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Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on  3-September-2026.

The gate is shut from outside and the door is held from inside. Everything else is commentary, including this.

Photo by Paul Harris on Unsplash


The Gate and the Door: 2 Jaws

On Thursday 27th August, five weeks after taking office, Andy Burnham visited Belfast for the first time as Prime Minister. Before he came, Michelle O’Neill told journalists what she intended to prioritise. Not the constitutional issue. The budget. She said they needed Burnham to secure a fair deal that would support public services. Nurses, she noted, were already speaking about strike action. They had been starved of funding for years. If he wanted to leave any mark, he could do it by altering the funding model. What existed now was not sufficient. She would put that to him.

He then arrived and dismissed the prospect of a border poll. When asked whether he would be the Prime Minister to trigger one, he said he was there to listen and work with others, but certain matters would not be open for discussion, and that was one of them. According to him, referendums make people turn inward and create divisions that take years to mend, while politicians ought to focus on the cost of living and on reaching agreement on a budget. He repeated the same wording to three different outlets that day, something Claire Hanna observed and interpreted as the obvious conclusion suggested: this was no accidental remark. It had been scripted beforehand.

O’Neill described the comments as anti-democratic, said that night that she had challenged him directly, and insisted that the right to a referendum was protected by the Good Friday Agreement and had to be respected. On that point, she is correct. A few days afterward, at a hunger strike commemoration in Ballina, she went further, saying that a unity referendum is not a favour to be bestowed on the people of Ireland by any English politician, and she made clear that Sinn Féin would not abandon Stormont, because leaving would simply hand the departments to British ministers.

Lay the sequence out and its structure becomes plain. For the meeting, the First Minister said the main issue was money. The Prime Minister came with a prepared refusal on the constitutional question, declined to offer money as well, and went back off home to England. The First Minister then asserted an actual right, and reaffirmed that she would not use the one lever available to her, which is also true. She secured neither the settlement nor the referendum, and she surrendered nothing and obtained nothing. By Wednesday, the position was unchanged.

The gate is locked from the outside. The door is being held from within. Between those two refusals lies the whole northern nationalist position, which over the past month has produced some of the sharpest political analysis written on this island in years, and not a single proposal that would require anything of the people making it.

That is the bind. That is the vice. Sinn Féin is not the only instance of it, though it is the main one. It governs the commentariat, the left, and the people who write essays about it, myself included.

The Free Thing and the Costly Thing

I have argued previously that clarity in Irish politics follows the trail of cost. Politicians become precise when precision is free and drift into vagueness as the price increases. You can locate a person within a structure by watching where their language starts to lose its nouns.

Extend that from an individual to a position and you get the subject of this essay.

Diagnosis costs nothing. A columnist pays nothing to write that Stormont cannot function. A party chair pays nothing to catalogue the DUP’s obstruction. A socialist pays nothing to note that the Irish left has failed to come together. The analysis is strong because analysis is cheap, the demand for it is vast, and nobody producing it has to surrender anything they already possess.

Remedy is another matter. Any course of action that would genuinely alter the position requires someone to pay: to give up an option, to cement an adversary, to state a policy that fractures their own coalition, to pass a project they control to people they do not. As a result, predictably, the remedies never arrive. In their place comes the ask: a request that someone else behave differently. The other side should stop destroying things. The British government should notice. The left should take the lead. The Secretary of State should sort it out.

An ask is not a remedy. It is diagnosis with a profession or vocation attached.

There is also a smaller version of the same pattern, worth noting because it shows how far the free thing can spread. When Stormont collapsed in 2017, nationalist Ireland came to believe that the alternative to devolution was not direct rule but some version of joint authority between London and Dublin. It proved seductive enough that a third of Sinn Féin voters told pollsters that it was their preferred constitutional outcome. It cost nothing to believe it. No negotiation, no concession, no price was required, which is exactly why it spread.

But it was never actually available, and in January 2024 the British government said so in writing. The command paper that secured the DUP’s return to Stormont, Safeguarding the Union, says the Agreement allows only two constitutional possibilities, continued membership of the United Kingdom or a united Ireland, and that the British government does not regard any other model, including any form of joint authority between the United Kingdom and Ireland, as compatible with the Agreement. The same paper says that a prosperous Northern Ireland with stable devolved government is the surest way to persuade the majority that its best future lies within the Union, and it commits the government to making the case for the Union and to creating a foundation to promote it.

That is worth dwelling on. The institutions Sinn Féin now leads were restored on terms in which the British government committed itself, in a paper laid before Parliament, to campaigning against the party’s founding goal and to rejecting the intermediate arrangement that much of its base thought was imminent. All of this is public. It has been public for two years.

Two Indictments and Two Asks

Consider the two most substantial interventions from the party-and-commentariat world over the past month, each made by a serious figure and each presented here in its full force.

Declan Kearney, Sinn Féin’s national chairperson, issued a detailed indictment of the DUP: arrogance, sectarianism, economic illiteracy, obstruction of the Good Jobs Bill, refusal of the Irish language strategy, the entire record. He then called for a new initiative on Irish unity, a single forum where all strands of what he called Irish national democratic opinion would gather, deliberate, agree and speak together. The indictment is sound. The ask is that the DUP change its direction, and that nationalism assemble itself. Neither request costs Sinn Féin anything. The forum, in particular, asks nationalism to do what it finds easiest: speak to itself.

Brian Feeney, writing in the Irish News, said the new Secretary of State is a decent man being fed rubbish by his officials, that the budget arithmetic is impossible and cannot be made workable, that unionism has shifted sharply rightward and elevated culture wars, and that partition is and always has been the problem here. Most of that is defensible, and much of it is plainly true. The final operative sentence of the column is: he should then tell Burnham.

Feeney is the most revealing example, and I want to treat him fairly, because he got farther than anyone. Weeks earlier he had suggested something genuinely costly: that after next year’s election Sinn Féin should renew its mandate and then refuse to form an executive until the British government published the criteria for calling a referendum. That is a real remedy. It has a price, identifies who pays it, and does not rely on anyone else’s goodwill. Yet within a few weeks the same writer had returned to hoping the proconsul would sort it out and say so upstairs. That is not a lapse of nerve on his part. It is gravity. When you let go, the cost-free ask is where the argument settles.

Two of the sharpest people working in this area, in one month, and between them not one proposal that would cost their own side anything.

I should be careful here, though, because there is a version of this that is too tidy, and the past week has produced its clearest exception.

This argument does sometimes name prices. Writing at the end of August, Siobhán Fenton proposed one and then did what almost nobody does with a proposal: she worked out who would have to bear it. Her proposal is the Feeney-boycott: after the May 2027 election, the parties should refuse to form an executive until the British government publishes the criteria for calling a referendum, with Sinn Féin able to say it has upheld its side of the Agreement and it is now Britain’s turn to uphold its own. She then constructs the coalition. The SDLP, because its authorship of the Agreement makes this the one boycott it might tolerate. Alliance, awkwardly positioned because Naomi Long has already called for the criteria to be published and a boycott seeking only clarity is difficult to portray as tribal. The smaller parties, if they return members. And then, unprompted, she argues against herself: that it may be too confrontational, that it could alienate the centre ground that will decide the referendum, and, most importantly, that publication might weaken the pro-unity case in the short term, because whatever the threshold turns out to be it is almost certainly not met yet, and saying that openly would stall the momentum the campaign currently has.

