that fascist and reactionary groups were on the periphery hoping they could mould the revolutionary demands their way. Perhaps a mistake was not dealing with these small reactionary groups along with the AVH. These fascist and reactionary groups, not dissimilar to the Anti-Semitic groups who latch on to the pro-Palestinian marches today, infiltrated to a very minor degree the revolution. This was, however, enough to give the USSR the self-perceived reason to invade Hungary to ‘fight fascism’ and the ‘White Terror’ which, they claimed, was active in Hungary and were organising this uprising. If the Hungarian revolutionary fighters had dealt with these small groups, assuming they knew who they were and if they did not any fascist utterings should have been detected early, this excuse used by the Stalinist USSR could not have been used.

There were signs early on of reactionary possible involvement and these right-wing groups with fascist leanings should have been stamped on certainly if the aim really was, as Peter asserts, socialist revolution. According to Peter Fryer in his little book, Hungarian Tragedy:

the uprising was neither organised nor controlled by fascists or reactionaries, though reactionaries were undeniably trying to gain control of it.

If Peter could see this surely the revolutionaries could? These people were an even greater threat to the uprising than the USSR and had they gained any kind of control the ideology of the revolution could well have changed in an unpleasant way. In the latter days of the Second World War the Hungarian Nazi puppet government installed by Berlin were as evil and vicious as their masters in Germany. On his arrival in the country one of the first things Fryer noticed was a young soldier working away at a five-pointed red star:

He whistled happily between his teeth as he bent forward in his ill-fitting uniform, closely modelled on the uniform of the Soviet Army. He was absorbed in his task of picking with a nail-file at the red star.

The soldier was obviously trying to remove the red star from the mosaic which was not an easy task. 

Eventually the red star came away. Pocketing his nail-file the young soldier ground the bit of stone to powder with his heel and sauntered away. 

The question here is, why did he do this? The Red Star is the sign of international socialism and not the preserve of the USSR. If anything, it was the Soviet Union who should have not adopted the red star. If, as Fryer claims, the Hungarian revolution was about installing true socialism in the country, why then take down the symbol of international socialism, the Red Star? It was not a symbol of the USSR. In fact, in 1924 Stalin adopted the unworkable theory and political position of ‘socialism in one country’, and in 1943 dismantled the Communist International (Comintern). It was the USSR under Stalin who disregarded international socialism, so, if Hungary was trying to bring true socialism to their country the Red Star should have been central to any design for the Hungarian masses! Another point of observation; why did the Hungarian revolutionary government abandon the Marxist maxim: ‘Proletarians of the World Unite’? Again giving credence to those who might disagree with Fryer’s analysis but I still give the Hungarian people, at this stage, the benefit of the doubt.

With the demise of the AVH, officially disbanded by the new government of Imre Nagy (later murdered by the Soviets), and to realize their political, economic, and social demands, local soviets (councils of workers) assumed control of municipal government. These councils of workers were something which the Russian Revolution of October 1917 was based upon and should, if the USSR was still loyal to those socialist principles, which they were not, have supported and encouraged these councils. The major error which the Nagy Government made and the USSR could not allow, was declaring Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, leaving a huge hole in the Eastern Bloc's defences in the west, thus allowing NATO an open door in the event of conflict. 

Did this give the Soviet Union the right to invade? Well yes and no. They were equally as entitled as the USA were to interfere in Vietnam or invade the tiny island of Grenada, almost three decades later, for electing a Marxist government under the guise that it threatened the security of the USA. US Congressman, Ron Dellums, sent to investigate these claims, concluded no threat existed in Grenada. Nikita Khrushchev considered Hungary leaving the ‘Warsaw Pact’ a threat to the security of the USSR. Therefore, the Soviet leader by the same criteria as that adopted by the USA was right! The US involvement supplying Kai Chang Chek in China against Mao’s Communists, who the masses wanted, with weapons and advisors might be another example of two sets of rules. Rules existed for both then super powers, not just the Soviet Union, and both political and military giants broke these rules.

The people of Hungary were committed to the building of socialism on democratic not dictatorial lines and were equally adamant there would be no return to ‘capitalism and landlordism’. They looked to Yugoslavia and Marshal Tito for inspiration, but not to be ruled by, as it was Tito who stood up to Stalin in 1949. In a letter to Stalin Tito wrote:

Stalin, you have sent your agents three times to assassinate me. I would only have to send my agent to you once. Signed, Tito.

