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Séamus Fitzsimons ★ Writing In Medium. Recommended by John Crawley. 

Why Sinn Féin Is Betting the Republic on a Mechanism the British Have Already Told Us They Won’t Use

How a party that once fought to remove the British built its entire strategy on a clause the British wrote, the British control, and the British have now told us in writing they have no intention of ever using.

Sinn Féin tell people freedom is coming. Not through struggle, not through building anything, but through a box on a ballot paper that a British Secretary of State may, at their own discretion, one day decide to print.

They call it the border poll. They talk about it the way the old movement used to talk about the Republic itself, as though it were inevitable, as though history were doing the work for them. Nobody in that leadership will tell you the plain truth of the thing: this mechanism has never once delivered what they are promising. Not here, not anywhere, not ever. And the people holding the pen have already told us why.

Continue @ Medium.

The Poll That Will Never Come

Atheist Ireland ★ There is a Constitutional and legal right for any child to not attend religious instruction in state-funded schools. Respecting this right is a Constitutional condition of state aid to all schools.

21-July-2026

The Department of Education has no Guidelines on how this right is to be processed, and given practical application on the ground, in schools. Children are left sitting in the religion class and no other subject is offered.

The Department of Education, schools and the WRC treat this Constitutional right as an administrative issue. A Workplace Relations Commission case under the Equal Status Act is a good example of this.

A student, who was non-religious, did not want to participate in religion classes. She attended her only local publicly funded school. The parents had no alternative other than to send all of their children to this school.

Her parent exercised the Constitutional (Art44.2.4) and statutory right (S.30.2(e) Education Act 1998) for the child not to attend religious instruction.

The school refused to allow her to participate in alternative classes while religion classes were taking place. The parent complained to the WRC that, because of this, she was receiving an inferior education.

Astonishingly, the WRC accepted the school’s argument that providing alternative classes for students who opted out of religion might potentially cause chaos within the school.

It also suggested that offering another subject to a child who opted out of religion could potentially discriminate against students who attended religious classes, because those students would not receive the same extra tuition.

The WRC stated that:

However, what could potentially be considered discriminatory would be if the Respondent offered extra tuition in a different subject to a student who opted out of religion but refused to provide additional tuition to a student who chose to attend religious classes on the grounds of their belief.
This difference in treatment based on students’ choices regarding religious education could raise concerns of discrimination under the Equal Status Act as the Respondent’s representative correctly highlighted.
Specifically, if the Respondent allowed C to participate in additional history classes due to her decision not to study religion, then it could be argued that E has a valid claim of discrimination because she chose to study religion but was not given the same opportunity for extra history classes.

This reasoning illustrates the problem. The child who opts out is not seeking an advantage. She is seeking equal access to education during the school day, while exercising a right grounded in freedom of conscience and belief.

Instead, the child was left sitting in the religion class and no supervision was even provided outside the religion class. The WRC did not view this as discrimination.

Providing meaningful alternative instruction would remedy a disadvantage, not create an advantage.

This case shows the disrespect that the Department of Education, the WRC and schools have for the Constitutional rights of parents and their children. Our Constitutional rights are treated as an administrative issue, and when we complain it is viewed as seeking an advantage.

⏩ Follow Atheist Ireland on X @atheistie

WRC Treats Protecting Constitutional Rights In School As An Administrative Issue And As Seeking An Advantage

Dixie Elliot ✊This lot Andersonstown Regeneration Committee wouldn't know what a 'genuine Republican' is.


Definitely not the former enemies of the British Crown who now parade themselves before the eyes of the world as being amongst it's most loyal subjects.

Anyway, they refer to The Dark as a 'Boston College Tout'.
 
A Republican leader who led from the front. The reason they hate Brendan Hughes is because the Kenova Report has proven him right in what he told Adams after the quick killing of the tout Joe Fenton.
 
He told Adams that 'Belfast was rotten' and Adams accused him of being paranoid.
 
Fuck me was The Dark right!
 
These same pathetic clowns probably sit around a table with real touts given what we now know.
 
In 2003 Adams, McGuinness, Morrison and Gerry Kelly came out in defence of the tout, Scappaticci, who was killing touts with other touts like John Joe Magee. They claimed he was an innocent man.

What about the innocent volunteers, like Michael Kearney, who were branded as touts and murdered by Scappaticci and Magee?

How the hell did a former member of the British Special Boat Service, Magee, end up in the IRA's ISU? 

Then in 2016 Morrison said in an interview with the Irish News that Scappaticci was stood down under a cloud of suspicion in 1990.
 
So why were they defending him in 2003, claiming he was an innocent man?
 
