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Louth For Ever ★ Louth For Ever ★ Three collapses in a weekend the blockade ended — notes on the government, the opposition, and the tradition I write from.

Photo by Stewart Munro on Unsplash

.The haulier was right about diesel

That sentence has to come first, or the rest does not earn its readers. The cost of diesel in Ireland in April 2026 was a genuine emergency. The man with one truck and three children and a contract he could not break was looking at a number on a pump no Cabinet minister had to look at. His grievance was real. The architecture gap underneath it, a state that has never built the institutions to absorb a shock like this without panic, was real. And the Coalition that survived a no-confidence vote tonight, having found more than €750 million in a weekend after spending six days hoping the temperature would drop on its own and having lost a junior minister on its own benches in the process, earned every word of what is coming.

But this essay is not about the haulier who came for diesel. It is about the WhatsApp group that told him where to park, the spokespeople who appeared on livestreams with Niall McConnell of Síol na hÉireann, and the elected representatives who used a fuel grievance as an audition tape for a politics the haulier himself did not want. Those are two different things. A serious left politics has to tell them apart, and the failure to do so is the second story of this week.

First, the cheque.

I. The government that could not read its own country

The Disability Federation of Ireland has been told that the permanent Cost of Disability payment cannot arrive until 2027 because, in the phrase the Department uses when it would like a conversation to end, the money is not there. The ESRI report the government itself commissioned found that the additional weekly cost of living with a disability in Ireland is between €204 and €290. Disability allowance is €244 a week, which is to say that for many recipients the entire payment is consumed by the cost of being disabled before food, shelter, or anything we might recognise as a life is touched. 2027 is the date the Cost of Disability payment becomes available. The money is not there until then.

On Sunday night, after an emergency Cabinet meeting, the government found more than €750 million in a weekend. Tánaiste Simon Harris confirmed on the record that the package came from the surplus and would affect Budget 2027. The same surplus. The same year. A different urgency.

The package is roughly two and a half times the annual budget for homeless services. It is more than four times what would be required to bring disability allowance into line with the ESRI’s own findings. It comfortably exceeds what Social Justice Ireland calculates would lift the 177,000 children living below the poverty line above it. None of those interventions has required an emergency Cabinet meeting at any point in the lifetime of this Coalition. A blockade on O’Connell Street and a refinery in Cork did. The hauliers’ direct-payment scheme, the government’s own description, is “open to anyone who owns a truck.” The Cost of Disability payment is open to no-one until 2027.

This is not, in the first instance, a moral observation. It is a mechanical one. The Coalition did not find €750 million in a weekend because it suddenly cared about hauliers. It found it because writing cheques is the only instrument it has. As Sinéad O’Sullivan has set out in her recent piece on Ireland’s “architecture gap,” 85% of Irish government spending goes to current transfers, direct payments to citizens, and 15% goes to building things. Ireland, in her phrase, treats its budget like a household that earns well and spends it all at the pub, so when the boiler breaks there is no plumber and no savings, only a €450 cheque and a recommendation to buy a blow-heater. The package announced on Sunday is the blow-heater. The Coalition reached for it because nothing else exists to reach for.

One Coalition minister, speaking anonymously to the Irish Times after the package was signed off, gave the Coalition’s own diagnosis in nine words: “We emboldened the mob, essentially, then nothing happened.” The minister meant it as criticism of the slow response. Read it as the Coalition’s accidental confession. The mob was emboldened because the Coalition had nothing to bring to the conversation except a six day pause and a cheque, and the cheque was the only instrument it had ever built.

What the package buys is not policy. It is a one-week stand-down. The organisers, the Co. Kildare farmer who called the 2.4c cut on green diesel “an insult,” the people still attempting fresh convoys on Tuesday morning, have already announced they are not finished. The Garda Commissioner, having declared an “exceptional event” for the first time in years, is now signalling the “full rigours of the law” for any future action. Seven arrests have been made in Cork city. The state’s only two visible instruments this week were a cheque and 200 gardaí with a water cannon. That is the architecture. That is what the surplus has built.

One detail that has not had the attention it deserves: Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan announced the Defence Forces deployment without informing the Minister for Defence, Helen McEntee. In every comparable European democracy the line between justice and defence is a constitutional red line, police and soldiers are different instruments, deployed against citizens under different legal frameworks, for different reasons. In Ireland this week the line was an inter-departmental phone call that did not happen. That is not a procedural footnote. That is a Coalition that does not know which of its own ministers is supposed to be putting soldiers on Irish streets, in the middle of putting soldiers on Irish streets. Labour nicknamed O’Callaghan “Rambo” during today’s debate. The nickname is funny. The underlying failure is not.