 It was this kind of anti-Stalinism which gave the Hungarian freedom fighters heart. The Kremlin claimed that ‘White Terror’ was rife in Hungary which was, according to Fryer, not the case. The Soviet Union had seen ‘White Terror’ at first hand when the Nazis invaded. That was ‘White Terror’ and to say such forces were at work in Hungary was an untruth of the highest level. Another example of White Terror was the actions of Franco in Spain against all opposition. Bruce Renton wrote the ‘truth about the white terror’. “In the provinces only the AVH was physically attacked” (New Statesman November 17):

I had seen no counter-revolutionaries. I had seen the political prisoners liberated . . . I had seen the executioners executed in the fury of the people’s revenge . . . But there was no White Terror. The Communists walked free, the secret police were hanging by their boots. Where then was this counter-revolution, this Wite Terror”? (Truth November 16). 

White Terror is the organised suppression by a bourgeois dictatorship of its revolutionary opponents. This dictatorship did not exist in Hungary and there was no evidence to suggest the ‘uprising’ ever intended to bring about this end. The USSR was, at best, perhaps premature in their invasion, at worst, they had no right to invade at all.

The Soviet Union claimed the Nagy government were moving towards fascism which they were not but Peter Fryer writes, which I disagree with:

even if Nagy had been making concessions all along the line to fascism, even if counter-revolution had succeeded, even if White Terror had been raging the Soviet Union would still not have been justified in intervening. 

I disagree with Peter because he was writing knowing full well no such threat existed but, it appears, he would have held the same opinion if fascist gangs were rampaging through the streets just like the SA and later SS did in Nazi Germany. By his criteria the fascists should be allowed to roam unmolested? I can see his point but a line has to be drawn as to when fascism is present and must be stopped. That line did not exist in Hungary, but Peter's remedy (do nothing) was equally wrong. 

VI Lenin, one of the leaders in the October Revolution in Russia 1917, stated:

if Finland, if Poland, if Ukraine break away from Russia there is nothing bad about that. Anyone who says there is, is a chauvinist. It would be madness to continue the policy of the Tsar Nicholas . . . No nation can be free if it oppresses other nations.

Lenin was writing before the rise of fascism in Europe which almost overran the continent. Would he have spoken in this vein if he had witnessed the horrors inflicted on the Soviet Union by the Nazis in the first six months and beyond of their invasion? Karl Marx also wrote, quite correctly but again before the rise of fascism but less questionable; “A people which enslaves others forges its own chains”. This is as true today as it was in the days of Karl Marx but fascism gives us a contradiction! Such a contradiction or contradictions did not exist in Hungary 1956. The question remains, were the vents of Hungary 1956 a bourgeois counter revolution or a proletarian uprising?
     
Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

The Hungarian Uprising October 1956

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

 

A Morning Thought @ 3207

Jim Duffy ✍ Ireland unambiguously never has been and never will be politically neutral. 

That has been made unambiguously clear by successive taoisigh, successive External/Foreign Affairs ministers and others. Sean MacBride as Minister for External Affairs made it clear in the Dáil and Seanad in February 1949 that Ireland is of The West, part of The West, and on the side of The West.

Ireland is simply militarily neutral - meaning it is not in NATO. Its decision not to join NATO was not based on some principle but on one simple fact - the existence of partition. On 23 February 1949, Minister for External Affairs Sean MacBride told the Dáil that:

Ireland as an essentially democratic and freedom-loving nation is anxious to play her full part in the protecting and preserving of Christian civilisation and the democratic way of life. With the general aim of the Atlantic Pact (setting up NATO), therefore, we are in agreement.

He told the Seanad:

We approve of the Atlantic Pact and I think that, if it were not for the fact that a portion of our country is wrongfully occupied by Britain, we would have been in the Atlantic Pact. Theoretically, its aims, its purpose are in accord with our own wishes and our own desire.

Sean Lemass in 1962 said:

NATO is necessary for the preservation of peace and the protection of the countries of western Europe, including this country. Although we are not members of NATO, we are fully in agreement with its aims.

Ireland has demonstrated unambiguously that it is on the side of the democratic West. On Sean Lemass's explicit orders, Kennedy's embargo on Cuba was enforced by Ireland in planes landing in Shannon en route to Cuba. Goods in Soviet and Eastern Bloc planes breaching the embargo were confiscated - to the fury of Khrushchev.
 
