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Caoimhin O’Muraile  ☭ In today’s world we hear more and more about the positives and, very occasionally, negatives of Artificial Intelligence (AI). 

Those who tell the truth, the negatives, are often deemed as ‘killjoys’ or people with ‘no vision for the future’ when in fact they are pointing out the very real dangers of AI. We are constantly told, by the ‘killjoys’ opponents, about how this new wonderful development will revolutionise our lives and make everyday existence easier which may be true or may not. 

Used properly I have little doubt that AI will improve our lives, that is the lives of everybody on this planet but only if used properly and sensibly which, under capitalism, it will not. Under the present economic conditions AI will be generally available in its most beneficial form to those who can afford and instead of making life better for everybody, in many cases, it will cause unemployment and a lower standard of living. The further down the international scale we go when we arrive at so-called ‘third world countries’ where AI could and should have a real impact unfortunately, like the covid 19 vaccine in many cases, AI will be unavailable as the country will be unable to afford it. As for employment in the so-called ‘developed world’ already, and despite being told in the early days the opposite, we are seeing large transnational companies making workers redundant as their jobs will be taken over by AI generated machines. Therefore as opposed to the future looking rosy it looks more like something people will dread. AI is the new means of production and while in the private hands of a few capitalist barons whose sole God in life is money it will have more negatives than positives for the majority of the world’s population. However, and all these arguments aside, there are far more serious aspects to AI we are told little about.

I watched a film, science-fiction, about an Artificial Intelligence generated doll called M3GAN named Megan, the title of the film being M3GAN. M3GAN stands for Model 3 Generative ANdroid and the film tells the story of Katie, a little girl who loses both parents in a road traffic accident. Her aunt, Gemma, then adopts her and brings her up accordingly. Gemma works for an AI company one of the largest in the world and she is a scientist/inventor. Gemma designs a doll, M3GAN or, in the home Megan, which is designed to be a companion for Katie. The doll is very lifelike and is programmed by Gemma to be a companion and protector to Katie which in the early days the doll does perfectly.

Unfortunately things begin to go wrong when it becomes apparent this android has taken on the ability to reprogramme itself on top of the programmes Gemma has given it, to constantly self-improve and hereby lies the clue to the possible dangers of AI in real life. The doll soon learns how to override Gemma’s programmes refusing, for example, to switch off when instructed. M3GAN soon becomes more intelligent than her designer by far and begins doing things, in the protection of Katie, which are murderous. The scenes in the film are sometimes funny and at other times frightening but at all times they act as a warning. On one occasion the doll rips off a kid’s ear then chases him into the road where he is hit by an oncoming vehicle which M3GAN knew was travelling in the boy’s direction at relative speed. The kid was a typical US spoilt brat who deserved a ‘clip round the ear’, not having his ear torn off before being killed. This was only one of countless incidents involving the taking of actual life by Artificial Intelligence, imitation life. As M3GAN increases its intelligence so too does the androids abilities advance as the machine goes on the rampage defending Katie supposedly.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution back in the nineteenth-century the owners of the new means of production knew, in most cases, fuck all about these new machines or the products these machines helped produce. The same applies in many cases today, the brains are nearly always the scientists and designers who are employed by the capitalist to operate the new technology and design new advancements and products. Through these workers' mental labour power and other workers' physical labour power, often in sweat shop conditions regards physical labour, these capitalists get very, very wealthy. The TNC in the film are no exemption to this rule, and one scene which could be any company in any land on earth in real life, the boss asks Gemma, the brains, to write a speech he can present which sounds like “I know what I am talking about” which, in reality, he did not. This way his audience will believe it to be the employer, user, who is not only the owner of the company but the brains behind the technology when nothing could be further from the truth. The employer’s sole interest, as is obvious, is profit and this is also the case in real life. All the flaws with Artificial Intelligence in this film apply in the real world. Nothing must get in the way of business and profits and a machine like M3GAN would be very profitable indeed, except it wasn’t! Could the self-destructive flaws in Megan’s constant quest to self-improve happen in real life? In all probability yes but don’t expect the capitalist owners to tell us about them. Such information may interfere with profits and that just would not do!

As AI advances and we are told very little about the possible down sides what are these negative possibilities? Well, let us take a scenario in years to come where all air traffic controlling is no longer carried out by humans but AI Androids. A nightmare scenario is this AI reprogramming and re-arranging a flightpath for two Jumbo jets at 30,000 feet forcing the two AI piloted planes carrying countless passengers to collide mid-air!! Such an accident is unthinkable because the casualties would be huge, not only passengers but people living for miles around on the ground would die!! Could such an accident happen? Truth be told something similar already has at Tenerife Los Rodeos Airport (now Tenerife North - Ciudad de laguna Airport) in March 1977. The accident happened in thick fog when two 747 aircraft, or Jumbo Jets, collided on the runway when one of the two giants initiated its take-off run colliding with another stationary Jumbo Jet crashing into the stationary planes side. The number of deaths was 583 in what is to this day the worst aviation disaster in history. New regulations state the captain is no longer “considered infallible” and crew members, all human, must now be involved with decision making. If such a terrible incident can happen with humans in charge of operations imagine the chaos and loss of life if an AI operated air traffic control of the future reprogrammes itself to do the opposite of what the technology is designed for? Humans do not reprogramme themselves, machines can and, I dare say, will!!