According to the Kenova Report Scappaticci sent word to his handlers that the net was closing in on the tout Joe Fenton. Not only that, but twenty other sources told the intelligence services that Fenton was highly likely to be shot.
 
Those twenty had to have been in high enough positions to have known that.
 
No ordinary volunteer would have known it.
 
And then there's 'the great leader' Gerry Adams sending an email to the Garda Commissioner fingering three of his colleagues who had remained loyal to him for the killing of the screw Brian Stack.
 
Surely that was touting?

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

Who's Afraid Of The Dark?

Friendly Atheist ★ The televangelist claims an "inter-dimensional device" stole her eggs for decades. Don't bother looking for evidence.

Ask any author you know what it’s like to promote a new book, and you’ll inevitably hear stories about how tough it is to break through all the chaos of the news. You’ll try anything to get people to pay attention to your book during that short period of time around when it’s published, but unless you’re already famous or have great connections, it’s rough.

In the case of convicted criminal-turned-Christian evangelist Katie Souza, she has a brilliant marketing plan to convince the most ignorant religious people to buy her new book about how aliens are engaged in “spiritual warfare ministry”: Just tell everyone that aliens stole her eggs in order to create half-alien-half-human hybrids.

Just as the Bible foretold.

I was visited when I was a young girl and… aliens… alien beings implanted an inter-dimensional device in me that harvested my eggs over my lifetime. ‘Cause eggs—you get hundreds of thousands of eggs when… you’re born with hundreds of thousands of eggs if you’re a female. But they don’t mature until you ovulate . . . 

Christian Televangelist Katie Souza Claims Aliens Stole Her Eggs And Made A Hybrid Baby

Packy Carty ✒ Andy Burnham’s announcement that a border poll is “off the table” — while not surprising — further underscores the undemocratic nature of British rule in Ireland and the denial of Irish national self-determination by yet the latest British Prime Minister, whose government ironically has yet to be approved by a British general election.


 
However, this latest dismissal cannot hide the material reality that the artificially constructed Northern Irish state is on borrowed time.

Contrived to maintain a permanent unionist majority, the inversion of that majority remains the most subversive force the status quo has ever known.

Unionism, in its intransigent desperation, pushed all-in on Brexit in the hope that the rising tide could be stopped through the imposition of a hard border. Instead, the imposition of the sea border rocked Unionism to its core and revealed Whitehall's true hand. They set the North outside their sovereign referendum and, for the first time in British history, signed an international treaty conceding that Northern Ireland is not, apparently, as British as Finchley!

This decision, more than any other, exposes the British position as a long, slow disengagement — effectively conceding the Provisionals’ "declaration of intent to withdraw."
 
Burnham won't be the Prime Minister who makes that final call, and he knew it when he brushed aside the question. For while the new majority has already been born, it still has a decade to mature.

⏩ Packy Carty is an East Tyrone Socialist Republican. 

On Borrowed Time

Right Wing Watch 👀Written by Peter Montgomery.


“They Just Made Prayer Illegal” reads the dishonest subject line of emails send by Intercessors for America to its prayer warriors on Friday and Saturday. 

The Friday email urges people to sign a petition to “stop making prayer illegal.” The truth is that nobody “just made prayer illegal.” But IFA leaders don’t let truth get in the way of politically useful fearmongering. Here's what IFA President David Kubal wrote in his Friday email:

New Jersey just signed the ‘shield law bill’ that criminalizes prayer outside of abortion clinics statewide. This chilling eradication of the First Amendment for believers is now happening in New Jersey--it could be coming to a state near you.

The false claim about a law recently signed by New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill to protect access to health care facilities is a classic example of the religious right’s go-to strategy of stoking conservative Christian fear and anger with claims of religious persecution.

What the New Jersey law actually prohibits is threats, intimidation, and physical obstruction of access to clinics. IFA’s newsletter article published on Saturday is more nuanced than its action-alert email. The newsletter article is headlined “Did New Jersey Ban Pro-Life Prayer?” and quotes from an Epoch Times article 

Continue @ RWW.

Trump’s Prayer Warriors Lie About New Jersey Shield Law

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Seventy Seven

 

Pastords @ 59

 

A Morning Thought @ 3249

Pádraig Drummond ✊ There is something magnificently Irish about the National Party’s latest internal apocalypse.


According to Cllr. Patrick Quinlan, who had resigned as leader, was asked to reconsider and was voted back in. He tried to run the organisation, but eventually got voted off the very body that had voted him back in.

All perfectly normal, apparently!

This is not a political party so much as a particularly aggressive WhatsApp group with delusions of government.