Ireland like other Western states never recognised the illegal Soviet annexation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and like other states recognised the governments-in-exile of those states as the legitimate government. The modern Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian governments stress that they are the descendants of the Governments-in-Exile and not the Soviet puppet regimes Moscow installed.

Ireland is unambiguously on the side of Ukraine, not Moscow, as Russia breached the UN Charter in its invasion as an UN member we are obliged to uphold the charter. In theory under UN rules Russia could have been expelled for its invasion, just as the USSR was expelled by the League of Nations for its invasion of Finland in 1939. In practice, the existence of vetoes made the expulsion power, like a lot of UN powers, inoperable as veto powers can simply veto actions against them or their friends.
 
Russia like the USSR has always acknowledged that Ireland is not politically neutral. It regards Ireland as a de facto member of NATO. It was one of the reasons who Stalin repeatedly vetoed Ireland's efforts to join the UN. (Countries are admitted by the General Council on the recommendation of the Security Council. Stalin vetoed Ireland annually, preventing any SC recommendation to admit Ireland.) His death removed the logjam.

He also despised Irish neutrality in World War II as "cowardice" - a longstanding Soviet and Russian attitude towards the concept of neutrality in general. The former Allies like Britain and the US lobbied Stalin on Ireland's behalf, pointing out that though officially neutral Ireland had been working closely with Allies, breaking codes, spying on Axis diplomats and passing on information. Stalin simply threw his hands in the air, and spat out "cowards!"
 
He was particularly animated on the issue of de Valera's dumb decision to offer condolences to the German minister in Ireland on the death of Hitler - perhaps the biggest blunder in Irish foreign policy.

The truth is simple. Ireland is not and never has been politically neutral. It has been consistently been on the side of the west. It is simply militarily neutral, meaning it is not in NATO.

Sean MacBride was clear in the Seanad in 1949 in a speech:

based directly on the contents of the Atlantic Pact (setting up NATO), based on military considerations, based on public policy, the Atlantic Pact is heralded as the new instrument of international co-operation in the North Atlantic. It was intended to preserve if you like, the democratic way of life among the nations of the North Atlantic.
With that, we are in complete agreement. We approve of the Atlantic Pact and I think that, if it were not for the fact that a portion of our country is wrongfully occupied by Britain, we would have been in the Atlantic Pact. Theoretically, its aims, its purpose are in accord with our own wishes and our own desire.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Ireland Is Not Politically Neutral

Anthony McIntyre ⚽ It was much like watching Arne Slot’s Liverpool side from his second and final season in charge. Big hat no cattle.


With neither cohesion nor coherence to their play, France - despite all the hype carried into the game based on scintillating soccer, the frontal assault mentality, the dazzling displays, the prodigious ability, the exhilarating fluidity, the promise - simply did not turn up to win the only game standing between them and their third consecutive World Cup final. Tournament favourites, they came in with a bang and went out with a whimper. A serious disappointment not only to their own supporters but to lovers of the beautiful game in general who gathered to watch giants and saw only midgets. 

A matter of days ago sports columnists were asking if this would turn out to be the best les Bleus side ever. On the strength of last night’s performance the side that turned out compares more with the team of 2002 that failed ignominiously to defend the trophy it secured for the first time in Paris four years earlier: no wins, no goals, elimination in the group stage. 

If we sigh in disappointment, and take a more panoramic view, looking back for comparison to the great Brazil side of 1982 - the explosive team that boasted they did not care who they met in the final, they were going to win it anyway - we would be instantly reminded that the Zico-Socrates side went out having played the best match of the tournament. They went down to Italy fighting, not like France's graceless exit. The Socrates equalizer remains one of the great goals of World Cup history.

Spain who have stuttered for much of World Cup 2026, relying on late strikes from Merino to get games across the line, put in a solid performance. Their game plan superb, they were worthy of their victory, dominating France in every area of the park and using every blade of grass to ensure passes reached their target. French passing was, again, much like that of Slot's side. Spanish coach Luis de la Fuente might be a tad premature with his claim that Spain is 'the best team in the world’ after last night's victory, but few would deny him the megaphone. One more game and the answer will be revealed.  

