Hangry, we called into the Harbour Master close to the train station for body fuel before making the few hundred yards to the venue. Although the food was good, our stopover there more fed my irritation than my stomach. It was Holy Communion day and the place was filled with children and their families all out making the most of their big day. I love the sound of children laughing - the high pitch instrument that heralds the arrival of the future - but only when they are a hundred yards away.
We seemed to time our arrival at Liberty Hall just right as the doors began opening shortly after we turned up, on the way passing a statue of the Irish Marxist Easter Rising leader, James Connolly.
Once inside, it was a different matter. We had to wait for almost half an hour before the theatre doors opened. It reminded me of a poem about the Soviet Union where people queued to get into a queue and queued to get out again. Fed up with standing, despite the captivating conversation with people I hadn't seen in a while but met with in the queue, the bar seemed the only solution.
Unsolicited, the barman put water in my whiskey. Billy McKee was fond of saying "never kiss another man's wife, never water another man's whiskey." I thought of him as I sipped my diluted concoction without as much as a scowl at the barman. He and his colleagues were under pressure due to the numbers. Dave Barry rightly quipped that “a person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.” Same goes for bar staff.
Amongst the notables we got to listen to before Sanders took to the stage were Mick Lynch and Omar Barghouti. Lynch, held in such high esteem by trade unionists, was there in person but Barghouti had to appear via Zoom due to an Israeli travel ban. Rousing speakers the brace of them. Lynch stressed that for the trade union movement to more robustly resist attacks on both democracy and worker rights it was essential that it divested itself of bureaucracy, get out of the offices and into the workplace where officials can engage with people more authentically. In a world managed through well developed and entrenched bureaucratic processes that is not likely to happen anytime soon. Barghouti for his part hammered Israeli genocidal policy and urged greater efforts to Boycott, Divest, Sanction. Neither did he pull his punches when aiming a blow at what he believed is the Irish Government's complicity in the Israeli genocide, insisting that more than a word salad was needed to protect starving people whose plates lack even a salad.
There were calls for Left unity at different points in the evening. While such would be strategically advantageous there is probably more chance of Manchester United winning the European Champion League this weekend. Engels’ June 1873 letter to Bebel complained:
Elsewhere in correspondence with Marx, the pair professed relief to be rid of the left wing sects, arguing that where the sects flourish, socialism is moribund. That doesn’t hold out much hope for a cohesive Left but in such matters no pessimist was ever proved wrong.
When the keynote speaker of the evening emerged from the wings he was given rapturous applause although not as sustained or as loud as that received by President Michael D Higgins when he and his wife Sabina made their entrance.
The Sanders address was well received apart from one heckler whose roars were so garbled, I felt he might have been in the bar too long prior to taking his seat. The Marx and Engels experience redux. Only as he was being escorted out did I pick up on the chant Free Palestine. As everybody in the theatre seemed to agree with that sentiment there was little point in him howling it. We had come to listen to Bernie Sanders and wanted to hear him out. Courtesy of someone in close proximity it transpired the heckler had been getting prompts on the phone, the suggestion being he had been sent to disrupt.
One must not allow oneself to be misled by the cry for ’unity’. Those who have this word most often on their lips are the ones who sow the most discord . . . the biggest sectarians and the biggest brawlers and rogues shout loudest for unity at certain times. Nobody in our lifetime has given us more trouble than the shouters for unity.
Elsewhere in correspondence with Marx, the pair professed relief to be rid of the left wing sects, arguing that where the sects flourish, socialism is moribund. That doesn’t hold out much hope for a cohesive Left but in such matters no pessimist was ever proved wrong.
When the keynote speaker of the evening emerged from the wings he was given rapturous applause although not as sustained or as loud as that received by President Michael D Higgins when he and his wife Sabina made their entrance.
The Sanders address was well received apart from one heckler whose roars were so garbled, I felt he might have been in the bar too long prior to taking his seat. The Marx and Engels experience redux. Only as he was being escorted out did I pick up on the chant Free Palestine. As everybody in the theatre seemed to agree with that sentiment there was little point in him howling it. We had come to listen to Bernie Sanders and wanted to hear him out. Courtesy of someone in close proximity it transpired the heckler had been getting prompts on the phone, the suggestion being he had been sent to disrupt.
Sanders was very critical of Israel, describing the country's government as far right and fascist. I would have preferred that to have been the mainstay of the talk, but the core theme he chose to build his talk around was the Trump-led oligarchy in the US which he described as a “government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires”. He castigated the Democratic Party for being out of touch with working class people, which cost them dearly in the last presidential election.
He said that unlike previous governments of the rich the Oligarchy 'do not believe in the concept of government. They do not believe in democracy.'
He said that unlike previous governments of the rich the Oligarchy 'do not believe in the concept of government. They do not believe in democracy.'
Emphasising the speed with which the oligarchy is moving in its assault on democracy and economic rights which are indivisible from human rights he boldly stated:
“And by the way, this is not just an American phenomenon, it is happening to social democratic parties all over the world. And these parties have to make a choice - if they think they are going to survive defending a status quo which is destroying the lives of millions of workers in America and around the world, they are dead wrong."
I left feeling that Sanders had just issued a siren call that time was running out, that in the seemingly prescient words of Karl Marx the barbarians of oligarchy are at the gates. The forces of the Right are organised and advancing along well paved roads while those ostensibly opposed to the authoritarianism that accompanies exclusivist and aggressive nationalism are bogged down in the mud of cul de sacs endlessly squabbling over pronouns and toilets. For the Left, any abandonment of class is not a class act.
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Handing Shannon airport to the American military is one ( if not ) the most despicable act enacted by our globalist politicians .
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