Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on 23-May-2026.
Four events in one week, and what they showed about the terrain the contest is being fought on.
| Photo by Dimitry Anikin on Unsplash |
Section I: The Week
On Tuesday 18th May, Israeli naval forces intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters as it attempted to deliver aid to Gaza. Around 430 activists were detained. At least 14 of them were Irish citizens, including Dr Margaret Connolly, a Sligo GP and sister of President Catherine Connolly. On Wednesday and Thursday, the Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir released videos of himself walking among the bound detainees holding an Israeli flag, telling them welcome to Israel, we are the landlords, and pushing one detainee to the ground. The Taoiseach said the behaviour was appalling. The Tánaiste said it was despicable and could not be consequence free. Both declined to move the Occupied Territories Bill, which has been before the Oireachtas since 2018 and has been called for repeatedly by the opposition this week.
On Wednesday 14th May, the Residential Tenancies Board published its quarterly figures. There had been 7,062 termination notices served on tenants by landlords in the first quarter of 2026, a fifty-one per cent increase on the same period in 2025, and the highest quarterly figure since the data series began in 2022. On the same day, the Daft.ie report for the first quarter of the year showed that market rents had risen by 4.4% between December and March, the largest quarterly increase the series has recorded since it began in 2002. The new rent regime which the Coalition introduced on 1st March, advertised as a stabilising reform, had produced in its first quarter the highest rent rise in twenty-five years and the highest eviction figures on record. The country’s largest commercial landlord told its investors the new rules would produce a twenty-five per cent increase in its rental income over the coming decade.
On Friday 15th May, on Henry Street in Dublin city centre, a thirty-five year old Congolese man named Yves Sakila was held on the ground for approximately five minutes by five private security guards from a firm contracted to Arnotts, after an alleged shoplifting incident from which Sakila had attempted to flee. He had injured an elderly man in his eighties as he ran. The five men held him on the ground until he stopped responding. He was pronounced dead at the Mater Hospital. He had been in Ireland for over twenty years, had lived in a Salvation Army hostel in Dublin 1, and was described by staff at the Granby Centre as pleasant and quiet, with a deep interest in technology and a habit of attending prayer services. His family in the Democratic Republic of the Congo learned of his death online. The Congolese Community in Ireland held a vigil for him on Henry Street on Tuesday 19th May.
On Friday 22nd May, by-elections took place in two constituencies. Dublin Central was filling the seat vacated by Paschal Donohoe in November. Galway West was filling the seat vacated by Catherine Connolly when she was elected President in October. The counting began on Saturday morning. The first preference picture is now in.
This was the week
Section II: The week the framework spoke
The previous essay in this body of work argued that a hegemonic project, in the precise sense that it seeks to become the framework through which a generation makes sense of its political situation, is what is currently consolidating across these islands. It argued that this project operates on integrated terrains. Anti-immigration nativism. Patriarchal restoration. Anti-EU sentiment positioned as the recovery of sovereignty. The colonisation of working-class economic grievance through narratives that locate responsibility in external enemies rather than in structural failures. It argued that a counter-hegemonic project must hold the integrated terrain on its own terms, contesting both the political sphere and the ideological sphere, and that no party in the current Irish opposition holds the form the contest requires.
The week described in the previous section is what happens when the framework that essay named is operating in plain view across multiple terrains at once.
The flotilla story is the foreign-policy terrain. Israeli state behaviour towards Irish citizens, including the President’s sister, is condemned in the strongest available rhetorical terms by both the Taoiseach and the Tánaiste. The legislation that would translate the rhetoric into material action — the Occupied Territories Bill, before the Oireachtas since 2018 — remains unmoved. The Coalition is performing the position the political ground demands while declining the action the position would require. The gap between rhetorical position and material act is the gap.
The housing data is the economic terrain. The Coalition’s signature housing policy, introduced on 1 March as a stabilising reform, has produced in its first verified quarter the largest rent rise in twenty-five years and the highest eviction figures on record. The country’s largest commercial landlord has told its investors that the new rules will produce a twenty-five per cent uplift in its rental income over the coming decade. The policy serves a specific constituency, and that constituency is not renters. The economic terrain on which the far right is building hegemonic capacity is being made by Coalition policy more material every quarter.