Didier Deschamps' side might feel hard done by over the penalty decision awarded against Lucas Digne but the former English Premier League man went from Villa to villain for displaying no sense of awareness that a player of the threat posed by Lamine Yamal was bearing down on him. Even if it was handball by Yamal, and it is highly disputable, Digne has no grounds to petition for a fool's pardon for his unpardonable lack of concentration. Had Saliba stayed on the pitch it was unlikely to have made any difference. In such situations a side with the depth of France should swiftly recalibrate and move on. They failed.' As Mbappe observed in his post match interview: When you don't do what you have to do in a World Cup semi-final, you don't win.' France didn't just fail to win, they lost miserably.

French Newspaper L'Equipe was scathing in its criticism of the national team's performance, rating Digne, Dembele and Olise 2/10. Mbappe did little better managing only 3/10. Compare that to the ratings of Spain's Porro and Dani Olmo with 8/10, and the chasm opens up to expose its vastness. 

England take on Argentina in around thirty minutes time and are more than capable of making it through to the final. The English have grown into this tournament and have dug deep when most needed. They have a stronger and more dynamic midfield than the Argentinians and are not as overly reliant in front of goal on one towering talent. While Argentina could go all the way, there is a feel of the 1986 Mexico squad to the current crop. Without Maradona that team would never have won the World Cup. Messi is the main man here but in 86 Maradona was 25 whereas Messi is almost 40. An old dog for the hard road might find that old legs won't carry it the distance.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Les Bleus Blew It

Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on 6-June-2026.

The left can see that something has gone wrong with Sinn Féin. It has reached for revulsion where the answer is structural

RDS Stage, Dublin

1. The Standard

The Robert Tressell Festival took place in the RDS on Saturday, and in the course of it Ruth Coppinger TD stood up and described, more completely than anyone has managed in months of commentary, what a genuine left would have to be.

She began with the form. There should be a common left platform, she said, coming up to the next election. And then, before anyone could file it under electoral arithmetic, she widened it: it is not just about elections, because to challenge what is happening you have to build movements on the ground as well. That second sentence is the one worth holding onto. It says the platform is not a transfer pact or a seat-maximising arrangement. It is a thing built outside the electoral cycle, in the places elections do not reach, and the electoral form is meant to grow from it rather than stand in for it.

Then she set the conditions. A genuine left, in her account, stands implacably against racism and in solidarity with racialised communities, with women, with LGBT people. It acknowledges that the wealth of the society is hoarded by a tiny minority, and it advocates for that wealth to be taxed and taken under control. The social commitments and the economic commitment are not two lists. They are one list, and the holding of both together is what she meant by genuine.

On migration she was emphatic in a way that is worth reproducing closely. A united front against racism, she said, with no leaning in, in any way, shape or form, to anti-immigrant sentiment. Immigrants are not to blame for the crisis in capitalism. To challenge the myth of scarce resources, you talk about wealth, not about the people who have arrived to live among the scarcity. On abortion she was just as plain: no backtracking, on that or on any position previously held. And on the question of who a left platform could govern with, she drew the hardest line of all. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are excluded from a common left project. Not negotiable, not a matter of seats, excluded.

Set those pieces beside one another and what you have is not a wish list and not a purity test. It is a coherent account of a political position: hold the whole terrain, social and economic, as one thing; do not trade your positions for advantage; build the strength outside the electoral cycle that the electoral cycle can then express; and do not walk through the door marked government if the parties of the existing order are standing in it. Whatever one makes of any single plank, the thing hangs together. It describes a left that knows what it is and will not be moved off it.

That is the standard. It was stated clearly, from a stage, by a sitting TD, on a Saturday in June. Hold it there for a moment, because the rest of what follows is a question about the distance between that standard and the ground it was stated on.

II. The Room It Was Stated In

Consider the room it was stated in.

The festival’s theme, printed on the banner behind the speakers, was that the enemy is not the foreigner, the enemy is the system of greed. It is the right line, and it gathered the right people: trade unionists, the flotilla crews, Corbyn and McDonnell over from a British left in its own difficulty, the Higginses as patrons, writers and organisers and musicians, the whole ecosystem of the Irish and international left assembled under one roof for a day. The framing was solidarity, and the solidarity was real. For a day, the left performed its own unity, and there is a value in a movement reminding itself what it is for.

But a standard stated from a stage is also a measure laid against everyone standing on it. And Coppinger’s standard, taken at its word, describes a left that several of the parties in that room do not currently constitute. Arriving at the festival, Mary Lou McDonald spoke clearly and without hedging on Gaza, confirming Sinn Féin would table a motion to stop the Irish football team playing Israel while a genocide is committed, calling it unconscionable. Bacik and Gibney said the same, in much the same words. On that question the left was united and unequivocal, and Sinn Féin was unequivocal with it.