That final point is a cost voluntarily assigned to her own side, and it is the rarest thing in the whole discussion.

Still, note where she stands. Fenton is a journalist. She once worked for the party and no longer does. Feeney, who proposed the same boycott some weeks earlier and had already returned to appeals within another few weeks, is a columnist. Neither of them will be in a room in May 2027 deciding whether to form an executive. However well designed the proposal is, the price would still be paid by somebody else’s leadership.

That is the more truthful version of the finding. The issue is not that nobody can imagine a cost. It is that the ability to name one is inversely related to the chance of having to bear it. The farther you are from the thing that must be surrendered, the more clearly you can see that it ought to be. That describes a critic, and I will return to that.

What the Fleadh Actually Showed

The strongest objection to everything I am arguing was published on The Pensive Quill a week ago by Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, and it should be answered rather than folded away.

His argument is about the Fleadh in Belfast, which nationalist Ireland has spent August reading as evidence that the north has changed beyond recognition. It did change, and the celebration was real. But, he points out, the Fleadh took place in the United Kingdom. Irish identity can now flourish in Belfast much as Scottish and Welsh identity flourish within the same state. Culture is not sovereignty. And the uncomfortable possibility is that the Good Friday Agreement, rather than opening a path out of the Union, may have made the Union much better at accommodating Irishness.

I think he is right, and I think the reason is the mechanism of this essay. The Union grants what is free and withholds what is costly. Irish-language signage, a fleadh in the city centre, an Irish name on a public building: none of these reduce British sovereignty, and a confident state can afford them. Sovereignty itself is the expensive item, and it is not available at any price. So cultural flourishing is not evidence of constitutional movement. It may be the opposite: the sign of a settlement that has learned precisely how much it can concede without conceding anything.

That should disturb anyone who took the Fleadh as a milestone. It certainly disturbs the argument I made two weeks ago.

But it is only half the story, and the other half matters more, because it is the only thing in this whole month that looks like a price being paid rather than merely named.

Read the Fleadh as Ó Súilleabháin does and it is a story about the British state, about what a confident Union can afford to permit. Read it the other way and it is a story about what nationalist Ireland is prepared to offer, in practice, on a street, over eight days, to people who do not share its constitutional goal and will not. Protestants were central to organising it. The deputy First Minister of a unionist party spoke at the opening and was heard. A loyalist flute band played at City Hall. A former UDA man, Davy Adams, wrote afterward in the Irish News that he had finally seen the New Ireland he had spent years failing to describe, and what he described was not a place where his tradition was merely tolerated but one where nobody much cared which foot he kicked with.

That is not a cultural festival being granted by a state. That is a guarantee being rehearsed by a community, and it was rehearsed without a British minister’s permission and at nobody’s invitation but its own.

The distinction matters because it separates accommodation from inclusion, and the whole argument of this essay turns on that. Accommodation is offered from outside by a power that keeps what it values. Inclusion is done from within, at cost, by people who could have chosen otherwise. The first is what the Union extends to Irishness. The second is what happened in Belfast in August, and it is the one thing that answers Ó Súilleabháin’s objection rather than simply absorbing it. If the concern is that the Union has become better at holding Irish identity, the answer is not to deny it. It is that Irish nationalism, for eight days, showed it can hold British identity too, and did so publicly, and nothing collapsed.

None of that is minor, and none of it is new. It is the oldest proposition in the tradition. Tone’s entire formulation was to replace the common name of Irishman for the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, which is not a plea for tolerance but an argument that the categories should stop being the issue. McCracken was a Presbyterian who died at the end of a rope for a republic he understood in exactly those terms. The reason South Africa works as a comparison is the same reason: the Congress tradition was non-racial from within its own ranks, so the voice that eventually spoke already contained the people it would need to reassure. That is not a concession to unionism added to republicanism from the outside. It is republicanism’s founding sentence, and the Fleadh was eight days of it in action.

The problem, and it is the problem with everything in this essay, is that eight days is not a settlement. What was shown on the street has not been written into a single document, offered at a single table, or costed in a single prospectus. It remains an instinct rather than a guarantee, and instincts are free.

The Asymmetry

It troubles the argument in a second way, which I did not recognise until Anthony McIntyre stated it plainly in response to that essay.

As he observed, unionism is divided at party level but remarkably unified on the constitutional question. Whatever else separates it, it holds together on the Union. Nationalism is close to the opposite: unified at party level, where Sinn Féin has dominated, and much more uncertain constitutionally. Nationalists are more willing to accept rule from London than unionists would ever be to accept rule from Dublin.

If that is correct, and I think it is, then something I wrote two weeks ago needs revision. I had argued that the one truly encouraging figure in northern polling was rising unionist consent, the increasing willingness among unionists to accept a referendum result they would lose. I still think that trend is real and that it is the variable that matters. But willingness to hold a vote is not the same as willingness to lose one, and a bloc that fractures over flags and parades while remaining firm on sovereignty is a bloc whose consent shifts within a much narrower range than I allowed. I moved too quickly. The mechanism is right, but the room for it is smaller than I said.

A New Ireland For Whom

Here is where the same mechanism creates the silence that should concern republicans most, and I am not the first to say it this month. Ó Súilleabháin said it more forcefully than I will, and Colin Gannon has been making a version of the point in Jacobin for years.

Ask what a united Ireland would actually be, and the discussion immediately thins. Who owns its wealth. Who can afford its housing. What kind of health service it would run. How, if at all, it would redistribute resources. What prevents a thirty-two-county state from reproducing the inequalities already present on both sides of the border. These are not questions for the day after unity. They determine whether unity offers anything worth voting for.

They remain unanswered for the same reason everything else here remains unanswered. To specify a cost. The moment you say what kind of Ireland you want, you split the coalition assembled to want an Ireland at all, and a movement that has spent thirty years building that coalition is not going to risk it for the sake of a policy platform. So working-class communities are asked whether they want a new state before being told what it would do for them, and the constitutional question is placed first while its social content is postponed without limit.

The oldest expression of this came from within, long before the current arguments. Brendan Hughes, speaking to Fourthwrite in 2000, said the facade had been cleaned but the bone structure was the same. He was talking about the north. He might just as well have been describing the offer.

The One Who Paid

Two weeks ago I wrote about the one movement that reached this goal and kept it, and I will not repeat the case, only the part that matters here. What made the South African transition succeed was not analysis. Everyone had analysis. What made it work was that Joe Slovo, the person with the most to lose by saying it, named a price his own side would pay and argued for it publicly, in the movement’s own journal, to the people who would bear it: guaranteed employment for the civil service of the state he had fought, a government of national unity with posts divided by share of the vote, and a front that dissolved itself into a table where the other side could say no. He was explicit that a leadership which hid the cost from its base would be accused of selling out, so he did not hide it.

Every one of those was expensive, and that is the whole point. They were not requests aimed at the National Party. They were prices the ANC paid, on its own, in advance, to make the other side’s consent possible. Nothing in current Irish nationalism resembles that, and the absence is not accidental.