The death on Henry Street is the ideological terrain made physical. A Black homeless man, a member of a community the far right has been targeting in pub conversations and on doorsteps and in podcasts for years, is held on the ground for five minutes by five private security guards and dies there. The Congolese Community in Ireland says it does not feel safe any more. What makes a community feel that, and what makes five men hold a man on the ground for five minutes for a shoplifting allegation, are connected to the same framework whose contest this essay is about. The ideological sphere does not stay abstract. It reaches the street.
The by-elections were the political-sphere test. The Dublin Central count has reached its third stage as this essay publishes. The Galway West first count has just landed. The first-preference picture across both is in, and the first-preference picture is what the closing section reads. Final seat allocations will arrive on their own time. The structural fact does not wait for them.
These are not four separate stories. They are one story, told across four terrains, in one week.
Section III: Henry Street
Yves Sakila was thirty-five years old. He came to Ireland in 2004, when he was thirteen. He lived here for more than twenty-two years. By the spring of 2026 he was homeless. He had been living for some time at the Salvation Army’s Granby Centre in Dublin 1, where staff described him as pleasant and quiet, with a deep interest in technology, and a habit of sometimes attending the Centre’s prayer services. He left the Granby Centre on the morning of Friday 15th May. The staff who said goodbye to him that morning were the last people there to see him alive.
Shortly before five o’clock that afternoon, on Henry Street, he was alleged to have shoplifted from Arnotts. As he attempted to flee, he knocked an elderly man in his eighties to the ground, leaving him seriously injured. Five private security guards contracted to the store gave chase, caught him, and brought him to the ground. They held him there for approximately five minutes. The footage that has been released shows him at the start of the five minutes audibly shouting in distress. By the end of the five minutes, he is motionless. He was pronounced dead at the Mater Hospital that evening.
His brothers and his uncle, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, learned of his death online. His family in Ireland, and the Congolese Community in Ireland, learned of it through phone calls and through the news.
On Tuesday 19th May, the Congolese Community in Ireland held a vigil for him on Henry Street. The vice president of the Community, Laure Zoya, said that he was more than a headline. He was a member of their community, a professional, a human being whose life mattered. Members of the community said they did not feel safe any more. Flowers were placed at the spot. Prayers and songs were offered. The vigil ended.
These are the facts of one man’s life and death.
They are also, and this is the only structural reading the essay will offer of them, the facts of what the ideological sphere produces when it reaches the street. The far right’s project, the project the sixth essay named as a hegemonic contest, has been building for years on the everyday terrain of who is seen as belonging here and who is seen as not. The conversations on doorsteps. The phrasings in WhatsApp groups. The cultural production around national identity and who counts as Irish. The slow movement of what feels like common sense about Black men in Irish cities. None of this is a direct cause of what happened on Henry Street. None of it can be. The Garda investigation will establish what happened. The case has been referred to the Garda Síochána Ombudsman, Fiosrú. The legal process will work in its time.
But the conditions under which a Black homeless man could be held on the ground for five minutes by five men in front of bystanders, in a country where the everyday discourse about who belongs has been moving in a particular direction for years, are not separable from those conditions. The Congolese Community in Ireland said that they do not feel safe any more. They are saying something the framework the previous essay named would predict them to be saying.
Yves Sakila has been denied human dignity in death by some of the framings of the days that followed it. This section has tried to refuse that denial. He was a person. He had a name. He had been in this country since he was thirteen years old. He died on Henry Street on Friday 15th May 2026 and that fact does not become smaller because it is also the fact that the framework the essay is engaging is operating.
Section IV: The position and the act
The Occupied Territories Bill has been before the Oireachtas since 2018. It was first introduced by Senator Frances Black to give material expression to Ireland’s stated position on the illegality of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. The bill has passed stages in the Seanad and the Dáil at various points in its history. It has been called for by every Irish opposition party, by civil society organisations, by international legal scholars, and by Palestinians themselves. It has not been moved into law. Successive governments have argued that the legal advice they received from the Attorney General concluded the bill was incompatible with EU competence. Successive governments have declined to publish that advice or to enact the bill in a form that would address the legal concerns. The bill has sat where the bill has sat.
On Tuesday 18th May, Israeli forces intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla in international waters. Around 430 activists were detained. At least 14 of them were Irish citizens. The Taoiseach said the interception was absolutely unacceptable. He said that it was no longer tenable that it could be business as usual with Israel. The Tánaiste said that the actions of the Israeli government were despicable and could not be consequence free. Both said that they would discuss with EU partners how to ensure the safety and wellbeing of Irish citizens.