One can almost picture the scene when Quinlan, having apparently made the outrageous mistake of believing he was running an actual political organisation, asked for access to the registered membership database.
 
There must have been a moment of terrible silence. Someone probably opened the spreadsheet. Another person checked the filing cabinet. A third man stared nervously at his phone. Then came the terrible discovery: there was no membership database. The membership, it seems, was simply there in the WhatsApp group.

The entire glorious nationalist vanguard of Ireland, gathered together beneath the familiar green “online” dots, waiting patiently for the next poll.

No membership records. No proper meetings. No minutes. No accessible accounts. Just a phone screen glowing in the darkness like the control panel of a badly managed submarine.

And this is the organisation that apparently intends to challenge the establishment and govern the country.

Imagine the future, Ireland, 2032.

A national emergency breaks out. The Taoiseach calls an emergency Cabinet meeting. The President addresses the nation. The National Party responds with a WhatsApp poll:
“Should we invade the Occupied Six Counties?

 Yes
 No
 Maybe after lunch.”

The whole thing would be hilarious if it weren't so painfully revealing.

Quinlan says he wanted access to the membership, party emails, finances, proper accounts, editing tools and the basic resources required to organise political activity.

In other words, he apparently walked into the National Party asking for the outrageous luxuries of administration, accountability and functioning infrastructure.

You can almost hear the screams. “Jesus Christ, Patrick, next you'll be asking where the minutes are.”

And then comes the magnificent revelation that decisions of the Ard Chomhairle are apparently made by poll in a messaging group.

No meeting. No minutes. No proper record. Just a digital thumbs-up from whoever happens to be holding the phone.

This is not how you run a political party. This is how teenagers decide where to go drinking.

And somewhere in this strange little nationalist bureaucracy, there must be a poor bastard desperately trying to explain that democracy requires more than asking fourteen people on WhatsApp whether they fancy something.

The great irony is that Quinlan says he wanted to build a serious, disciplined nationalist movement.
Fine.

But before you can build the Fourth Reich, the Fourth Republic, or even a moderately competent residents’ association, you generally need to know who the bloody members are.

You need names. You need records. You need accounts. You need meetings. You need minutes. You need some mechanism by which a person can establish what the hell was actually decided.

Instead, we apparently have a political movement where the membership database may effectively be a WhatsApp group and the supreme constitutional instrument is the poll function.

This is not the storming of the Bastille. It is the storming of the group chat.

And then there is the international conference business. Apparently, while the great nationalist machine was struggling to establish who its own members were, somebody had the brilliant idea of looking abroad.

Because nothing says “grassroots Irish political movement” quite like flying people into a hotel ballroom to discuss nationalism while the actual political organisation back home is apparently being held together with free software and mobile data.

Forget knocking doors in Blanchardstown. Forget leaflets. Forget talking to voters. Get the PowerPoint projector. Book the conference room. Find somebody from another country.

And for God's sake, make sure the Wi-Fi password is written down, because otherwise the Ard Chomhairle may be unable to conduct its next leadership election.

The whole spectacle has the surreal quality of a revolutionary movement accidentally being run by the people who organise the office Christmas party.

And then, after all this chaos, Quinlan says he was sent a statement approved by the very people who had voted him off the Ard Chomhairle, a statement thanking those same people for supporting his decision.

That is not merely political spin. That is performance art. It is the kind of thing that makes you wonder whether somewhere in the National Party headquarters there is a secret committee whose sole purpose is to make reality increasingly difficult to distinguish from parody.

You could not write this stuff. Well, apparently you could.

They did.

The National Party now appears to have achieved the impossible: a political organisation simultaneously obsessed with nationalism and apparently incapable of maintaining a functioning domestic administration.

A movement that dreams of national sovereignty but conducts its internal affairs through a group chat.

A party that wants to challenge the establishment but apparently cannot establish where its own membership records are.

A leadership structure apparently capable of removing people without minutes, records or even the courtesy of having them present.

It is magnificent. It is almost beautiful.

Somewhere in Ireland, a man is sitting alone with his phone, staring at a WhatsApp poll and wondering whether this is how National Party icon, Michael Collins would have done it.

And the answer, tragically, is no.

Collins had couriers.

These lads have typing indicators.

Collins had an underground network.

These lads have read receipts.

Collins had intelligence operations.

These lads are still trying to locate the membership database.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the great nationalist revolution of the twenty-first century: The Republic will be reborn, immediately after someone finds the fucking spreadsheet.

⏩Pádraig Drummond is an anti-racism activist.

The National Party 🪶 The Revolution Will Be Group-Chatted

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


⏩Geordie Morrow is a Belfast artist.