What Would Have To Be Given

So, at the risk of doing the very thing I have spent seven sections describing, here is what a serious proposal would need to include. Not what Sinn Féin should do. What anyone serious would have to accept.

First, the recognition that this requires two strategies, not one, which is Fenton’s point and the most useful sentence written on this subject this month. Winning a referendum and getting one called are different problems that require different campaigns, and the movement has only ever built the first. What follows bears on both, but the second is the one that has never been attempted at all.

Preparation before the vote, not agitation for it, which means the costed prospectus nobody wants to write because writing it closes off arguments people would rather keep open.

Guarantees to unionism that unionism helps author, not guarantees presented to unionism by the party that opposed it. That means a table where the other side can say no, which is a real transfer of control and not a forum where one tradition speaks with one voice.

A movement broader than any single party or tendency, which means the people who presently own the unity question would have to give it away, and it is their most valuable asset.

And the social content set out in advance, which means telling people what sort of Ireland before asking them to vote for one, at the price of the coalition that vagueness protects.

Each of those costs somebody something. That is how you know they are remedies rather than asks. It is also exactly why none of them is on the table.

Including This

Which leads me to the part of this essay I would rather not write.

I have spent the spring & summer naming things. The party is constrained by the institutions it leads. The left will not shut the door that would create a bloc. The chairman’s forum is a front for one tradition. The commentariat produces indictments and asks. All of that, I think, is true, and some of it took real work to establish.

None of it cost me anything.

Naming is what this position rewards, and I have been collecting the reward. I have not proposed a single thing that would require the tradition I write from to surrender anything and truly mean it. I have described, with considerable precision, the price others would have to pay and paid none of it myself, and the essays have been better received the more accurately I have described it. The market for accurate diagnosis is excellent, and I am in it.

So the final movement is neither a demand nor a prophecy. It is an admission that the mechanism I have spent seven movements dissecting has its own author inside it, and that a body of work which only ever names things is not a way out of the bind. It is one of the more eloquent things happening within it.

And yet the essay’s own evidence contains its exception, and I have spent eight movements walking past it.

In August, over eight days, the costly act was carried out. It was neither merely suggested, nor priced, nor handed off to a commission for later. It was completed on a street by people with no office to defend and nothing personal to profit from the act. Inclusion came from inside instead of being an accommodation bestowed from outside, offered to a tradition under no duty to accept it, and nothing collapsed. Whatever remains uncertain, that no longer belongs to the realm of theory. It occurred in full view, and thousands witnessed it.

The gap between that and a settlement is genuine, and I have been straightforward about that: eight days do not make a document, and instincts cost nothing. Yet note how much narrower that gap is than the one outlined elsewhere in this essay. It does not call for Burnham to relocate, or for the Treasury to soften, or for a party to summon courage that its incentives discourage. What it does require is that someone put into writing what Belfast has already shown, and then place it on a table where the other side is free to refuse. The difficult part is the demonstration, and the demonstration has already taken place.

The gate is shut from outside, and Burnham has just shut it again. The door is held from inside, and O’Neill has just explained why she is holding it. Everything else, for now, including this, is commentary.

Further Reading

Everything below is worth your time, and most of it is better than the summary I have given it here. Read them in whatever order suits you, though the first two are what set this month’s argument going.

Declan Kearney, “Time for a new initiative on Irish unity”, An Phoblacht, 14th August 2026. The fullest statement of Sinn Féin’s current unity strategy, and the source of the proposal for a single forum of all strands of Irish national democratic opinion. Whatever you make of it, it is the party arguing its own case at length rather than through a press release.

Brian Feeney, Irish News, August 2026. Two columns worth reading together. The first proposes that Sinn Féin renew its mandate next May and then decline to form an executive until the British government publishes the criteria for calling a referendum. The second, “In case the proconsul hasn’t worked it out yet, the problem here is partition”, argues that the difficulty is partition and that the Secretary of State ought to say so to the Prime Minister. The distance between them is the subject of this essay. Feeney has been writing in that paper for thirty years and was an SDLP councillor before that, which is worth knowing when you read him on Sinn Féin.

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, “The Provo Paradox”, The Pensive Quill, August 2026. The strongest challenge to my own argument, written from inside the tradition by a man who gave it twenty years. His reading of the Fleadh is the part I have had to think hardest about, and his question about what kind of Ireland is being offered, and to whom, is one nobody has answered.

Siobhán Fenton, “Should nationalists boycott Stormont until the British government publishes the criteria for a border poll?”, 30th August 2026. The most practically useful piece written on this in a long time, because it works out who would actually have to carry the proposal and then argues honestly against its own case. Her point that winning a referendum and getting one called are two different campaigns is the one I keep returning to.

Colin Gannon, “Ireland’s Left Should Lead the Campaign for Irish Unity”, Jacobin, August 2026. Makes the case that a unity campaign built on material change in both jurisdictions could break the deadlock. Behind a free registration wall, which is a nuisance, but he has been asking the question about the social content of a new Ireland for years and deserves the credit for getting there early.

Safeguarding the Union, CP 1021, presented to Parliament January 2024. The command paper that bought the DUP’s return to Stormont. Read paragraph 64, which rules out joint authority as inconsistent with the Agreement, and paragraph 6, which states that making devolution work is the surest way to persuade people their future lies within the Union. It is a short read and it is more candid than anything said out loud since.

The ARINS / Irish Times North and South Survey. The most careful polling on constitutional attitudes on this island, and the source of most of the numbers people quote at each other without having looked at them. The material on unionist attitudes to holding a referendum, as distinct from winning one, is the part worth your attention.

Joe Slovo, “Negotiations: What room for compromise?”, The African Communist No.130, Third Quarter 1992. Available in full through the O’Malley archive at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The document that made the South African settlement possible, written by the man with the most to lose by writing it. It is short, it is unsentimental, and it is the clearest example I know of a leadership telling its own side what a settlement would cost before asking them to accept one.

⏩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 Vice 🪶 Everyone Can Name The Problem 🪶 Nobody Will Pay For The Answer

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

 

A Morning Thought @ 3259

Gary Robertson ⚽ Michel Nostradamus I am not.

His quatrains predicted events such as the rise of the moustachioed Austrian and the nuclear bomb.

Me, on the other hand couldn’t, predict night following day as evidenced by the hole in my bank account every (most) Mondays after a weekend “investing” on football matches.
 
It’s a mug's game, those of us who like to think we can beat the bookmaker are generally left licking our wounds.
 
Having been on both sides, both poacher and gamekeeper, having worked for a large high street bookmaker I’ve seen the damage gambling can do to people, to families. And while I laugh at my own failures I also recognise that for some it can be a serious problem and for those people I beg you reach out and ask for help. There are numerous online tools available, bookmakers themselves have a responsibility to help and a word with them can often be the first stage to recovery. For those in that position I ask you to reach out, there’s no shame in asking for help.
 
You may be wondering what all this has to do with Scottish football so let me explain. The leagues themselves are sponsored by betting giant William Hill, numerous clubs including Celtic have gambling companies as shirt sponsors and advertising hoardings display the names of bookmakers, casinos and the like. It’s hard to escape from and all designed to encourage us to part with cash.
 