And then, as if to underline the point, a second instrument. On vote day, Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan confirmed he was writing to Coimisiún na Meán, the media regulator, to raise concerns about the fairness of coverage of the fuel protests. The National Union of Journalists called this “sinister and deeply disturbing.” They are right, and the sinister part is not the specific intervention — it is the reflex underneath it. A Coalition that cannot build, that cannot negotiate, that cannot respond to a domestic crisis with anything except cash and a public order unit, reaches for the regulator the moment the coverage displeases it. The first instrument is cash. The second is pressure on the press. Neither builds anything. Both are what is available when nothing else has been built.

This Coalition has earned a motion of no confidence. It earned one on Sunday. It would have earned one on a hundred previous Sundays for things that were not televised. The case for its fall is moral, not tactical: a state that can find €750 million in a weekend for a blockade and cannot find €100 million in five years for the Cost of Disability payment is a state that has chosen who counts. I want this government to fall. I want the next one to answer the question “where is the money?” without waiting to see who has parked a tractor on a bridge.

That is the first collapse. The Coalition spent six days hoping the country would calm down and then, when it didn’t, reached for the only instrument it had ever built. It read the country wrong because it has no apparatus for reading the country. The premature state, faced with its first serious domestic crisis in a generation, did the only thing the premature state knows how to do.

II. The opposition that could not lead its own base

The Ireland Thinks poll published in last Sunday’s Independent found that 56% of the Irish public backed the protesters and 38% opposed them. The internals are where the story is. 96% of Sinn Féin voters backed the protests. 94%of Aontú voters. 99%of Independent Ireland voters. 78% of independents. Among Fine Gael voters, 18%. Among Fianna Fáil voters, 14%.

Read those numbers slowly. The Sinn Féin base was not following the Sinn Féin leadership into the blockade conversation. The Sinn Féin base was already inside the blockade conversation before the leadership got there. The leadership was trailing.

This is the most important fact of the week and it is the one that has been least discussed. Sinn Féin’s Sunday lunchtime motion of no confidence, filed before the €750 million package had even been signed off, was not a leadership decision in any meaningful sense. It was the only motion available to a party that cannot publicly cross 96% of its own voters in the middle of a cost-of-living spike. Pearse Doherty’s statement that “this government clearly aren’t listening to the people” was technically wrong and tactically inevitable. The government was listening; it was listening to the wrong people with the wrong instrument. So was Doherty.

The most generous reading of Sinn Féin’s week is this: a party that needs to convert 25% support into a parliamentary majority cannot afford to be on the opposite side of 96% of its own voters at the moment the cost of living becomes the only conversation in the country, and the only motion available on Sunday lunchtime was one that asked the government to give the blockaders more, not one that asked the base who had been talking to it for the last two years, and why it had not been Sinn Féin. That is a structural bind. It is not nothing. A party in a structural bind deserves the courtesy of being told so.

But the failure being named here is not the bind. The failure is the response to the bind. The motion criticises the government for “not reconvening the Dáil last week and not engaging directly with the protesters” and calls for “the maximum action necessary” to cut fuel prices. Read those two clauses together. The leadership of a republican party, of all parties, stood on the floor of the Dáil tonight asking the government to negotiate with the people Paul Murphy was physically driven from O’Connell Street by. The people who shouted “What’s a woman?” at him and made him turn and leave, and to give them a larger cheque than the €750 million already extracted from the surplus that funds disability allowance. The motion does not ask the question the leadership of a republican party should have been first to ask: who organised the anger before we arrived, and what does it tell us that we were not the ones organising it? The motion accepts the blockaders’ framing. It accepts, by doing so, that the cost-of-living crisis in Ireland is best addressed by a larger cheque to people who own trucks. It is the right motion of no confidence on the wrong grounds, and the wrong grounds will compound, because the organisers are not finished and the next demand will be larger.

There is a temptation, watching the government take a slap in the chamber tonight, to enjoy the slap and call the enjoyment a strategy. It is not. The pleasure of watching Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael squirm is real and earned and will not, by itself, replace them with anything. Psychological satisfaction is not political strategy, and a left that confuses the two will spend the next decade losing while feeling good about it.

Worse than that. The funeral cortège for this Coalition is gathering, and the front row is filling up with black ties on blue shirts. Tommy Robinson flew into Dublin last week. Bannon’s WarRoom ran the data on a Sunday evening. Reform UK is mapping the ground. The left, in this country and across the water, is tailing the cortège rather than walking its own, and tailing it under cover of a strategic posture, the politics of the worse, the better, that has not done the work of specifying what fills the vacuum when the system goes. The worse, the better is not a strategy. It is the absence of one, dressed up as patience. A left that cannot say what fills the vacuum is a left that has handed the vacuum to the people already filling it. The slap is not the plan. The plan is the question the motion did not ask, and the answer to the question is not “let it burn.”