Days Like This

Anthony McIntyre ☠ Seyyid Ahmed Nahi and Ibrahim Souna are the type of names racists would scowl at on a good day.

On a bad day people bearing those names might find themselves subject to violent attack, even having their homes torched by some thug in Ku Klux Klan drag on their way back from sating their hatred beating up drag queens - a case of dregs assaulting drags - for entertaining families. 

Earlier this month while out trying to purchase a scooter in Galway, both Algerian nationals noticed smoke coming from a property a few metres away from the home of the scooter seller. On rushing to the scene they were confronted by smoke and screaming teenagers trapped in a third floor bathroom.

Neighbours were running out, and the fire alarm is on and we tried to get in from the front door, but there was plenty of smoke. You could see nothing, and we breathed in some smoke.

Unable to get into the house because of the suffocating smoke, they shouted to see if there was anyone inside before rushing to help the girls. One of the men tried to climb up to the bathroom but the drainpipe would not support his weight. While trying to keep the girls calm they once again tried to enter the house from the rear only to be repelled by the smoke billowing from the structure. 

At this point a quick thinking Polish national had arrived and he started to push a trampoline towards the house. They assisted him, desperately clearing any obstacles preventing them getting the trampoline tight to the wall. Then all three men encouraged the girls. by this stage gasping for air, to leap for life. The older of the siblings jumped first but damaged her legs in the process, explaining that she had lost sensation. The men then had to keep her in position until the emergency services arrived and could move her in a medically safe manner, while at the same time encouraging the the younger sister to jump from the blazing building which she did. She too was injured but not as bad as her older sister. Both survived the ordeal. 

Seyyid Ahmed Nahi explained:

There was no time for thinking, I see them the same way I see my three children. Like that Polish guy, he didn’t think, he just went and we ran, I think it’s about having humanity, if you see someone, try to help, it’s not nice to take the phone out. For me, we are human beings, if somebody can help save someone, that is the most important thing and in that moment, you don’t think because if you think too much, maybe you will back away, just try to help as much as you can and that is it.

This is what many immigrants bring to this country - a quality and integrity that prompts them to take risks to help save the lives of Irish children. When the thought get them out entered the heads of the three men it was to get the children of a different nationality out of the flames in contrast to the racist hate goondas for whom get them out means getting people of a different nationality out of Ireland. The three foreign nationals involved in the Galway rescue mission had one objective to save people from flames and not, like the racists, engulf them in flames. 

Having foreign guys like these three living next door is much more preferable than having an Irish racist as a neighbour. 

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

Get Them Out

The Fenian Way ✍ Muiris Ó Súilleabháin's insightful article,The Provo Paradox, opens up an accessible path of clarity that can rely on straightforward observations to assess events both pre and post ceasefires in the mid-nineties and beyond. 

In the midst of a revisionist onslaught such a path is an indispensable guide to pragmatic engagement.

Analysis at this remove, if to be valid, must first recognise that its primary function is to educate, and not form some semblance of identity comfort to anyone attempting to recreate the past in the here and now.

Nor should it be guided to a given end point, vindicating or repudiating any stances taken within republicanism at the time because to the British, ostensibly, all republican points of view are now dead. What’s done is done, which is all the more remarkable given the loud logic of history imploring us that it should have been done a different way.

The two principle points I would like to address in the article concerns the circumstances surrounding the ceasefires and the politics it conferred on the Six Counties and Provisional Sinn Féin, however strenuously denied or parried by that grouping.

I completely agree with Muiris that anybody who joined the Republican Movement did so with a basic understanding that their involvement was to secure fundamental change to the status quo and that that change had to surpass any previous arrangements put forward as settlements.

There were/are many different view points as to what a ‘United Ireland’ should look like; a Marxist classless society, comely maidens at the crossroads, broad indifference once the Irish people were free to choose. The common denominator however was, and remains, sovereignty, the securing of which was a prerequisite to allow any of the above, or other, to be pursued.

When the first ceasefire was called the joyous cavalcade which streamed down the Falls Road was a clear expression of an expectation that the ceasefire secured terms that were worthy of the struggle which preceded it. Forearmed with the historical experiences of Collins and Sunningdale, and emboldened with the sacrifices of struggle, that expectation was wholly justified.

Muiris argues that the ceasefires were necessary, that the abandonment of armed struggle was right. The true paradox however is that the terms upon which the former was called guaranteed the defeat, not the abandonment, of the latter because the ceasefire was called on British terms.