Now I’m not going to get all preachy about this, I mean sponsorship is a big part of the game these days and without it many clubs wouldn’t survive but there must be alternatives surely.
 
If clubs are to be sponsored by bookmakers I’d like to see more mention of groups such as GamCare GambleAware and the RCA trust also. Clubs should be forced to give greater exposure to these charities rather than a small hoarding tucked away in the corner of the pitch.
 
Many of us like a flutter, myself included, but for some it becomes less about fun and more about need. It becomes addictive and then it becomes a problem.
 
Clubs have a responsibility to their fans and rather than a quickly garbled message at the end of a tv advert the realities of gambling addiction should be shown.
 
Ireland has some of the most powerful anti drink driving advertising I have ever seen and I’d like to see problem gambling addressed similarly.
 
Sorry to be a bummer, when I try to make my columns light hearted but it’s something I wanted to talk about and if it helps just one person then I think we can all agree that it’s worth it right?

So onto the football . . .  after all, that’s why you’re here.
 
Wednesday saw almost a full Premier League card, only the Edinburgh derby held off til Thursday, no doubt a decision made by the broadcasters but I guess he who pays the piper, anyway . . . 

Celtic (who are only just regaining my trust after the CL exit) faced an Aberdeen side in transition.

Bearing in mind Aberdeen lost by a solitary goal to McInnes' Rangers I expected this game to be tighter than it was. So when Duran's shot hit the underside of the bar and landed into the back of the net on 14 mins the signs looked ominous for the Dons and so it proved to be. With goals from Nygren on 34 mins and Yang in the first minute of first half stoppage time it was a comfortable enough night in a rain sodden Glasgow for the hoops. Aberdeen did look threatening at times but the night belonged to the Celts. 

Elsewhere, St Mirren continued their four from four record with a 1-0 victory away to Kilmarnock. Rangers look like they might finally be getting their act together with a 2-1 victory away at Falkirk with both goals coming from the boot of Captain and Scotland international Shankland. Motherwell landed their first home victory of the season with a 3-0 hammering of Jim Goodwin's Dundee United. The man himself still recovering at home and we wish him a speedy recovery. United themselves played the majority of the game with ten men after Agyei saw red in the 14th min. Even so they look like a team lacking confidence and certainly played like one. Fans of the Arabs must be having sleepless nights. Elsewhere St Johnstone continued to show they belong in the SPL with a 1-1 draw against Dundee.
 
So to Edinburgh and the Derby.
 
These games are almost usually impossible to predict yet somehow this one seemed entirely predictable. Hearts racing into a 2-0 lead by halftime, the game looking all but over by the time the second half began. A glimmer of light for the home fans in 51 minutes from Mayor was quickly extinguished when Hibs Iredale's reckless challenge saw him receive a second yellow in the 62nd minute, and it was left to former St Johnstone striker Joshua McPake to seal the victory for Hearts with a lovely solo effort beating three men before his deflected shot eluded Hibs Keeper Sallinger and sent the Jambos back across the city with Cheshire cat grins.
 
Where Thursday was a great advert for Scottish football Saturday afternoon at least was anything but. Aberdeen and Kilmarnock managing to both avoid scoring and whilst I didn’t watch this I suspect the biggest cheer came when the ref blew the final whistle and everyone could go home. It’s a fair hike from the granite city to the home of pie, a 336 mile round trip or there abouts, no this wasn’t sexy football, total football - it was instead two poor teams both desperately seeking a lift neither finding that killer spark. I endured the highlights (I use that term in its broadest sense) so you don’t need too. The sacrifices I make for TPQ 🙄. Thankfully even the SPFL chaps didn’t drag this one out so it wasn’t a tough four and a half mins. It was at least a beautiful early autumn day for it with the sun shining for most of the match.
 
Rangers' revival continued with a goal gifted to them by Motherwell keeper Paulsen in the 12th minute whose footwork to evade the onrushing Naderi handed the ball to the big German, and he slashed the ball into an empty net. In fairness Paulsen did redeem himself though with some fine saves, and Motherwell did have their chances to equalise but this was Rangers revenge for the 3-2 defeat suffered last season at the hands of the Steelmen.
 
Worrying times though for the Ibrox faithful as captain and top scorer Shankland limped off early (to be replaced by Naderi) with what the club are calling a “significant injury”. With two Glasgow derbies ahead in the next 2 weeks this isn’t the news Rangers fans needed.
 
So to Saturday evening and Celtic travels to Paisley. A top of the table clash with both sides unbeaten I myself wasn’t confident as Celtic have struggled at St Mirren before, and with the home side in such excellent form we knew it would be a tough evening.
 
I’m a fan of Liam Scales. I think the big Irishman sometimes ends up being the fall guy when things go wrong for Celtic and some of the criticism he receives is unjustified. However …
 
In the 19th minute a rush of blood to the head, an arm outstretched leading to a penalty for St Mirren (eventually) fired past Sinisalo by Agrafoitis, I felt it was hard to continue to back him. That weight lifted from his shoulders he actually went on to have a really good game but more of that later. 

The Celts did think we’d equalised in the 29th minute through Duràn but after much deliberation between VAR and Ref Ryan Lee it was deemed Duràn's big toe was offside, and therefore the goal was ruled out. 1-0 to the home side at half time, and whilst all hope wasn’t lost it didn’t look promising. Cometh the hour though and Cometh the man and a spectacular header from Scales in the 51st minute restored my fickle faith and all was forgiven. From there on in a Celtic victory looked assured, and when Yang raced clean through in the 68th minute and slotted home past the despairing Chapman points were only heading one way. The night was marred however by scenes on 73 minutes where a clash between Asian games bound Yang and Chapman saw the Celtic midfielder look shaken up as he was quickly substituted by Martin O’Neill. Lucky to escape injury the South Korean heads off now to compete elsewhere while Celtic are left with the headache of trying to fill the hole he’s left.
 
Finally Sunday and 2 x 2-1 victories for Hearts and St Johnstone over Dundee and Hibs respectively rounded off the weekend rather nicely.
 
Hearts leaving it late with an 84th minute penalty to equalise before Dundee were reduced to ten in 91 minutes and the home side winning the match with a 96th minute strike from Kerjota.
 
At McDiarmid Park all the action occurred in the first half with the home side taking the lead the away side equalising and a penalty on 41 minutes settling the score and leaving the points in Perth.

So what’s next?
 
There’s midweek fixtures but I guess most of us are looking forward to Saturday and the first Glasgow Derby of the season. Sadly no away fans this year after the disgraceful scenes at Ibrox last season where cardboard gangsters in balaclavas raced three quarters of the way across a pitch to then stop, stand, gesticulate, then run back into the stands. Awful scenes of course blown up by the Scottish media that highlights a far deeper rooted problem in Scottish society. A problem we’ve addressed before and I’m sure we will again.

In the meantime whatever you’re doing be safe, be happy and stay well.

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

Before The Fun Stops, Stop

Barry Gilheany 🔖 Reviews an exploration of the history of Jew Hating. 