On Wednesday and Thursday, Itamar Ben-Gvir released videos of himself walking among the bound detainees holding an Israeli flag, telling them welcome to Israel, we are the landlords, and pushing one detainee to the ground. He told Prime Minister Netanyahu in a second video to give them to him for the terrorist prisons. The Taoiseach said he was appalled and shocked by the footage. The Tánaiste said it was a further clear breach of international law and disgusting. The Coalition continued to decline to move the Occupied Territories Bill. The Taoiseach explained in the Dáil that passing the bill would not change Israel’s behaviour.
This is the structural pattern. The Coalition can describe Israeli state behaviour in the strongest available rhetorical terms — appalling, despicable, disgusting, unacceptable, breach of international law — and decline to translate the description into material action. The rhetorical position is performed at the level the political ground demands. The action is withheld at the level the position would require. The gap between the two is the gap.
The sixth essay diagnosed this pattern in Sinn Féin’s procedural absorption of structural critique. The same pattern is operating here, from the other direction. Cullinane absorbed the reproductive rights question through procedural framing about the bill’s specific provisions. The Coalition absorbs the Occupied Territories question through procedural framing about EU competence and the bill’s expected effect on Israeli behaviour. In both cases, the position is performed and the act is withheld. In both cases, the procedural framing is not invented — it is the form the structural feature produces every time the substantive question is hard.
The bill that would translate Ireland’s stated position on illegal settlements into material consequence has been before the Oireachtas for eight years. The President’s sister was among the detainees Ben-Gvir was filming. The bill still has not moved.
Section V: The terrain Coalition policy is making
The Coalition’s reform of the rental sector came into effect on 1st March 2026. It was advertised as a stabilising measure that would protect renters by introducing six-year minimum tenancies and a national two per cent annual cap on rent increases inside Rent Pressure Zones. The Taoiseach and the Minister for Housing said the reforms would bring greater security to tenants and stimulate investment in supply.
The first verified quarter of the new regime is now in the record. The Residential Tenancies Board reports that 7,062 termination notices were served on tenants by landlords in the first quarter of 2026, a fifty-one per cent increase on the same period in 2025, and the highest quarterly figure since the data series began. Sixty per cent of the notices were issued because the landlord intended to sell the property. The Daft.ie report for the same quarter records that market rents rose by 4.4% between December and March, the largest quarterly increase the series has documented since it began in 2002. Average market rent for a two-bedroom apartment has now passed €2,100 per month. The economist Ronan Lyons, who compiles the Daft.ie series, described the initial impact of the new system as an increase in market rents larger than any seen over the past twenty-five years.
In its preliminary results for 2025, Ires Reit — Ireland’s largest commercial residential landlord, owner of 3,627 rental properties — told investors that the Coalition’s reforms could produce a 25% potential rental income uplift with minimal added costs across its portfolio. The company’s chief executive said its existing rents had been assessed as approximately 20% below market value, and that the new framework would allow them to be gradually reset. The Coalition’s signature housing policy serves a specific constituency, and that constituency is not renters.
This is the economic terrain the previous essay named as one of the four terrains the far right’s hegemonic project is integrating. The colonisation of working-class economic grievance through narratives that locate responsibility in external enemies rather than in structural failures. The structural failure on this terrain is in plain view. The Coalition’s reforms have produced, in their first verified quarter, the largest rent rise in twenty-five years, the highest eviction figures on record, and a documented twenty-five per cent uplift in income for the country’s largest commercial landlord. The grievance the far right is colonising is being made more material every quarter by the policy.
The Coalition is, in a precise sense, the supply line for the project it claims to oppose. The economic conditions on which the far right is building hegemonic capacity are the conditions Coalition policy is producing. The policy is not failing to address the grievance. The policy is the source of new grievance the project has yet to colonise.
Section VI: What two electorates answered
On Saturday 23rd May, the counting in Dublin Central reached its third count by the late afternoon. The Social Democrats’ Daniel Ennis topped the poll on the first count with 4,903 first preference votes. Sinn Féin’s Janice Boylan was second on 4,348, a margin of 555 votes. The political correspondent Gavan Reilly described the seat as a done deal by midday. By the third count Ennis still held the lead. The seat will be filled by the Social Democrats. In Mary Lou McDonald’s own constituency, in the week the Coalition’s housing policy delivered the largest rent rise in twenty-five years and the highest evictions on record, in the week of Sakila, in the week of the flotilla and the Occupied Territories Bill still unmoved, Sinn Féin has come second.