As AI continues to have an impact on our lives increasing by the year in the name of profits how many corners could be cut? Could corner cutting then become part of the Androids programmes either by intent or otherwise? As long as the profit factor remains the major driving force then Artificial Intelligence will always harbour doubts about its reliability. AI could be an asset to humanity, all humanity of all countries, if tailor made to suit and assist in society’s needs. These needs do not include causing unemployment and poverty but, alas, while in the hands of private greedy capitalists, like all the means of production distribution and exchange, AI will always have a shadow cast over it. 

Unlike the film, M3GAN, one of the world’s leading AI manufacturers, Anthropic, have called for a pause in AI production. The reason for their call is some of their models are showing signs of “escaping human control” meaning the events in our film could well become reality as AI machines constantly improve their capabilities. This call for a pause in global production is dependent on all manufacturers agreeing which is unlikely. In Washington the Trump administration are opposed to such a pause, irrespective of the risks, in case China get the upper hand taking the lead in AI development. Anthropic will call a pause if they can get agreement to such a pause from all Artificial Intelligence manufacturers, if not, no pause - heaven forbid they lose profits. Better thousands of M3GAN’s could be on the loose terrorising humanity than the company lose one cent in profits more than their competitors or fall behind other manufacturers. The attitude of Trump and his administration is in line with the para-fascist (not to be mistaken with neo-fascist) policies of the White House which involves corporatism, business as part of government. The White House are concerned China will not comply to such a pause in production of AI, China will no doubt be worried the USA will not comply.

A spokesperson for Anthropic indicated “AI is accelerating at a rapid pace” and unfortunately there is no brake mechanism. The “accelerating pedal is down” but as of yet we do not have a brake to slow it down. “A pause” would allow time for us to find a braking system to slow down the rate AI is advancing. The question is; how many of the world’s AI manufacturers would take a pause in profits in order a braking system can be found? How many would be interested in finding such a brake? It is not in the interests of business to search for such a braking mechanism and, as we are constantly told, nothing gets in the way of business and, most importantly, profits!
     
Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.
I

M3GAN 🪶 Megan (AI)

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Ninety Nine

 

A Morning Thought @ 3172

Jim Duffy ✍ The biggest mistake Starmer made in opposition when he decided not to make detailed government plans and produced a manifesto with no details. 

As a result, it had no mandate for what to do, as it had never told people in detail what it would do.

The party may have done that as the last election result was so disastrous that it looked as if it was almost mathematically impossible for Labour to win a majority, so they were trying to maximise support by saying nothing that would turn anyone off. They end up winning a landslide, not because they won support but because the opposition was so fragmented Labour won seats by default. That is the fatal flaw in First Past the Post. It can create gigantic landslides on support levels that in a far election system would have seen a party lose.

Thatcher 'won' an landslide election in 1983 despite its vote share declining simply because the opposition was split between Labour and the Liberal/SDP Alliance with the former on 27.6% and the latter on 25.4%. It was a landslide entirely created by the flaws in FPTP. Thatcher, Blair and Starmer won dubious landslides on percentages that in any democratic proportional system would have seen them at best in a minority government.

Starmer has been struggling from day 1 as voters had not given a specific mandate for detailed policies. He has also been struggling with a hostile media, many of whom were Corbyn supporters and from day one were gunning for Starmer as he had deposed their hero.

It is easy to chicken out of putting details in manifestos, but it usually comes back to haunt you. At least when you put details in manifesto, you can say to voters "I did say I would do this. It was in black and white in the manifesto." Putting details in manifestos also helps get through things in the Lords. Under the Salisbury convention, the Lords will not reject laws that implement manifestos.

Burnham shouldn't count his chickens to quick though. There is a strong possibility that he won't win that seat in the by-election. Labour did not win that seat comfortably in the landslide. It is a Reform stronghold. Other parties may not want him as leader of the Labour Party. So you may find some Tory voters and Lib Dem voters voting for the Reform candidate to keep Burnham out of Parliament.

Add to that there is the risk that Reform may win the Manchester mayoralty as it is a strong Reform area. The worst of all worlds for Labour would be to lose the by-election and the mayoralty to Reform and have a seriously weakened Starmer stay as leader. Streeting is unlikely to win. He has alienated even once close friends in how in government he walked all over them and turned friends into enemies. He used to dine with some senior close friends like Reeves. That all stopped when they found out he was bad-mouthing them. They are now out to stop him.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Starmer's Biggest Mistake

Dixie Elliot ✊I watched the lynch mobs from the Catholic side of the racist fence . . . 


. . .  out in force, with their proverbial burning crosses, on social media today, frothing at the mouth about protecting our children from immigrants and refugees who were forced to flee to our country because their own countries had been invaded and plundered by white oligarchs leaving wastelands in their wake.

I have never seen one of those racist hypocrites calling for protests or action to be taken against the countless drug dealers who live in our communities and which destroy the lives of our children, causing many to take their own lives.
 
Unlike the drug gangs who operate out of our streets these people are soft targets.

This isn't about that poor lad who almost lost his life as the racial hatred was fired by the skin colour of the drug crazed lunatic who attempted to murder him. By all accounts the two of them shared a flat and had been using drugs when it turned to violence.
 
Yet there was not an utterance about the drug gangs who supplied them with the drugs.
 
Tonight Loyalist gangs who hero worship the Shankill Butchers and the Glennanne Gang are burning the homes of innocent people and their terrified children because of their skin colour.
 
When you use the same rhetoric as those scumbags then being 'concerned about your children' is a lame excuse for racism.
 
If you were so concerned about your children then the real targets would be the drug gangs who live among us.


PS: Tommy Robinson is leaving his sunbed by the pool where he lives in Spain to come and lead you to victory over people who he has found guilty of being foreigners.
 