Part Two

In Part I of this book’s review, I dealt with how Sander L. Gilman refutes the unilinear, almost primordial accounts of antisemitism given by established scholars and substitutes the word “antisemitism” with its plural, “antisemitism” and justifies this literary course of action by analysing the phenomenon of Jew Hate/Hatred of Jews in specific time and context frames. He argues that “antisemitisms are not a unique transhistorical manifestation as they are variants of xenophobia, fear and thus hatred of strangers that are part and parcel of all human experience”.[1] Seeing antisemitisms as expressions of xenophobia and taking on board the amorphous and shape shifting characteristics enables a grounded understanding of the specificities of racism and xenophobia be it the nativist, Know nothing opposition to Catholic and Chinese immigration to the US in the 19th century; the restrictions on New Commonwealth immigration to the UK in the 1960s and 1970s; the antiimmigrant underpinnings of the Brexit campaign; the operation of colour bars in Britain; Jim Crow in the US Deep South; apartheid in South Africa; ant- Muslim feeling and ethnic conflicts across the world. He cites Hannah Arendt in pointing out that the “Longest Hatred” account of or the idea of eternal antisemitism resembles the idea of the Eternal Jew in the machinations of secret Jewish societies or cabals who have sought to rule the world since antiquity.[2]

The Self-Hating Jew

Gilman structures his book on four case studies that for him exemplify the construction of the image of the Jew (and responses of individuals who identified as Jewish to such images). These prejudices are reified as generalised qualities attributed to the ‘Other’ by xenophobes and which, although shifting over time, preserve the fantasy that these qualities are exclusive to the Jew: visible difference (appearance), vulnerability (disease), belonging (rootedness) and boundary setting (self-hatred). The former two would have appeared in any 19th century list but in the post-Holocaust era in which the race pseudoscience on which that cataclysm was predicated has overwhelmingly been discredited (despite the best efforts of the Pioneer fund and the rehabilitation of it in a certain Cambridge University faculty which is a discussion for another day). The association between Jews and disease did make an unwelcome reappearance during the Covid-19 pandemic with bad actors such as the Iranian theocratic regime making conspiracist allegations that Jews were acting as vectors for the spreading of the virus. It is the interplay between the Gilman’s latter two; namely the figure of the self-hating Jew and the Zionist Jewish identity that I focus on in this second part of my review of his book.[3]

According to Gilman, there are Jews who don’t like Jews. There seem always to have been some. And they ‘know where they live.’ The spectre of the ‘self-hating Jew’ has been a frequent theme by right-wing supporters of Israel who not content with attaching their opponents but seek to deJudaicise them if they identify as Jews. In 2016 the Jewish American right-wing talk show host Dennis Prager denounced Senator Bernie Sanders as ‘a non-Jewish Jew and a non-American’ adding Noam Chomsky and George Soros (the bete noire of anti-globalist antisemites of the far right the world over) into the mix of self-hating Jewish demonology. Whether consciously or unconsciously, Prager was echoing the ‘non-Jewish Jew’ positive self-identification of the Marxist historian Isaac Deutscher. While affirming his atheism and internationalism, he stressed that “I am, however, a Jew by force of my unconditional solidarity with the persecuted and exterminated, he concluded in ‘Who is a Jew.’ ‘I am a Jew because I feel the tragedy as my own tragedy.’ Driven by Soviet (or specifically Stalinist persecution as Deutscher was a Trotskyite) and global antisemitism, he became a non-Jewish but a Jew nevertheless and this direction of travel led him to see the creation of a Jewish nation state that was to become the State of Israel as an international humanitarian necessity; a “life raft state.”[4]

In reiterating, at least obliquely, the theme of his book, Gilman posits the question that there are multiple ways of imagining oneself as a Jew. Certainly as the son of a Polish Jewish immigrant who came to the USA at the age of 17 ‘without a nickel in his pocket’, Bernie Sanders identified himself during the 2020 Presidential Election campaign as ‘proud to be Jewish’ but not ‘particularly religious’. He does not claim dual citizenship. He did spend time on an Israeli kibbitz near Haifa in 1963 after graduating from university. He did boycott Benjamin Netananyu’s speech to Congress in 2019. For this and for his opposition to right-wing attempts to turn the Israel-Palestine conflict into another culture war front led to a denunciation of him as ‘worse than Hitler’ by Dinesh D’Souza, the Indian American right-wing political commentator (at least he didn’t descend to the use of the worst insult against recalcitrant critics of Israel – Kapo). 

More recently, as a self-identified Jew, Sanders has led the campaign against funding the IDF during the Israel-Hamas war as Palestinian deaths remorselessly mounted. At the same moment, Donald Trump, in his second Presidential term, vilified Democrats such as Sanders and the New York Democrat Senator Charles Schunmer, the senior Jewish political figure in the Democratic leadership, as un-Jews:

I actually think they hate Israel… Any Jewish person who votes for Democrats hates their religion… They hate everything about Israel, and they should be ashamed of themselves because Israel will be destroyed. 

That would-be philosemite Trump relied on support from the far-right MAGA movement in which antisemitic conspiracism was hardly marginal is moot.[5]

But who in the end is self-hating? The Jew who labels or the Jew who is so labelled? Kenneth Stern, author of the guidelines defining antisemitisms that morphed into the controversial IHRA rubric and which, in 2019, were incorporated into Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act commenting in the aftermath of 7 October 2023 and the resultant global upsurge in antisemitic attacks, argued that the purpose of the IHRA definition:

wasn’t to describe anybody as an antisemite because they said something that was inside or outside the definition. The major point was to get clarity on what should be counted as a hate crime.[6]

More existential concerns have motivated critics of ‘self-hating Jews.” At the end of his life, Jean-Paul Sartre dismissed self-critical Jews as ‘inauthentic Jews,’ on the grounds that.

the sole tie that binds them is the disdain and hostility of the societies which surround them … [and they] decided to run away from this insupportable situation … They display various types of behaviour, not all of which are present at the same time in the same person but each of which may be characterised as an (inauthentic) avenue of flight.[7]

The political consequences of “inauthentic behaviour” particularly in relation to support for the State of Israel are laid out in this 2021 piece by Natan Sharansky the most prominent of all Soviet refusenik émigré to Israel and long-time Likud Party figure:

We call these critics ‘un-Jews’ because they believe the only way to fulfil the Jewish mission of saving the world with Jewish values is to undo the ways most actual Jews do Jewishness. They are not ex-Jews or non-Jews, because many of them are and remain deeply involved Jewishly, despite their harsh dissent. Many un-Jews ate active in forms of Jewish leadership, running Jewish studies departments, speaking from rabbinic pulpits, hosting Shabbat dinners. For many of these un-Jews, the public and communal staging of their anti-Israel and anti-Zionist beliefs appear to be the badge of a superior form of Judaism, stripped of its unsavoury and unethical ‘ethnocentric’ and ‘colonialist’ baggage . . . [8]

What Sharansky is articulating, according to Gilman, is the traditional term lashon hara, speaking with an evil tongue, and, in being silent, avoiding fuelling enemies’ attacks on the Jews. According to Sharansky’s ‘My Country, Right or Wrong’ credo, support for the State of Israel, regardless of its government’s actions, is a sign of ahavath Israel - love of the homogenous collectivity of the Jewish people.[9] In drawing up and policing the boundaries of authentic Jewish identity in such a way, Sharansky and unconditional supporters of Israel (as distinct from critical friends), presumably exclude American Jewish liberals, still a solid majority among American Jewry, and other high profile Jewish critics of Israel’s current trajectory such as the actress Miriam Margoyles and comedian Alexei Sayle and the UK Foreign Secretary Ed Milliband, from the community of true Jews.