Robert Barton, one of the plenipotentiaries during the Treaty Negotiations in 1922 observed on the outcome; ‘Once we conceded we were not representatives of the Irish Republic we were on the road to disaster.’ In other words, once they allowed the British to determine their status within the negotiations they did, by default, allow them to determine the parameters of any settlement reached.

And this is precisely what the Provisional leadership allowed to happen in the negotiations which led to Good Friday. Gone was the position of the IRA representing the defence and demand for national sovereignty, replaced by Provisional Sinn Féin demands based on their electoral mandate in the Six Counties.

In other words, the British were dealing with a regional political party who had political gripes within part of the United Kingdom and that’s precisely how they were dealt with. Thus were the parameters of the Good Friday Agreement secured.

And because the issue of sovereignty was not a term for securing the ceasefire it could never be broken on that issue either. The PIRA, now reduced to the role of a militia, truly became what the British, unionists, constitutional nationalists and Irish governments always referred to them as, the armed wing of Provisional Sinn Féin.

The irony of the politics which Provisional Sinn Féin subsequently adopted for electoral gain is cogently mapped out in the article. Muiris makes the following (and widely accepted) observation:

The Provisionals did not defeat constitutional nationalism by demonstrating that it was wrong. They replaced constitutional nationalism and then, gradually, became it.

But they didn’t, they became something much worse. To its credit constitutional nationalism recognised that the issue of sovereignty had to be addressed in any credible settlement with the British. In the New Ireland Forum Report in 1984 three proposals were put forward; a Unitary State, a Confederation/Federal State or Joint Authority.

These were dismissed by Margaret Thatcher in her infamous Out, Out, Out declaration because each option represented a derogation of British sovereignty over the Six Counties. For Thatcher sovereignty was non-negotiable. For their part Provisional Sinn Féin equally rejected the reports proposals because they fell short of a clear call for a complete British withdrawal from Ireland.

The grievous irony is that Provisional Sinn Féin adopted Thatcher’s position in subsequent negotiations because the entry fee into those negotiations was not simply the calling of a ceasefire but a ceasefire on terms that accepted that the issue of sovereignty continued to be non-negotiable.

The obvious follow on question is: where did this place the issue of sovereignty within the so called pan nationalist front, the new alternative strategy? Having rejected the findings of the New Ireland Forum how could Provisional Sinn Féin, credibly, return to constitutional nationalism on the sovereignty question?

The equally obvious answer is in the observable facts of the agreement reached. Articles 2 & 3 gone. Stand Alone All Ireland Bodies rejected. A Triple Lock guaranteeing a Unionist Veto agreed to. British Sovereign Authority explicitly recognised in the Good Friday Agreement.

Here now we see the correlation between the terms upon which the IRA ceasefire was based and the counter republican politics which it inevitably spawned. Constitutional nationalism was now off the sovereignty hook. Constitutional imperatives were replaced with fuzzy aspirations. And as our host observed in a commentary on the original article politics was now centred on the manner of British occupation and not the fact of it.

The only obligation on any party to the talks initiated by the ceasefire was to ensure that a prolonged ceasefire would have a withering effect on any leverage that resumption of armed struggle could yield (by anyone). And the net effect of that strategy, once armed struggle as a tactic was neutralised, was the retrospective criminalisation of armed struggle itself. The differences between Sunningdale and Good Friday did not necessitate the taking of one human life to resolve. Paradox and irony combined as one.

Which leads us to addressing the shameful but predictable revisionism from Declan Kearney. Muiris correctly identifies the glaring contradiction in Kearney’s call for a second pan nationalist front as a tacit admission that the first such entity failed to remotely deliver what republicans were promised it would achieve.

But the key point that he observes is that the pan nationalist front did not fail constitutional nationalism nor British strategic interests in Ireland (all of it). Not one single republican demand was secured. Howling in an echo chamber for a border poll only serves to distract internal chin stroking as to the precise nature of the current strategy to move Provisional Sinn Féin forward: Stormont working? Stormont not working? Stormont not existing? Are they flying or falling with style?

Oddly I think this current revisionist thrust is best addressed by the revisionism of Martin McGuinness; “I would gladly give my life for peace.” The paradigm shift.

Gerry Adams once told us that the Good Friday Agreement was not a republican document, the obvious observable conclusion to be drawn is: that’s because republicans didn’t negotiate it! Revisionists abhor simplicity and clarity.

I agree with the conclusion that Muiris reaches:

The less speculative reality may simply be that, after nearly three decades with their snouts in the Stormont trough, the patronage, salaries, status and political infrastructure that come with government have become indispensable to the party itself!

Probably their only remaining All Ireland conviction!

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

Pernicious Paradox & Perfidious Irony

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