One piece of clean left analysis was offered during the blockade week, and it came from the leader of the party the blockade organisers have spent two years smearing with homophobic memes. Roderic O’Gorman called for protesters to direct their energy at the US and Israeli embassies, naming the actual chain of cause and effect: the diesel spike in Ireland is a downstream consequence of a war the Irish working class had no say in, prosecuted by a government in Washington and a government in Tel Aviv, neither of which sits at a Cabinet table in Dublin. That was the framing a serious left politics needed. It came from the Greens, treated by everyone to the left of Fianna Fáil as the punchline of every cost-of-living conversation in this country for three years. The cleanest analysis of the week came from the party with the smallest claim on the populist-left vocabulary. That tells you something about who has been doing the work and who has been doing the posting.

I owe People Before Profit a concessive note here. On most weeks of most years, Paul Murphy and his colleagues are among the few voices in the Dáil asking the questions the Irish establishment would prefer were not asked. Their record on Gaza, on housing, on climate, on the policing of protest, has been clearer than that of any party larger than them. What I am about to say is not about Murphy’s politics in general. It is about this week’s politics, and this week’s politics were a mistake.

Murphy walked onto O’Connell Street during the blockade, was screamed at by people he himself identified as known far-right agitators (one shouted “What’s a woman?” at him), had to physically turn and leave, and afterwards told The Journal that the left should not abandon the protest. At a press conference this morning, hours before the vote, a journalist asked him directly about the presence at the protests of people making racist jokes online, including one prominent figure who had posted he would not care if Greta Thunberg was raped. Murphy’s answer did more work than his BlueSky thread had done on Sunday night. He named the people who screamed at him as right-wing Trump supporters cynically trying to hijack the movement, said they did not represent the contractors and hauliers on the ground, and pointed to reports of far-right figures being ejected from protests over the weekend by ordinary participants saying “this is not what we are here for.” He said explicitly that the left’s job was to refuse to let the movement be divided on race and sexuality, and to unite the vast majority - workers, small farmers, small businesses - on the basis of common interests.

That is a better answer than I gave him credit for on Sunday night, and I owe him the acknowledgement. Murphy is not collapsing the organisers/participants distinction. He is using it. What he is arguing, in effect, is that the left has to compete for the hegemonic ground on cost of living or lose it to the far right, and that the way to compete is to take the lead on the movement the far right is currently trying to hijack. That is a serious argument, recognisably the Gramscian move. Contest the ground, do not cede it. The instinct is right. A left that refuses to be on the side of people suffering from the cost-of-living spike because the wrong people showed up is a left that has chosen its comfort over its constituency.

But here is where I still disagree, and the disagreement is strategic rather than moral. Murphy’s prescription is that the trade unions should now take the lead on this , a new phase of this movement, built on these methods, because “militant action has won concessions.” Richard Boyd Barrett was more explicit at lunchtime, calling for a repeat of the tax marches of the 1980s and saying the lesson of last week is that “people power works.” But the specific methods that won the concessions this week were blockades organised in WhatsApp groups whose infrastructure was built by people Murphy has just, correctly, condemned. You cannot separate the method from the organiser here, because the method is the organiser’s template. The paid Facebook ad, the trucker-convoy framing, the infrastructure-obstruction model, the international amplifier pipeline. These are not neutral tools the left can pick up and use better. They are a specific political technology developed over the last two years by a specific organising tendency, and that tendency’s first successful domestic deployment extracted €750 million from the Irish state in six days. The lesson is not “these methods work, let us use them.” The lesson is that these methods work for this tendency, because the tendency built them for this purpose, and the vacuum that made them work is the vacuum we should be filling with something else. The slap is not the plan. Running the same play from the other side of the pitch is not the plan either. The plan is the question the motion did not ask: what fills the vacuum, and with what methods that are ours?

That is the second collapse. The opposition that should have been first to name what was happening in the WhatsApp groups did better than that this week — to Murphy’s credit, at the press conference this morning, he did name it. But having named it, he and his colleagues proposed to adopt the tactical template the tendency had just demonstrated, on the theory that the left could run the same play better. The right motion of no confidence was filed on the wrong grounds. The right grounds were sitting on the page in front of every opposition TD: €750 million in a weekend, against “the money is not there” for disabled people until 2027.

III. The tradition I write from

This is the part of the essay only I can write, because it requires standing inside the tradition rather than outside it.

The republican tradition’s hardest won insight is this: the legitimacy of a grievance does not depend on the respectability of its expression. Irish diplomats spent thirty years explaining this to British counterparts who insisted there could be no negotiation while the IRA was bombing, that calm discussion could not happen while the law was being broken, that to engage with the grievance was to legitimise the method. Those diplomats were right and the British were wrong. The Good Friday Agreement happened because enough people on both sides eventually accepted that the legitimacy of a grievance had to be addressed on its own terms, regardless of the respectability of its expression. That insight was built in Belfast and Derry, Dundalk and Crossmaglen and the H-Blocks, by people who counted the dead. It is the most important political idea Ireland has given the world in a century, and it belongs to the tradition I write from.