It is worth asking why that question was easy. The answer is that on Gaza the line costs Sinn Féin nothing. Its base is already there, the broad public is largely there, and clarity on Palestine loses the party no votes it wants to keep. Set it beside the questions on which the party does hedge, migration above all, and a pattern appears that is not vagueness and not cowardice but something more precise. Sinn Féin is clear exactly where clarity is free and reaches for ambiguity exactly where clarity has a price. The same instinct that let McDonald be unequivocal about the Israel match is the instinct that produced the leaflet promising to manage migration. The unequivocal stance and the managed one are not a contradiction. They are the same calculation, run on two questions with two different costs.

And the choice of what to carry home from the day tells the same story. The clip Sinn Féin cut and sent into the world was not the Gaza motion or anything on the terrain Coppinger had named. It was reunification, and the building of the republic we all deserve. A party’s choice of what to amplify is a choice about what it wants seen, and from a festival convened around the economic and social terrain, Sinn Féin chose to show its base the one piece of ground that is unambiguously and historically its own, and that costs it nothing to stand on.

So the room performed a unity that the standard stated within it quietly fractured. Not because anyone present was insincere about solidarity. Because solidarity as a feeling and a genuine left as Coppinger described it are not the same thing, and the gap between them is precisely the gap the rest of this is about. The left can fill a hall. The question is whether the thing it stated from the stage of that hall is a thing any party in the hall can actually be.

III. The Revulsion and the Analysis

Here is where I want to slow down, because the way the left has talked about this matters as much as the thing it has been talking about.

When Sinn Féin leans toward anti-immigrant feeling, when it hedges on migration, when it lets a leaflet promise to manage the thing rather than refuse the framing of it, the response from the left has been revulsion. Betrayal, disgust, the sense of a party showing a face it had kept hidden. And the revulsion is not wrong. Something is wrong. The leaning-in is real and it is bad, and the people who feel it as a betrayal have correctly identified that a line has been crossed. I am not going to ask anyone to feel less about it. The feeling is earned.

But the feeling has been close to the whole of the response, and a feeling is not an analysis. Revulsion treats the hedge as a failure of character. They were cowards. They were cynics. They sold the principle for a few points in a poll. And if that is what the problem is, then the remedy follows from it: better people, more courage, a leadership that would hold the line where this one would not. Find the braver party, or shame this one into bravery, and the problem is solved.

I do not think that is what the problem is, and I think the comfort of the revulsion is part of why it has been mistaken for an explanation. There is a satisfaction in disgust. It flatters the one who feels it: we would never lean in, we hold the line, the rot is in them and not in the situation. It sorts the field into the principled and the sold-out and lets us know, warmly, which side we are on. That satisfaction is exactly what an analysis has to give up, because the question an analysis has to ask is the unsatisfying one. Not how do we feel about the leaning-in. Why does it happen. Why does it happen to this party and not to the party down the bill. Why does it happen to the large party and not the small one. The revulsion has no answer to those questions, because it was never asking them. It was naming a wrong, which is a real thing to do, and then stopping at the naming.

What follows is an attempt not to stop at the naming. The wrong is real; the revulsion has that right. But the wrong is structural before it is moral, and reading it as moral leads somewhere that does not work, because the next party that reaches the size this one has reached will meet the same thing, and bravery will not have been the missing ingredient. To see why, you have to put the feeling down for a moment and look at the table the pieces are actually standing on.

IV. The Physics of the Table

There are two forces on the table, and between them they do most of the work that the language of cowardice has been asked to do.

The first is the shape of the terrain itself. There was a time when a party could hold a clear economic position and stay vague on the social questions, or hold firm on the social questions and stay quiet on the economics, and the two could be kept in separate rooms. That time is over, and the far right ended it. The achievement of the reactionary politics now organising across the West, in Ireland as everywhere, has been to bundle the questions together: migration, the borders, the national culture, the rights of women, the climate, sovereignty, all wired into a single circuit so that a position on any one of them reads as a position on all of them. You cannot, any longer, be sound on housing and evasive on 
migration and have the evasion go unnoticed, because the migration question now carries the whole charge of the bundle. This is why Coppinger named the two grounds she named. The migration line and the abortion line are not two items she happened to mention. They are the two places where the integrated terrain bites hardest, the points where a left position is most exposed to the pull of the bundle, and she named them because she understood that holding the terrain means holding it precisely there, where it is hardest, or not holding it at all.