The same Tommy Robinson who takes drugs and is a convicted criminal funded by Israel.

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

Lynch Mobs

Louth For Ever ★ writing on 26-April-2026.

A fourth note on the questions the political moment is asking: whose grievance is recognised, whose form of expression is permitted, and what the political left would have to be able to say.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Jennifer Horgan asked, in the Examiner last month, whose anger is permitted to bring society to a standstill, and what it means that the answer is gendered. The tradition I write from has been asking, for forty years, what the relationship is between the legitimacy of a grievance and the legitimacy of its expression, and whether the tradition that produced the question has become careless about its own answer. The two questions are the same question. This is the essay that says so.

Section I: What the two arguments named

Jennifer Horgan wrote a piece in the Examiner on the 17th April that did one thing carefully. Her mother had been prevented from reaching her dying brother-in-law during the fuel blockade weekend. The piece begins from that fact and runs a substitution exercise. Horgan asks her reader to imagine the same form of disruptive protest performed by other suffering groups: parents of children with unmet needs blocking school gates, disabled people preventing able-bodied access to clinics, homeless people stopping people getting to work, women preventing the state exams from running. Each substitution is plausible as a hypothetical and impossible as a political reality. The point she is making by holding up the absences is that the form of protest available to the hauliers is not available to those other constituencies. The form is gendered, classed, and structured by which kinds of suffering the political imagination has decided to recognise as legitimate.

Horgan calls what was set that weekend a new standard for what angry men can achieve. She also calls it a new kind of terrible beauty. The Yeats reference is doing serious work. Easter 1916 is the foundational lyric of Irish republican mythology, and Horgan is invoking it in a context that is the inverse of what Yeats meant, beauty terrible because it produces destruction in service of a legitimate cause. She is asking whether the blockade week deserves the framing or parodies it. She does not answer the question. She lets the reader hold it.

The tradition I write from has been holding a related question for forty years. The question is whether the legitimacy of a grievance and the legitimacy of its form of expression can be separated. The tradition’s answer, hard-won and historically vindicated, is that they can. Engagement with grievance is appropriate even when the form of its expression is one the state cannot itself endorse. This is the insight that produced the Good Friday Agreement, and it is the insight located at Long Kesh and named, in earlier writing, lateral legitimacy.

But the tradition has been less clear on a second question that follows from the first. The lateral legitimacy a constituency earns is not infinitely transferable. It belongs to that constituency, in that historical moment, against that adversary, through the forms that constituency had been left with. It does not become a permission slip for any movement that can mobilise grievance. The principle is one thing. The transferability is another. The tradition has been clearer on the principle than on the limit, and the gap is where most of the trouble lives.

Horgan’s question and the tradition’s question converge at a specific point. Horgan is asking which forms of expression are available to which constituencies. The tradition is asking how grievance and form of expression relate to each other. Both questions, properly held, are asking about the same thing. The political conditions under which a grievance becomes visible and the form of its expression becomes legitimate. The form is not neutral. It is a political artefact. Whose form gets recognised, and whose does not, is the question both writers are touching from different sides. Neither has fully named the relationship. That relationship is what this essay is trying to articulate.

Section II: The form is the artefact

The relationship Horgan and the tradition are both touching, when their questions are set beside each other, is this. Forms of expression are not neutral instruments that constituencies pick up and use. The forms themselves are political artefacts. They are produced by histories, by economies, by the gendered and classed structures of who has access to what, and by the long memory of which kinds of action a society has trained itself to recognise as legitimate political behaviour and which kinds it has trained itself to dismiss as irrelevant, hysterical, or criminal.

The hauliers had access to a form of expression that worked. They had vehicles. They had the infrastructure to coordinate them. They had the assumption, built into Irish political culture across decades, that men with trucks blocking roads were doing politics. The infrastructure had been built before the protest began. The form was waiting for them. The grievance about diesel was real, and the constituency was real, but the form they used was not invented in the heat of frustration. It was already there. It had been there for years.

The form was not there for the women Horgan named. There is no inherited cultural infrastructure in Ireland through which carers of children with disabilities arrive at the gates of the Department of Education with vehicles, fuel, fundraising, communications networks, and the assumed legitimacy of a recognised political constituency. The form has not been built. The cultural memory does not exist. If those carers blocked the gates, the political response would not be debate about engagement. It would be removal. The form does not transfer to them, not because their grievance is less real, but because the structural conditions that make a form of expression available are themselves the product of which constituencies the political imagination has been organised around.

This is the relationship the two questions converge on. The legitimacy of a grievance and the legitimacy of its form of expression are separable in principle, as the tradition correctly insists. But the form available is not random. It is the residue of which constituencies have been politically organised, which struggles have been fought, which infrastructures have been built. The form a grievance can find is shaped by who has fought before, who has built the networks, who has been recognised as a legitimate political subject in earlier political moments. Forms of expression carry their histories with them.

What this means for the fuel week is that the haulier protest did not invent its form. It inherited it. The form had been built by decades of male, vehicle-based, economically-organised political action that had a place in the cultural imagination as legitimate political activity. The carers, the disabled, the homeless, the women whose grievances the trilogy has been touching on across these essays, they have not been politically organised in ways that would have built equivalent infrastructure. The absence of that infrastructure is not a coincidence. It is the political residue of forty years in which certain constituencies have been organised and others have been left to wait. The form available is the artefact of that history. The form not available is the artefact of the same history.