The expressions ‘non-Jews’ and ‘self-hating Jews’ carry echoes of exclusionary epithets from other ethno-nationalist discourses, such as “West Brit,” “Castle Catholic’ or “souper” from Irish nationalist/republican demonology or “Lundy” or “Rotten Prods” from the Ulster Unionism/Loyalist type.

Gilman draws extensively from social psychology to explain the emergence of the figure of the self-hating Jew and the consequent schismatic developments among Jewry. He begins with Theodor Lessing’s Jewish Self-Hatred (1930) which remains the classic study of the pitfalls (rather than the complexities) of acculturation in the age of antisemitisms. Drawing on his own experience as a middle-class, urban, marginally religious Jew in Imperial and then Weimar Germany, he used this study to reject the social integration of the Jews into German society, which had been his own experience, by tracking the most radical cases. This early awareness of the impossibility of acculturation into what he saw as an inherently antisemitic world soon led him to become a Zionist and in parallel a visceral opponent of the rise of German Nazism. 

An anti-Zionist account of Jewish self-hatred was earlier given by Anton Kuh, a Viennese-Jewish journalist and satirist in his book Jews and Germans (1921). Kuh condemned Zionism as an imitation nationalism little different from German (and Austrian) nationalism. Influenced by his reading of Freudian psychoanalysis in which the conflicts of the family, the hatred of the family, come to the fore as hatred of the self, Zionism was for him a psychopathology. It was ‘Jewish antisemitism,’ a term which he noted, had been used for decades by antisemites to account for inner Jewish conflicts. Paradoxically, in this view, Jews could show the world how to get past the blight of self-hatred only by embracing their own conceptually advanced self-critical tendencies – their ‘Jewish self-hatred.’ For Lessing, this or any other form of assimilation was for Jews (no matter how defined) was destined to fail in the age of political antisemitism. [10]

Gilman describes how Lessing’s “popular” book summarises a massive critical literature, begun in the age of scientific racism with texts such as the secular Eastern Jew Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation from which Lessing converts theological claims into psychological ones. Since Jewish doctrine has, since ancient times, responded to the question ‘why we are not loved?’ with ‘because we are guilty’ it is within this theological attribution of guilt and ‘in the experience of Jewish communal attribution of guilt and communal suffering’ and within the concept of suffering as punishment, lies the origins of the concept of Jewish ‘self-hate.’ Lessing’s interest in the psychopathological is rooted in his first impulse as a student of medicine; institutional factors led him to switch his interest to philosophy.

Pinsker as a scientifically trained doctor, used the new psychiatric interest in group phenomena (“the crowd”) to explain collective hatred of the Jews. He outlined the obsessions of the European Christian imagination as such: 

to the living the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the proprietary a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country, for all a hated rival.

He undertook the first systematic attempt at analysing ‘Judeophobia’ as that incurable disease of late 19th century Europe. ‘As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.’ Pinsker, and somewhat later Theodore Herzl and Max Noerdau saw the separation of the Jew as the only ‘cure’ for those who become affected with the bacteria of antisemitism in the form of self-hatred.[11]

Antizionisms as Antisemitisms/Self-Hatreds

However, just as antisemitisms are wobbly and time and context specific, so Gilman fits theories of Jewish self-hatred into similar frameworks. For these theories always relate to the concept and reality of the Jews who experience. At the University of Berlin, the social psychologist Kurt Lewin appears to endorse the Zionist project as he, like Pinsker, became convinced that only a political solution beyond the Global North could ameliorate what he labels in his 1941 essay ‘Self-Hatred among Jews.’ Lewin articulated the thesis that Jewish identity, as a negative, is the internalisation of antisemitisms, but which envisaged a recovery of Jewish identity if a national homeland existed that would see ‘the solution of the minority problem with the problem of the welfare of all human beings’. While both Lewin and Lessing were victims of the Nazis, the latter murdered by Sudeten Nazis in 1939 after fleeing to Czechoslovakia, and Lewin though the murder of his mother in the camps and his own flight from Germany, Lewin’s work reflected his historical location during the Nazi regime, while Lessing focused on a 19th century model of introjection.[12]

Lewin’s work is on the cusp between pathological internalisation and redemptive political identity. Jonathan Judaken, in his 2024 Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism, argues that the concept of the self-hating Jew shifted after the establishment of the State of Israel. Probably the most contentious terrain of contestation in this new arena are the controversies in the 1960s around Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Moving from multiple theories focusing on those read having internalised antisemitisms to critics of Zionism, Judaken’s work echoed the demands of political Zionism from Pinsker and for a unitary (if undefined) idea of the Jew in their own national state (if undefined). Self-awareness of Jewish difference seen through the experience of Nazi antisemitism and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was read as a cure for the Jewish ‘identification with the aggressor’, whomever that was applicable to.[13]

As I explained in Part I of this review, Hannah Ardendt had never in her life ‘’loved” ‘some nation or collective – not the German, French or American nation, or the working class, or whatever else might exist.’ Arendt also invoked in addition to the Enlightenment claims of universalism (contra emergent nationalism of that time) that she espoused, the increased reliance on a specific code of symbols, forcing such “states within a state” and “nations within the nations,” such as the Basques, Bretons, Catalans, Scots and the Irish, to accommodate public life only as individuals, not as collectives, to a national symbolic register. Arendt appears to refute the Wandering Jew narrative of the Jews as ‘a state within the state,’ incapable of any integration and thus damned to wander the world, by her observation in The Origins of Totalitarianism while the:

Jews had no political ambitions of their own and were merely the only social group that was unconditionally loyal to the state, they were half right … because the Jews, taken as a social and not as a political body, actually did form a separate group within the nation.[14]

Prefiguring Sharansky’s “unJew” denunciations decades later, Gershom Scholem’s condemned Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem as a work on inherent Jewish self-hatred. For her ‘as with so many intellectuals coming from the German left,’ there was no trace of (pace Sharansky) ahavath Israel ‘that completely indefinable, yet fully concrete love for the Jewish people.' He cautioned that after the Holocaust, even for a Zionist evoking national identity was problematic. For Scholem, peoplehood, defined by a common language (parole) is a much more comfortable “imaginary community.” He thus appears to be enunciating more a Gemenschaft, organic, communitarian form of nationalism than one defined by territorial integrity.[15]