The second force is the one the party is standing in rather than standing on. The institutional architecture of the southern state is built to absorb. Every serious attempt to construct a left politics outside the two parties of government has, within a generation, been drawn into one of them, and the drawing-in has a mechanism. The architecture rewards the party that comes inside and punishes the party that stays out. Come inside and there are ministries, there is the vocabulary of the state, there is the slow education in what cannot be done, and at the end of the education the party speaks the language of the thing it set out to change. Stay outside and there is permanent opposition, permanent criticism of decisions taken by others, permanent smallness. The architecture is not neutral ground that parties cross. It is a set of rails, laid in advance, and the party that climbs aboard can take the driver’s seat and grip the wheel and feel itself to be steering, while the track decides where it goes. Coppinger’s hardest condition, the refusal to govern with Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael, is a condition written against exactly this. It is an attempt to bar the one door through which the absorption has always come.

These are the two forces. The terrain that will not let the social questions stay quiet, and the architecture that carries aboard whoever climbs on. Neither of them is about the character of any particular leader. They are the physics of the table, and they act on every object placed there, regardless of what the object intends or how brave it is. Which is why the question that matters is not whether a given party is principled, but where on the table it has come to rest, and what the forces do to an object resting there.

V. The Standard and the Scale

Now put the standard back on the table and watch what the forces do to it.

Coppinger stated the standard and she holds it. Implacably, in her phrase, with no leaning in, in any way. And she holds it from two per cent. Her party, Solidarity – People Before Profit, the alliance her party sits within polls at two per cent between them, and it has held the line on migration with a completeness that no larger party has matched. The temptation is to read the completeness as the cause of something, a purity that ought to be rewarded and has been punished by an ungrateful electorate. I want to suggest the relation runs the other way. Solidarity – People Before Profit can hold the line with total confidence because two per cent is a position the line has never cost it anything to hold. It is a group of committed activists in a handful of constituencies, talking mostly to people who already agree, never within reach of the kind of power that puts a position under the pressure that breaks it. The line is easy to hold there. That is not a criticism. It is a description of where on the table the small left rests, and of how light the forces fall on an object resting there.

Move to where Sinn Féin rests and the forces fall differently. A poll this weekend, the second in a fortnight to say the same thing, put the party at 20%, sliding, with the vote it gained in 2020 visibly draining away. The Social Democrats were up 3% in the same poll, and it does not take much to see where a good part of the drained vote has gone. 20% is not 2%. 20% is a party trying to hold together a coalition of voters that includes the cosmopolitan and the communitarian, the city professional frustrated by housing and the worker in a town where immigration is felt as a pressure and not an abstraction, and 20% is within reach of the power that 2% is not. That is where the migration question bites. That is where the integrated terrain and the architecture meet, on a base too wide and too contradictory to be held by a single clear line, with the rails of government close enough to climb aboard. The party leaned because that is what the forces do to an object resting there. Not because it was braver or more cowardly than the party at 2%. Because it was bigger, and bigness is where the test is.

This is the sentence the revulsion cannot say, and the reason it cannot say it is that the sentence offers no one any satisfaction. The small left holds the line not because it is virtuous but because it is small. Sinn Féin leaned not because it is vicious but because it is large, and largeness is where the pressure lives. The principled small party and the compromised large one are not two kinds of character. They are the same forces acting on objects at different points on the table, and the difference between them is the difference between 2% and 20%, between never being tested and being tested constantly. Strip the moral language away and what is left is a structural fact with no villain in it. The standard that Coppinger stated from the stage is a standard that becomes harder to hold the closer a party comes to the scale at which holding it would matter.

It is worth saying that the fracture this describes is not invisible to the mainstream. The Irish Times, surveying the same left after the by-elections, noted that the disagreements between Sinn Féin and the rest run through abortion, immigration and climate, and concluded that they do not extend to the economic questions that once defined the divide. The first half of that is exactly right, and it is the half that matters here: the terrain on which the left fractures is the social terrain, the integrated terrain, the ground the far right has wired together. Whether the economic agreement is as settled as the second half assumes is a question for another day. What is not in doubt is where the breaking happens, and it happens precisely where the bundle bites.