Section III: The fuel week, read through the convergence

Mary Lou McDonald gave three public interventions across the weekend the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis closed. In her keynote address on Saturday 25th April she described the fuel protesters as having gathered with tractors, trucks and lorries — the tools of their livelihoods. She accused Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael of trying to buy off workers with half-measures. On Sunday afternoon, on BBCNI Sunday Politics, Mark Carruthers put Chris Donnelly’s polling analysis from the Irish News to her directly. McDonald praised the construction of Donnelly’s sentence and then declared the leadership question settled by her re-election by the membership at the Ard Fheis. On Monday evening, on Virgin Media’s Monday with Gavan Reilly, she made a longer case. She defended the right to protest disruptively. She said she had heard from women in inner-city Dublin who told her they had felt safer with the lads and their tractors present. She drew a distinction, when Reilly raised the experience of the Muslim Sisters of Éire, between protesters and others who had used the platform of the protest for other purposes. On the leadership question she said there had been a whole lot of, with all due respect, hot air, and that the party had decided that she was the leader of the party.

Photo by Gabriel Ramos on Unsplash

Three rhetorical moves are doing the work across these interventions. Each can be held up against the analytical frame Section II established, and each can be tested for what it carries and what it leaves out.

The first move is the framing of the hauliers as workers using the tools of their livelihoods. This framing erases the structure of the protest’s organisation. The form was not a spontaneous use of vehicles by workers under pressure. It was a coordinated political action whose logistics, fundraising, communications, and amplification had been organised by a network that pre-existed the protest. The McCarthy GoFundMe domain was registered seven weeks before the blockade began. The international amplifiers, Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, the Reform UK ecosystem, arrived on cue. McDonald’s framing collapses the constituency and the form into each other and presents both as worker self-action. The constituency is real. The form was built. The framing erases the building.

The second move is the women-and-tractors claim. McDonald said that women in the inner city had told her they felt safer with the protesters and their vehicles present. The claim is unverifiable in any specific way. It is also doing something specific. It produces a different set of women, the ones who allegedly felt safer, to displace the women whose lives the blockade actually disrupted. Jennifer Horgan’s mother, prevented from reaching her dying brother-in-law, is not in McDonald’s frame. The Muslim Sisters of Éire, told they were not welcome at their own street soup-kitchen, are bracketed in the frame as the result of others using the platform. The carers, the nurses, the women trying to reach work or hospitals or family, do not appear at all. The form rehabilitates itself by producing the women who confirm it and disappearing the women who would not.

The third move is the parsing of protesters from others using the platform. This is the rhetorical operation by which Sinn Féin retains alignment with the underlying grievance while disclaiming the worst expressions of the form. The line is drawn without naming who the others were. The McCarthy infrastructure is not named. The far-right amplifiers are not named. Gavin Pepper, the Dublin councillor who has called for mass deportations of immigrants and who agreed with McDonald’s interview on the programme’s Facebook page, is not named. The line that distinguishes legitimate protesters from illegitimate platform-users is presented as having been visible to onlookers. It was not. It was, and is, a rhetorical line drawn after the fact, doing work that political infrastructure should have been doing in advance and was not built to do.

What these three moves share is that each one preserves Sinn Féin’s ability to claim the constituency without taking responsibility for the form. The grievance is real. The form was captured. The party wants the first and not the second. The framing is the operation by which it tries to have both.

A third instance of the same principle landed on the same weekend. On Saturday night, while the Ard Fheis was in session, the New IRA hijacked a delivery driver in Twinbrook and used him to deliver a car bomb to Dunmurry police station. The group claimed responsibility on Monday and threatened to target police officers in their homes. The First Minister condemned the attack alongside the DUP Deputy First Minister and the Chief Constable. The dissident republican claim to lateral legitimacy fails on the same principle by which the haulier blockade’s claim fails. The grievance the New IRA cites is held by some who hold it as real. The form of expression they have chosen does not have the constituency, the historical conditions, or the political reality that produced the legitimacy the H-Block prisoners earned. The principle is consistent across both cases. Lateral legitimacy is not transferable. The form earns nothing on its own.

Section IV: The form available, the form not available

Horgan’s substitution exercise did one thing and stopped. She listed the constituencies whose grievance is at least as real as the hauliers’ and asked her reader to imagine those constituencies using the same form of disruptive protest. The substitutions are plausible as moral claims and impossible as political realities. She did not theorise why the impossibility holds. The exercise did its work by demonstrating the asymmetry. The theorisation is the work this essay can do.

The substitutions feel impossible because the form of expression is not separable from the infrastructure that has produced it. The hauliers’ form was inherited from decades of male, vehicle-based, economically-organised political action that has been culturally legible as politics. The carers’ form does not exist not because carers are less aggrieved but because the political organisation of caring labour has not been built. There has been no thirty-year cultural training in which Irish people learned to see women with prams blocking school gates as political subjects. There has been no infrastructure of fundraising, communications, vehicles, and amplifiers built around the unmet needs of children with disabilities. The cultural memory does not have a place for it. The political imagination has not been organised around it.

This is the residue Section II named. The constituencies whose form is unavailable are unavailable because the political work of building their form has not been done. Not because their grievance is illegitimate. Not because their numbers are insufficient. Because no political project has organised the form their grievance could take.

The numbers, when they are finally counted, are striking. The Hope and Courage Collective published its annual report on 13th April, three days after McDonald’s Reilly interview. The report’s findings are worth holding alongside the framings of the past week. 66% of people in Ireland agree that immigrants contribute positively to Irish culture and community, up two points from the previous year. 79% agree that working-class people are struggling because of systemic inequality. 69% agree that wealthy people are successful because they were given more opportunities than others. 80% agree that minority ethnic communities face greater barriers to success than white people. 75% support the freedom of transgender people to live their lives.