After 7 October 2023 and the resultant brutal Israeli assault on Gaza, the schism that developed between camps of Jews evoked the spectre of Jewish self-hatred that corresponded to the sense of the wobbliness that Gilman structures his book around. By then, the debates about self-hatred had become inexorably associated with the politics of a new Jewish ‘imagined community’ since the 1950s. All Jews, regardless of identification, came to be incorporated into a new global community, demarcated by the symbol role that the State of Israel had taken in defining ‘Jewishness.’ As tent encampments grew all over US campuses to, in the case of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and the Liberation Sukkah Collective, oppose the Gaza war in solidarity with Palestinian activists while these spaces were contested by pro-Israel students who mourned the dead of 7 October, prayed for the hostages to come home and sang the Israeli national anthem under small Israeli flags in the trees. A new dichotomy within Jewish identity construction emerged: Jewish religious identity as universal in opposition to a Jewish religious identity tied to a national state. Within the peace camp, the self-declared Jewish celebrants opened their ranks to members of all religions, stressing religious identity among the Abrahamic religions. The pro-Israel demonstrations were primarily political and used Zionist imagery from the flag and posters and speeches held at the rallies. [16]

Despite the acknowledgment by, among others, a young Zionist student that the motivation for joining radical groups and erecting a sukkah in solidarity with the millions of displaced Palestinians and Lebanese as celebration of the full harvest festival, Sukkot was because ‘they cared so very deeply about their Jewishness’ they would soon receive the “standard treatment”, in the words of the famed American journalist I.F. Stone in 1978 that ‘all Jewish dissidents get’ from the new gatekeepers of Jewish identity, in this context, the Netananyu government and it’s US philosemitic/philozionist right wing allies – the label “self-hating Jews”.[17]

In conclusion, Professor Gilman’s book is an original and imaginative contribution to what is often a hotly contested area of scholarship and to an often toxic and divisive area of public debate. By eschewing the conventional Longest Hatred narrative of antisemitism and reframing it as one of plural context and contingency, affords a more nuanced account of “Jew hate” and “Hated of Jews” and an intellectual resource for those who wish to challenge the reductionist views that often dominate the air waves, the campus and print and electronic media, be they antisemitisms or philosemitisms.

References

[1] Sanders L. Gilman (2026) Antisemitisms. A History of Jew Hating. London: Reaktion Books. p.13

[2] Ibid, p,.15

[3] Ibid, p.79

[4] Ibid p. 219

[5] Ibid, p.220

[6] Ibid pp.220-21

[7] Ibid, p.221

[8] Ibid pp.221-22

[9] Ibid, p.222

[10] Ibid pp.226-27

[11] Ibid pp.227-29

[12] Ibid, p.242

[13] Ibid, pp.242-43

[14] Ibid, p.245

[15] Ibid, p.243

[16] Ibid pp.250-57

[17] Ibid, p.253, p.257
 
⏩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. 

Antisemitisms 📚 A History Of Jew Hating (2)

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

 

Hate Theology @ 15

 

A Morning Thought @ 3258

Michael Phillips ✍ I bumped into my traitor one day in Belfast. 

It was unexpected, to say the least. I wouldn’t be overly confident the feeling was mutual, though. The only significant indicator that he wasn’t acting alone was his sudden appearance and equally strange exit. The surprise encounter naturally blindsided me. 1–0 to him.

His initial reaction to our encounter did, however, tell me he knows that I know. Apologies for being overly enigmatic at this point, so just bear with me. Despite knowing it was bound to happen sooner or later, I was left feeling unusually vulnerable and chastised myself for it later. I’ve simulated the experience many times in my head and therefore run through the whole gamut of emotions one would expect from a friend who had planned to put a bullet in your head.

And not just me. I’m not that special. He could have made it 2–0 earlier had it not been for their ineptitude.

The point being, I decided on the spot that it wouldn’t serve any purpose raging about it, cursing him or making a scene. Besides, he possesses powers of invincibility and would make a suitable character in Marvel’s anti-hero series The Boys. As well as being adept at deception, his range of superpowers includes resisting public humiliation, shrugging off defamation, surviving demotion and possessing no discernible moral compass. Basically, nothing sticks.

The rest of our short conversation revealed little of any tangible substance about our impromptu meeting, if there actually was one. He is quite skilled and manipulative, but his armour can be pierced. Every anti-hero has an Achille’s heel, naturally, and his kryptonite is talking.

It may seem counter-intuitive for a traitor, but he is a seasoned, competent speaker. On the other hand, he tends to shift from subject to subject in the same breath, in what is known as ‘cognitive load management’. He also frequently steers the conversation towards safer ground with familiar topics. It’s a technique referred to as ‘strategic redirection’ and helps bring the listener in closer.

Those near and dear to him might appreciate these peculiar traits as dynamic, a bit nuts, random, quirky. In reality, it’s being evasive and deceptive for those who understand the game.

As we said our goodbyes, he invited me for a coffee. Funnily enough, I was expecting this, since I’d been informed, he had employed this tactic before.

And that is exactly what I did next.

I felt a touch of apprehension, as I had no idea what I was walking into. Acts of betrayal have that effect on friends. I was quite intrigued by his behaviour at this point. I certainly wasn’t poking around for ‘evidence’ of his guilt, nor was I trying to provoke him into letting his mask slip. That’s Amateur Hour.

There’s a bigger picture, which I’ll return to later.

He’s in the driving seat here, and I was the lone passenger along for the ride, wondering where the hell we were going.

My visit to his office on this occasion was a surprise to him. We’re 1–1 now. He couldn’t mask it, but he was afforded a few minutes to compose himself while I waited for him to join me. His manner was more relaxed, but we still went through a similar dance routine to the first time around: shifting subjects, walks down memory lane. I got a personal tour of his office.

Unfortunately, the coffee bar was closed.

On a personal note, a couple of things grabbed my attention.

When he mentioned another person in a certain context, he used the term ‘one of us’, and I thought it was a fascinating reference. I was relishing the idea of quipping that he was, in fact, a very unique individual, but I let him carry on. I saw it as a ruse to retreat to his safe space.

Another incongruous matter was the way he dealt with a person in our presence. He plied them with exaggerated compliments, and it suddenly reminded me why so many people blindly appreciate the respect and adulation he confers upon them.

It’s so much harder to suspect a nice guy of treachery.

I wasn’t searching for the truth because I’m absolutely convinced that even if forced to observe the physical torture of a family member, my traitor wouldn’t blink twice. I’ve come to terms with what he is and can take an educated guess at his raison d’être.

Ultimately, he carries around a gargantuan, egocentric sense of himself that you will not see externally, since his survival utterly depends upon it.

In My Traitor, the novel, the protagonist Antoine is shocked by the revelations that his friend and mentor, Meehan, is a tout, but eventually learns to accept the contradiction. It really appears he captured the essence of those entangled in close proximity to traitors.

Whilst the book is based on reality, I found a glitch in Antoine’s psychology that undermines his supposed loss and profound disappointment in humanity. He was an outsider, got manipulated by a conman and, when confronted with the hard facts, continued to believe Meehan was a redeemable character.

Doubtless, Antoine demonstrates motivated reasoning, clinging to Meehan because of the significant fear that accepting the truth may reflect on his own deeper character flaws. It was a devastating mistake in any case, and one many of us could make if left to face similar circumstances.

My curiosity, rather, has evolved from those Republicans who are behaving like Antoine by accepting the contradiction of this agent and his co-sponsors. The difference, though, is that many of them know or suspect reality is being twisted around them, yet they continue to provide moral and physical support for these agents.