The Galway West first count was completed in the early evening. Independent Ireland’s Noel Thomas led the count with 10,007 first preference votes. Fine Gael’s Seán Kyne was second on 9,647, a margin of 360 votes. The seat will be decided on transfers and the count will adjourn into Sunday. Whichever of Thomas or Kyne takes it, the seat goes to a Coalition party or to a party explicitly campaigning on cost of living and immigration from the political terrain the far right is colonising. Sinn Féin’s Mark Lohan finished seventh with 3,208 first preference votes. Behind the Social Democrats. Behind one independent. Behind Labour. Behind Fianna Fáil.
These are the answers two electorates gave to a question the political ground had spent the week putting to them. The question was whether the political form representing the constituency the Coalition is failing exists in the current Irish party system. The Dublin answer was the Social Democrats — the party clean on reproductive rights, compromised on climate, the party closer than any other major opposition formation to the framework the previous essay named. The Galway answer was a contest between the governing party that produced the conditions and the anti-immigration party that promises to restore control over them. In neither answer was Sinn Féin the form.
This is what the previous essay’s structural argument predicted. The absorption pattern is constitutive of how Sinn Féin operates. The pattern is not contingent on the issue. The pattern produces electoral consequence on the terrain where the political ground is most favourable to the party, in the week when the conditions for an opposition project building on cost-of-living grievance are most legible to voters. The argument has now been tested by two electorates on a single day and the test has produced the result the argument anticipated.
The Coalition is in a precise sense the supply line for the project it claims to oppose. The Social Democrats hold the progressive terrain in Dublin but did not hold the climate terrain on Wednesday 13th May. Labour and the Greens and People Before Profit held both terrains but the constituencies they currently mobilise are insufficient to the scale the contest requires. Sinn Féin has the scale and not the form. The form a counter-hegemonic project requires does not exist in any single party.
What the week showed is that the framework is operating on every terrain at once. The flotilla. The policy. The death on Henry Street. The two by-elections. None of these is a separate story. They are aspects of a single contest for the framework through which a generation makes sense of its political situation. The far right is contesting that framework with an integrated project across all the terrains. The Irish opposition is contesting it with parts of the framework distributed across parties that cannot or will not hold them together.
The Social Democrats won a seat on Saturday. Independent Ireland is positioned to take another. Sinn Féin finished second in McDonald’s own constituency and seventh in Galway West. The body of work is seven essays long now. The argument the previous essay made has been answered by two electorates on a single day. The form that could hold the framework does not yet exist. What is built from here is now being built by the people the argument is engaging.
References
The Global Sumud Flotilla. Reporting from RTÉ, The Irish Times, the Irish Examiner, IrishCentral, and the Associated Press, 18–22 May 2026.
Itamar Ben-Gvir video statements. As reported by RTÉ, The Irish Times, and the Irish Examiner, 20 May 2026.
Statements by Taoiseach Micheál Martin and Tánaiste Simon Harris on the flotilla interception and the Ben-Gvir video. As reported in The Irish Times and RTÉ, 18–21 May 2026.
The Occupied Territories Bill. Introduced in the Seanad by Senator Frances Black, 2018. Statutory history available at oireachtas.ie.
Residential Tenancies Board, quarterly data, Q1 2026. Reporting by The Irish Times, the Irish Examiner, RTÉ, and The Journal, 14 May 2026.
Daft.ie quarterly rental report, Q1 2026. Reporting by The Irish Times and the Irish Examiner, 20 May 2026. Compiled by Professor Ronan Lyons, Trinity College Dublin.
Ires Reit preliminary results for 2025, as reported by RTÉ News and The Irish Times, February-March 2026.
The death of Yves Sakila on Henry Street, 15 May 2026. Reporting by RTÉ, The Irish Times, The Journal, and breakingnews.ie, 15–20 May 2026. Statements by the Irish Network Against Racism and Laure Zoya of the Congolese Community in Ireland.
Dublin Central by-election, 22–23 May 2026. First-count results as reported by RTÉ News (Samantha Libreri) and The Irish Times. Tally reporting by Gavan Reilly (Virgin Media News) and Simon McGarr.
Galway West by-election, 22–23 May 2026. First-count results as reported by The Journal and RTÉ News (Pat McGrath). Tally reporting by Gavan Reilly (Virgin Media News).
🞹The sixth essay in this body of work, No Form To Hold It, published on Medium 15th May 2026.