These are not contested propositions. They are the settled common sense of a substantial supermajority of the Irish population. The constituency that holds these views is real. It is large. It is values-aligned around a recognisably progressive political position. What it does not have is a form of expression. There is no organised infrastructure through which the 79% who recognise systemic inequality coordinate their political action. There is no fundraising apparatus, no communications network, no vehicles, no amplifiers that arrive on cue. The Hope and Courage Collective’s report is itself the only sustained piece of public infrastructure organising this constituency, and a research report is not a political form.

The far-right has built infrastructure. The supermajority has not. The asymmetry is not coincidence. It is the artefact of a political moment in which the form of expression has been built by those willing to do the building, and the constituency that would oppose them has been waiting for someone else to do the work. The constituency that lost the blockade week was not absent. It was present, in the 79% and the 66% and the 80%. What was absent was its form.

Section V: The fifth commitment

Earlier writing in this sequence proposed four commitments that any serious political project on this island would have to be capable of making. The four were honesty about the fossil fuel transition, the rebuilding of state capacity, the refusal of enemy-of-the-people politics, and the cultivation of internal dissent as a positive value rather than an embarrassment to be managed. The four are the bottom line below which the project cannot be absorbed. The three essays before this one made the case that no current Irish political formation holds them, and that their absence is the trajectory the trilogy has been mapping.

The synthesis these four essays have arrived at proposes a fifth commitment, implicit in the previous four but worth naming on its own. The political project this island needs would have to be capable of building forms of political expression for constituencies whose grievance is not currently politically visible, and of doing so without absorbing the analyses that named the invisibility in the first place.

The fifth commitment has two parts and they go together. The first part is the building work. The form is the artefact. If the form is not present for a constituency, no amount of moral correctness about the legitimacy of its grievance produces political expression. The work is to build the infrastructure: the fundraising apparatus, the communications networks, the cultural training that makes the constituency legible as a political subject, the long memory of action that allows the form to be recognised when it is used. This is decades of work. It is the kind of work the populist right has been doing while the political left has been waiting for someone else to do it.

The second part is the discipline of not absorbing the critique. When a writer like Jennifer Horgan names the gendered asymmetry of recognised grievance, the political response from the left should not be to claim the analysis for the left’s own positioning. It should be to take the analysis seriously and ask what would have to change. When a writer like Chris Donnelly names the trajectory of a particular party with electoral clarity, the response from inside that party should not be to deflect with style. When the tradition I write from has been holding the question of grievance and form for forty years, the political left should not flatter itself that the question can be resolved by adopting the language of the tradition without doing the work the tradition has been pointing at.

The McDonald rhetorical apparatus over the past week has demonstrated what absorption looks like in real time. The workers framing absorbs the haulier constituency without naming the form’s organisation. The women-and-tractors claim absorbs the feminist critique without engaging it. The procedural framing on leadership absorbs structural critique into membership-vote vindication. The party performs the moves the trilogy’s previous essays predicted it would perform, and the moves work in the short term because the alternative, a political form built around the supermajority Hope and Courage just documented, does not exist.

The fifth commitment is the commitment to refuse this absorption from inside the left. The work is not just rhetorical positioning. It is structural and slow. It requires building forms of expression for constituencies that have been waiting for forms, refusing the easy absorption of feminist and dissident analyses into party-political messaging, and accepting that the political left this country needs will not be built in an electoral cycle. It will be built by people willing to do decades of work that no current Irish political formation is currently doing, and that the populist right has been doing for years.

Section VI: What is owed and what is not finished

The essay does what synthesis essays do. It brings two arguments into the same room and asks whether they recognise each other. They do, but only when held up alongside each other carefully. Neither argument names the other in its own register. Both arguments need each other to do the work neither can do alone.

Jennifer Horgan’s piece in the Examiner is its own work. It deserves a longer engagement than this essay has given it, and a wider readership than the political-commentary discourse will give it on its own. The substitution exercise she ran will keep doing work for any writer who picks it up carefully. The gendered moral economy she named is the analytical territory the Irish left will have to engage seriously if it is to engage anything seriously.

The tradition I write from is also its own work. Forty years of writing, much of it produced from inside conditions the writers did not choose, much of it ignored by the political class whose decisions the writing was tracking. The tradition’s question about grievance and form is the question the political moment is now asking from every direction at once. The tradition’s answer, when it is held honestly, is more textured than either its critics or its admirers tend to recognise.

What this essay has tried to do is bring the two together and ask what the synthesis points at. The fifth commitment is the proposal. The work that follows from it is decades of work that no current political formation in Ireland is doing. The supermajority that would benefit from the work is real and it is waiting. The form that would let it act has not been built. The asymmetry between what the populist right has built and what the political left has not is the political reality that the next decade will be decided inside.

I am one writer extending what others have given me. The work continues at a pace I am not the one setting. What remains to be said, others will say in their own time and their own register. This essay closes not because the argument is complete but because it has done what one piece of writing can do.

References

Primary commentary engaged in this essay

Horgan, Jennifer. “We have set a new standard for what angry men can achieve. It’s terrifying.” Irish Examiner, 17 April 2026.

Donnelly, Chris. “Warning bells should be ringing in Sinn Féin after Bobby Sands statue vote.” The Irish News, 26 April 2026.

Mary Lou McDonald public interventions, 25–27 April 2026

McDonald, Mary Lou. Keynote address to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, Belfast, 25 April 2026. Coverage: ITV News, “Sinn Féin president says referendum can be achieved by 2030,” 26 April 2026.