Holding the line and reaching the scale to enact the line have come apart. The party that has the line does not have the scale. The party that has the scale cannot hold the line. And the form that would have both does not exist.

VI. The Gamble

There is a reply to all of this, and it is the best reply available, and it comes from someone who was inside the building.

Siobhán Fenton was a press adviser to the Sinn Féin leader and then a spokesperson for the party, and she has written an account of its inner workings that is due in the autumn. Ahead of it she has offered the strongest version of the case that the drift is not a failure at all but a strategy. The argument runs like this. The 2020 coalition of voters was always incompatible, the cosmopolitan and the communitarian wired together by a housing crisis they both felt and little else they agreed on. To pick a side would be to lose the other and collapse back to a smaller party. So the ambiguity is deliberate, a holding of both for as long as both can be held, and it has an exit. The issue that will decide the next election is not yet visible, just as immigration was not visible early in the last cycle and housing was not visible early in the one before. The party waits. When the galvanising issue arrives, late in 2028, it plants its flag, recovers a clear identity, and fights the election on ground it has chosen. The lacklustre years are the price of the option, and the option is worth the price.

It is a serious argument and it should be taken seriously, with the caveat that it is an account offered by a former press officer rather than a proven fact about what the leadership decided, and that the book it trails is framed less as a story of strategy than as a story of how things came apart. But take the argument at its strongest, as the deliberate gamble it claims to be, and it still rests on a single assumption that the rest of this piece has been quietly dismantling. The gamble assumes that the deciding issue of 2028 will arrive in the form the gamble needs: a clean issue, an economic one, the kind a party can lead on while keeping the social questions in their separate room. Housing in 2020 was such an issue. You could ride it without committing on migration or abortion, because in 2020 the terrain had not yet been bundled.

It has been bundled now. That is the whole burden of the integrated terrain, and it is why the gamble’s exit is sealed over. The issue that decides 2028 will not arrive clean, because there are no clean issues left on a terrain the far right has wired into a single circuit. Whatever the galvanising question turns out to be, it will come already carrying the charge of the bundle, already entangled with migration and the borders and the rest, and the party that has spent the intervening years declining to hold a position on exactly that terrain will not be able to plant a flag on it, because the flag-planting is the very thing the years of declining will have unlearned. Coppinger named the two grounds where the terrain bites because she understood that they cannot be kept quiet until a convenient moment. The gamble is a bet that they can. The bet is against the structure, and the structure does not break.

VII. What Would Have to Be Built

So return to the stage, and to the standard stated on it.

The thing worth holding onto from Saturday is not that Sinn Féin failed a test. It is that the test was stated at all, completely and clearly, by someone who meant it. The left does not have a problem of not knowing what it is for. Coppinger said what it is for, in plain sentences, from a platform, in front of the whole movement: hold the terrain entire, refuse the leaning-in, keep the positions, build the strength outside the cycle, stay off the rails that lead inside. There is no confusion about the standard. The standard is not the difficulty.

The difficulty is the one this piece has been tracing. The standard becomes harder to hold the closer a party comes to the scale at which holding it would change anything, and at the scale where it would change everything it has so far proved impossible to hold at all. The party that keeps the line is kept small partly by keeping it. The party that reached the scale could not carry the line up the slope with it. This is not a story about good people and bad people. It is a story about a shape, the shape of a terrain that will not let the hard questions stay quiet and an architecture that absorbs whoever climbs aboard, and about the fact that no political form has yet been built that can hold the standard and the scale at the same time, against both of those forces, on the ground as it actually is.

That form is what would have to be built. Not a better leader for an existing party, because the forces do not care about leaders. Not a purer small party, because purity at two per cent is not a counter to anything. Not a clever wait for a clean issue that the terrain will no longer supply. Something else: a politics that could hold what Coppinger described, at a scale that could enact it, while resisting the pull that has absorbed every previous attempt to do exactly that. Whether such a thing can be built I do not know. I know that it does not exist, that the weekend made its absence unusually visible, and that the absence is the actual subject beneath the polls and the speeches and the insider accounts of who decided what.

The standard was stated on Saturday. The form that could carry it has not been. That gap is the whole of the matter, and what fills it, if anything fills it, will be built by people with more at stake than a writer watching the room. I will keep watching the room. The building, if it happens, will happen elsewhere.

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

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