To add further insult, my traitor picked up the equivalent of Charlie’s Golden Ticket and could have tiptoed off to start a new life elsewhere. Instead, the leadership wholeheartedly welcomed him back into their arms, which are apparently as wide as the Mississippi.

No wonder he feels like ‘one of us’ and confidently struts around the Republican communities he once wrought murder and mayhem upon.

Much has been discussed, argued and speculated over informers continuing to clock into work in the North, but one question begs a proper answer, and it’s nothing to do with their dark arts.

They’re just doing what their British masters trained them for.

After 30 years of peace, leading Republicans demonstrate an irrational willingness to shed these critical tools of betrayal, regardless of the mountain of material currently stacking up against them.

Why?

The Dark was right.

And finally, if you’re reading this, you still owe me a coffee.

⏩Michael Phillips is a former republican prisoner.  Keep up with his work.

Coffee With My Traitor

Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum ☭ Andy Burnham, the Border Poll and the Road Brendan Hughes Warned Us About.


Andy Burnham's comments that a border poll is "off the cards" should not be dismissed as careless words. They expose a fundamental truth: the British state determines the terms of any constitutional change in Ireland. Socialist republicans and the anti-imperialist movement in Ireland never had illusions about this reality.

The message is unmistakable. London is letting Sinn Féin know who sets the agenda. If Sinn Féin were genuinely caught off guard, it would demonstrate a remarkable lack of political awareness. But they were not shocked. They know 'Project Stormont' has failed badly, regarding the national question; even if it has financially served its participants well.

Under the Good Friday Pacification Agreement, the British Secretary of State holds the power to call a border poll—but only when the outcome is certain, and only when it serves capitalist-imperialist interests. The English ruling class retains this card, employing the age-old tactic of ruling by fooling. James Connolly rightly pointed this out over a century ago, and still, there are great Irish fools to practice on.

The constitutional arrangements are not based upon revolutionary acts of Irish self-determination outside the imperialist system. They are based upon an agreement between governments, designed to accommodate their interests. This gerrymandered process is not a simple all-Ireland question decided in a single vote. It envisages constitutional votes North and South, with outcomes requiring both governments to give effect to expressed wishes. Even if a majority in the North votes for change, the British state does not suddenly disappear from the process.

This brings us to Brendan 'The Dark' Hughes. His warnings are more relevant than ever. Hughes understood where constitutional nationalism would lead when devoid of revolutionary theory. He saw the danger long before others acknowledged it.

Hughes looked at the post-Good Friday Pacification Compromise and asked what had happened to the republican objective. He saw Stormont and recognised the British state was still there—the same structures, the same civil service, the same institutions, the same occupation. He asked whether the republican struggle had really been reduced to republicans taking ministerial positions inside that system. His warning was clear: the Stormont regime remained intact. The British still controlled it. Sinn Féin ministers sitting inside it did not magically transform it to meet republican ideals.

Hughes famously questioned whether thirty years of struggle had ultimately come down to "a big room at Stormont, ministerial cars, dark suits" and administering the British system. This was not a criticism from someone advocating a return to war. Hughes specifically rejected that argument, recognising the enormous human cost. His argument was political. What happened to the All-Ireland struggle? What happened to the objective of a 32 County Socialist Republic? What happened to the idea that working-class people of Ireland should control their own political and economic destiny?

Those questions remain vital. Look at where the Sinn Féin project has arrived. Instead of challenging the fundamental structures of capitalism and imperialism, Sinn Féin has become an important part of managing those structures. They sign off on cuts to public services. They operate within Stormont and the Dáil as servants to the status quo. They operate within the imperialist European Union and advocate for its survival.

The great political objective has become constitutional change through a process involving London, Dublin, Washington, and Brussels. But what kind of Ireland would that produce? The "United Ireland" being discussed by the establishment is not the 32-county Socialist Republic that Brendan Hughes fought for. It is an agreed Ireland between imperialist powers—an Ireland acceptable to London, Washington, the European Union, and native capitalism. An Ireland in which existing economic power structures remain intact.

A change in constitutional arrangement does not necessarily mean a change in the class system. The wealthy would remain wealthy. The powerful would remain powerful. Working-class people would still face unaffordable housing, a two-tier health system, poor wages, insecure employment, and deteriorating living standards. Those who create the wealth would still not control it. The British-imposed border might change, but the economic system would remain.

This is where Hughes's warnings become particularly important. He spoke about politics becoming tired, repetitive, and detached from revolutionary ideals. He warned that republicanism itself could become absorbed into a process creating a class of professional politicians. He said: "The republican leadership has always exploited our loyalty." Republican activists gave decades to a struggle based upon very different principles—national liberation and social transformation, an Ireland controlled by its people rather than elites. The revolutionary objective has been replaced by constitutional politics. The struggle was not about elections, ministerial offices, and budgets.

Now we are told to celebrate the possibility of a British government eventually allowing a border poll. That is quite a journey from the original objective.

If a British Prime Minister can say a border poll is "off the table," regardless of subsequent clarifications, it reveals the nature of the Good Friday Agreement. The British state remains central to determining the circumstances of constitutional change. That is precisely what Hughes warned about.

He wasn't saying republicans should return to armed struggle. He was asking a more fundamental question: Why are so-called republicans administering British rule instead of challenging the system that maintains it?

More than eight hundred years of English and British involvement in Ireland. Three hundred years of capitalism has demonstrated that the political system does not serve those who create society's wealth. If the British ruling class eventually decides that an all-Ireland arrangement serves its economic, strategic, or political interests, the British state will adapt accordingly. It has done so before. Unionist protests would not prevent it, nor would republican rhetoric.

The question is not simply whether there will eventually be a United Ireland. The question is: whose United Ireland? A United Ireland designed and negotiated by governments, political parties, big business, and international interests? Or an Ireland fundamentally transformed in the interests of the people who live and work here? The former can be achieved while leaving capitalism, inequality, and elite power untouched. The latter requires a much deeper political and social transformation.

That was the Ireland Brendan Hughes was talking about. He could see the danger of republicans becoming administrators rather than revolutionaries. He could see the danger of confusing political participation with political power.

Today, when a British Prime Minister can effectively tell Sinn Féin that the border poll is not on the agenda, perhaps people should remember exactly what the Dark was warning us about. The Dark was right. The road of constitutional nationalism always leads towards administering the existing system rather than replacing it.

If the final destination is an agreed United Ireland that leaves capitalism, imperialism, and elite power intact, then changing the constitutional border will not deliver the Ireland that generations of working-class republicans fought for. The real question is: "Who will own it, who will control it, and who will benefit from it?"

If the answer remains the same powerful and wealthy minority, the working class will have gained nothing. That is why Burnham's words matter—not because he said a border poll is off the cards, but because they expose the limits of the constitutional road. A road Brendan Hughes warned us about years ago. The Dark was right.

Time to bring politics back into our working-class communities, for only then can we meaningfully begin to build for the Workers' Republic and, in doing so, prepare the ground to demand a democratic 32-county referendum for national liberation.

The Dark Was Right

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