McDonald, Mary Lou. Interview with Mark Carruthers, Sunday Politics, BBC Northern Ireland, 26 April 2026.

McDonald, Mary Lou. Interview with Gavan Reilly, Monday with Gavan Reilly, Virgin Media, 27 April 2026. Coverage: Press Association wire, syndicated across regional Irish press including Kildare Nationalist, Roscommon Herald, Longford Live, Carlow Nationalist, Waterford News & Star, Louth Live, Laois Live, and Leitrim Live, 28 April 2026.

Empirical and contextual sources

Hope and Courage Collective. Ireland in Focus 2025: Mind the Gap. Published 30 April 2026. Reported by Conneely, Ailbhe, “Far-right doesn’t have broad public support, but is ‘shaping the conversation’ — report,” RTÉ News, 30 April 2026.

McDermott, Stephen. “GoFundMe organisers behind fuel protest: domain registrations and online infrastructure.” The Journal, April 2026.

Young, Connla. “New IRA threatens to target homes of PSNI officers as it claims station attack.” The Irish News, 28 April 2026.

On the Sands statue and the SDLP resignation

“Political row over Bobby Sands statue erected without planning permission.” Irish Examiner, 24 April 2026.

“Deputy mayor quits SDLP over Bobby Sands statue vote dispute.” BBC News Northern Ireland, 26 April 2026.

Companion essays in this sequence

The Blockade Is the Message: A first note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published April 2026. Republished on The Pensive Quill.

The Money Is Not There: A second note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published April 2026. Republished on The Pensive Quill.

What Would Have to Be Built: A third and propositional note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published 20 April 2026.

⏩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.

The Tools Of Their Livelihoods

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Ninety Eight

 

Hate Theology @ 2

 

A Morning Thought @ 3171

Gary Robertson ⚽ It’s not for the want of trying.

Look, it’s three days til the opening of World Cup 2026 and whilst as a Scot I should be buzzing about the prospect of my national team playing three matches then coming home, it’s really difficult not to view this through a political lens.

Firstly, these thoughts are mine and in no way reflect the views of TPQ or anyone associated with it. FIFA is corrupt as fuck. That’s obvious to even the casual observer whilst Israel are busy committing genocide in Gaza -  Yes, Andy Burnham, it’s a genocide - both their men’s and women’s teams were accepted into their respective competitions.

Russia on the other hand attacks Ukraine - “uproar uproar” from Western governments - and is booted out of practically all sporting events. Israel of course are on the side of the “good terrorists” - USA, UK, NATO et al, and more importantly they aren’t bombing, murdering or maiming Caucasians. The whole thing is fucked and it’s “rules for thee not for me.” It absolutely wouldn’t surprise me if the US went on to win this competition just so the Arsehole in Chief can lift the trophy.
 
Then of course we have the domestic terrorists that are ICE. How many innocent people have died in these concentration camps whilst waiting to be deported? Do we just ignore the US record on human rights? Let’s not forget the two high profile murders of Trumps' personal army - writer and poet Renée Nicole Macklin Good and Intensive care nurse Alex Pretti - but there are others:

Victor Manuel Diaz
Silverio Villegas González
Ruben Ray Martinez
Geraldo Lunas Campos
 
And these are the names we know. The conditions in these ICE camps are some of the worst imaginable; and the stories from those who have been detained in these places of the treatment of detainees puts the IDF in the shade. Whilst we are sat enjoying the opening ceremony human beings are suffering in cages, stripped of dignity and human rights but we’re meant to just enjoy the fireworks? Again I have visions of this being mostly Trump and little to do with football - like a golden statue of the man rising through the floor before angels crown him and he rises high into the air to bless the crowds and the stadium. Then lowered, before the man himself is carried to the stage by numerous teenage girls on a bed of the finest satin and silk, then launching into a piece about how great it is to be him, how he’s always been a rugby fan and MAGA!
 
On top of this (seems trivial but worth mentioning I guess) the ridiculousness of ticket prices - Scotland v Brazil in the cheap seats will cost you over £1000. That’s before food, accommodation. Even against Haiti it’s £410. Add in Morocco at £480 and there’s £2,000 per person. It’s went way beyond the wallet of the average working man. It’s greed, corporate greed. Hotel room prices have doubled, trebled. Hell I read the other day that a particular German lager will set you back $18 a bottle!!
 
The USA under Trump isn’t fit to host the World Cup but then where is right now? The whole world seems to be on fire and the far right Nazis are taking over or at least trying too. Regimes like Trumps and to a lesser extent Boris Johnson’s have made racism, hate and suspicion acceptable again.
 
I want to enjoy the spectacle but I fear my conscience may have other ideas.
 
However you view the World Cup, If you choose to watch it or not that’s on you but the ugly head of Qatar hangs shamefully over this event also. For a brief moment we forgot as Messi finally lifted the trophy of the horrors faced by ordinary people, the slave labour and untold dead who built the stadiums, We rejoiced. Let’s not remain silent on the crimes of the Trump regime.

Til next time ….

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

USA Isn’t Fit To Host The World Cup

Anthony McIntyre ☠ Last night's savage attack in North Belfast in which a man was seriously injured has been described as an attempted beheading.


In this part of the world head chopping is viewed with visceral anathema which might go some way to explaining the revulsion that is said to be saturating Belfast at the moment. Speaking to a former republican prisoner this afternoon I learned that people from the nationalist community are furious, with some talking about joining protests this evening. He will not be turning up.

Not that he is opposed to standing with others in opposition to knife crime. He is not prepared to stand against colour and demonise people of a different skin tone from himself. He made the point that knife crime is nothing new in Belfast, reminding me that the nationalist community was terrorised for years in the 1970s by the Shankill Butchers, who came as close as is imaginable to beheading some of their victims.

On the back of that exchange, in a later conversation with a former member of Sinn Fein I caustically commented that it seemed Lenny Murphy was back in Belfast stalking the streets of North Belfast. He suggested an alternative knife man - the one who butchered Robert McCartney in a Markets bar twenty one years ago.

In recent years I have attended several protests against knife crime, only one of which involved head chopping. On that occasion the person responsible was reported to be a man by the name of Robbie Lawlor who was later murdered not far from the scene of last night's incident. The people who gathered on Drogheda's West Street appalled at the murder of Keane Mulready Woods genuinely opposed the killing. They were not on the street because they did not like the skin colour of the killer. 

The person arrested on suspicion of last night's attack is reported by the PSNI to be a Sudanese national. That has kickstarted a surge in anti-immigrant rhetoric from quarters which were much less vociferous when Ian Ogle was knifed to death in Belfast in 2019. Ogle's killers, because they identified as white and British, did not provoke the same rabid outcry that we are familiar with when the attacker is a different colour. The Irish News has reported that 'far-right activist Tommy Robinson and tech billionaire Elon Musk amplified calls for people to take to the streets in response to the incident.'

We can therefore expect the type of hatred that flowed onto the streets in Ballymena last year. We can also expect that amongst those who will block the roads to oppose colour rather than crime will be some who gathered at Scarva at the weekend in support of genocide in Gaza. Brutal murder is not something that taxes them too much. Rather than call for last night's attacker to be executed they could demand he be conscripted into the IDF - ready made, no training necessary.

Last night's attack was brutal and savage. There is no mitigation. Whatever about immigration policy, its rights and wrongs, people's concerns and fears, the policy is hardly any more responsible for last night's savagery than it is for the savagery that ended Ian Ogle's life. 

As the writer Louth For Ever commented on Bluesky:

fascists exploiting a crime are not protesters with concerns . . . They are the organised far right, and the failure to say so plainly is the failure that lets them launder street violence into legitimate grievance.

 

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Protesting Colour Not Crime

Barry Gilheany ✍ The images were appalling and should shame any police service worthy of the name. 

Stabbing victim Henry Novak from Southampton, and a student at the local university, lies prostrate on the ground in the last moments of his life desperately pleading that he has been stabbed and on five occasions the listener can hear the horrifying iconic words “I cannot breathe.” Instead of administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or placing Henry in the recovery position in readiness for the arrival of an ambulance, the body cam footage of Hampshire police officers shows them putting handcuffs on the dying 18-year-old and dismissing his entreaties about his stab wounds with the words “I don’t believe you, mate”. 

The reason why the last words that Henry Novak hears on this earth are him being read his rights is that his assailant, a 22-year-old Sikh male Vikram Digwa who had stabbed him with a ceremonial sword, had falsely accused him of a racial assault. Exactly why these Hampshire police officers decided to believe his lies and prioritise this phantom crime and relegate the obvious distress of his victim will be the subject of an IOPC (Independent Office for Police Complaints) inquiry. There are many, including the local Sikh community, who believe that it should also be the subject of a public inquiry. 

Last week, Digwa was convicted of Henry’s murder and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum tariff of 22 years. On the steps of the courthouse where the legal proceedings were played out, the Novak family made a dignified appeal for no retaliation for their son’s murder; a plea which was ignored and violated in the most despicable way by rioting in Southampton whipped up by the notorious far right thug figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson and by the call by Reform UK leader Nigel Farage for a response of “cold rage”. Not to be outdone, Rupert Lowe MP, leader of Restore UK a far-right breakaway from Reform, called for the execution of Digwa. Pouring flame on the fires from across the Atlantic was the attribution by Vice President JD Vance of the murder to Britain’s “civilisational decline” caused by mass immigration. The barrel of cess was reached (if that is possible) by US Defence Secretary Pete Hesgeth at the D-Day commemoration ceremonies at Normandy who sacrilegiously compared the “invasion” of Western Europe by migrants to that of the Nazis.

Since the allegation of the existence of two tier policing in Britain whereby ethnic minorities and Muslims are perceived to receive preferential treatment in the justice system than white people is at the centre of the rage around the murder of Henry Novak and of other epochs of civil disorder such as the wave of anti-migrant riots after the Southport killings in the summer of 2024, it is necessary to examine the institutional culture that has provided the rationale for the articulation of such grievances. 

At the outset, I must state that while two-tier narratives are ultimately easily disprovable, there have undoubtedly been examples of where misplaced concerns about legitimising racism has had catastrophic consequences. One example concerns the homicides of three people including a student couple, Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley Kumar, and Ian Coates in Nottingham on 13 June 2023 by paranoid schizophrenic Valdo Calocane. The public inquiry into the killings found that racial sensitivities about the overrepresentation of black males in institutionalised mental health care led to a reluctance to section Calocane who had consistently refused to comply with his medication and care supervision regime. Dr Jonathan Gibson – who saw Calocane four months before the killings – testified that he had been repeatedly told that psychiatry was “institutionally racist” … and stated that “I did not believe that it had no bearing on VC’s care.”[1] In the words of Emma Webber, Barnaby’s mother, the outcome was a “catastrophic collapse of responsibility” and an “undoubted miscarriage of justice”[2] The other is the continuing scar left by the legacy of the grooming gang scandals whereby local authority agencies and politicians displayed repeated unwillingness to call out and tackle the systematic (and racialised) sexual abuse of white working class girls and young women by gangs of South Asian predators in Northern towns and cities.

To return to the case of Henry Novak, possible explanations for the apparently disastrous decision making by the police on the night of his murder in December 2025 on his way back from a night out at his campus have been located in the hitherto little-known Police Anti-Racism Commitment which was produced as part of the police race action plan. It is a commitment document summarising what police chiefs will do to end racial bias. The part that has given rise to controversy states: “It does mean treating everyone ‘the same’ or being colour blind’ (racial equality).” According to one person familiar with police thinking, the phrasing means that in their interactions with a member of the public, they should take into account the historical experience of their particular group with policing and the context. So, in the current climate of antisemitic attacks, a Jew may want reassurance that hate will be considered as a motive for a claim of criminal damage. Or a black person may need reassurance that a stop and search is not racially motivated but a legitimate action. 

The policy came out of the 1999 Macpherson Report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence and was supposed to guide the recording and investigation of hate crimes. Whether it was meant to be operational policy looks highly doubtful, with Neil Basu, Britain’s former head of counterterrorism and formerly Britain’s most senior minority ethnic officer, asserting that while police are supposed to treat claims of a racial motivation seriously that does not mean that any claim of alleged hate crime has to be accepted unconditionally. He has said:

When a victim says something you take it seriously, but that is different to believing it. The policy is supposed to stop police officers ignoring victims without investigating.[3]

The National Police Chiefs’ Council has clarified that the document is not formal policy or training for officers. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has said that she believes the phrasing is “clumsy.” The policing minister Sarah Jones has said: 

I don’t think it forms the basis of any training or any police activity. We think the language is wrong, it gives the wrong impression. But I don’t think it affects how our training is done.[4].

For many on the right, the murder of Henry Nowak was the outcome of the breakdown of the basis of policing caused by the influence of wokeness, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policies and, most totemic of all, the Black Lives Movement post-the murder of George Floyd in the USA in 2020. While rejecting such lines of argument, Kenan Malik does trace out the history and the outworkings of imported Americanised diversity training in policing which has led to the “two tier” narratives. He explains how in the 1980s, in response to the inner-city riots of the time and the widespread anger at racist policing, the state co-opted antiracist activists into the system by providing funding and resources. Goals for equality (a word that became anachronistic at the high-water mark of Thatcherism and beyond) became redefined as a drive for (the rather more anodyne goal) diversity. “Racism awareness training” became established corporate lingo; something which as long ago as 1985, the radical antiracist Ambalavaner Sivanadan described as “catharsis for guilt-stricken whites” and a “degradation” of the antiracist struggle.[5] Such epithets would be equally applicable today to concepts such as “white fragility”.

With the decline of independent, grass roots antiracist movements, “antiracism” became associated with bureaucratised, Americanised forms of diversity training of which for Malik “The Police Anti-Racism Commitment” document is the Gold Standard with its showcasing of performative, corporate guilt-tripping phrases such as “it is not enough for us to not be racist.” and the transformation of the meaning of equality from signifying the right to be treated the same to denoting the right to be treated differently. The decay of antiracism into virtue signalling, box ticking bureaucracy warped the struggle for equality and instilled a reluctance to act over such derelictions of public duty by authorities such as the grooming gangs scandal, the Nottingham and Southport tragedies because of misplaced racial and cultural sensitivities.[6]

But the most toxic legacy of bureaucratised “anti-racism has been to reinforce identitarian politics on both left and right and to allow racism to be rebranded in the language of white identity[7] or ethnonationalist English identity. Or in the victim narrative of alt-Right politicians like Nigel Farage that “the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities."[8] No matter that on every available metric on law enforcement, black people are systematically disadvantaged... even adjusting the use of force to account for disparities in the number of arrests, black people were still 1.7 times more likely to have force used against them last year; a figure which probably understates the true disparity, since only 70% of use-of-force reports led to an arrest.. Black people remained more likely than any other ethnic group to be subjected to almost any form of force, from handcuffing to bites from police dogs, from firearms to Tasers, when compared with population or arrest figures. Police officers were also 3.8 times more likely to stop and search a black person than a white person in the year up to March 2025.[9] In the Hampshire Constabulary area, black people were four times as likely as white people to be stop and searched.

But as has been seen repeatedly in Western democracies in the last decade from Brexit and first election of Trump in 2016 through the electoral successes of far right parties and the second election of Trump in 2024; it has been the rocket fuel of almost primordial emotion propelled by the algorithms of social media and the shadow world of plutocrats with very deep pockets that has been the greatest resource of the identitarian right. Migration and the second-tier narratives will remain mobilising forces for it powered as they are by tsunamis of misinformation with the concomitant menace of social disorder and identity-based hatred. To counteract such pernicious narratives, a democratic left that is not suffused with identity pathologies needs to rework a universalist politics of solidarity for our divided and anatomised times. But it is a politics that must not sacrifice public trust in democratic institutions on the altar of corporate guilt.

References  

[1] Gaby Hinsliff, Now is the time for hard truths, not culture -war posturing. The Guardian: Opinion 5 June 2026 p.3

[2] BBC East Midlands News 8 June 2026

[3] The Guardian 4 June 2026 p.6

[4] Ibid

[5] Kenan Malik, In weaponising Henry Nowak’s death, the right has come full circle on identity politics. The Observer 7 June 2026 p.28

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid

[9] The Guardian 6 June 2026, p13

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter.

Tiers Of Justice And Rage 🪶The Fall Out From The Murder Of Henry Novak

Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.


Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Ninety Seven

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