This week, that insight was claimed, structurally, whether they know it or not, by the people blockading Whitegate refinery, by every commentator pointing out that the Coalition’s response was illegal under European protest jurisprudence, and by Paul Murphy when he wrote that militant action wins concessions. The insight is doing real work for all of them. It is, in fact, the only insight that explains why the government had to engage with the blockaders rather than simply arrest them, and why writing the blockaders off as “illegitimate” because of the company they kept was a category error any Irish republican should have been able to spot.

And here is the thing a republican writer owes their tradition, when the tradition is being pulled somewhere the writer does not want it to go.

The insight is ours and it is being misused, and refusing to name the misuse is not loyalty to the tradition. It is its abandonment.

The lateral legitimacy that the IRA earned, the legitimacy that came from the size of its constituency and the depth of the grievance and the failure of the state to address either, was not transferable to anyone who could mobilise a constituency around a grievance. It was specific. It belonged to a struggle for self-determination on this island, against a state that had partitioned the island, in defence of communities that had been excluded from the franchise, the workforce, the housing list, and the protection of the law. The hunger strikers did not win lateral legitimacy because they were angry. They won it because the thing they were angry about was the thing this island had been angry about for eight hundred years, and the methods they used were the only methods the British state had left them.

What is being claimed this week is something different. The grievance about diesel is real. The architecture gap is real. The Coalition deserves to fall. None of that confers, on the people who organised the blockade and the people who flew in to amplify it, the lateral legitimacy that was won at Long Kesh. The international amplifiers of this week’s blockade, Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, Steve Bannon, the Reform UK ecosystem in Britain, are the direct heirs of the tabloid columnists who called Bobby Sands a terrorist and the Conservative ministers who sat on their hands while he died. These are not adjacent traditions. These are the people who were on the other side of the line the tradition was built to cross.

A republican writer who cannot say that has not understood what they inherited.

This is the third collapse, and it is the slowest and the hardest to see. The republican tradition is being reshaped from below by people who are neither republican nor left, because the tradition’s own institutional voices, Sinn Féin and the broader republican-left, have been afraid for two years to ask their own base where the anger was being organised. Brian Feeney has been writing about it. So has Patrick Murphy. So has Jude Collins. The November 2023 Dublin riots were the first warning. The blockades were the second. The third will arrive on its own schedule, and when it does, the question of who has been talking to the Sinn Féin voter base for the last two years will be answered by whoever shows up.

What does a republican writer owe the tradition, when the tradition is being pulled somewhere the writer does not want it to go?

The tradition was built by people who said no when standing still was easier. The tradition is not a brand and it is not a flag and it is not a vote share. It is a hard-won set of insights about how grievance, legitimacy, methods, and the state interact, and it was paid for in a currency I am not willing to spend a second time. Defending the insights from people who would have cheered when Sands died is not a departure from the tradition. It is the only thing the tradition has ever asked of anyone who carries it.

Closing

Three collapses in a weekend. A government that could not read its own country and reached for the only instrument it had ever built. An opposition that could not lead its own base and filed the right motion on the wrong grounds. A tradition that is being claimed by people the tradition was built against, while the institutional voices of the tradition look the other way.

The architecture gap that Sinéad O’Sullivan has named so cleanly is the ground all three collapses happened on. None of them would have happened the way they did in a state that had built itself instead of distributing itself. The €750 million was the cheque the premature state writes when it has nothing else. The motion was the motion an opposition writes when it has been outpaced by a base it stopped talking to. The silence is the silence of a tradition that has confused holding its vote share with holding its insights.

I still want this government to fall. I want the next one to be a government that has stopped confusing the surplus with a state, the cheque with a policy, the vote share with a constituency, and the methods with the grievance. I want a republican-left politics that can say to its own base, before anyone else does, that the people who flew Tommy Robinson into Dublin this week are not the answer to the cost of disability and that anyone who tells you they are is selling you something the tradition was built to refuse. And I want a left politics that can say what fills the vacuum, in this country, on this island, in the next ten years, because the people already filling it are not waiting for us to work it out.

Whoever shows up to that conversation first wins the next decade. This week showed who is currently showing up. It is not us. It is going to be us. And the work of making it us starts now, with naming what happened in the right words, on the right grounds, in the right order, and without flinching at any of the three.

Coda: The government survived by losing a minister

The Coalition survived tonight by 92 votes to 78. The government won the confidence vote in itself, will now pass its €505 million package of fuel supports on the back of it, and Budget 2027 will be the bill.

But the government survived by losing the Healy-Raes. In the middle of the debate, Kerry TD Michael Healy-Rae, Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, rose from the Coalition benches, announced he was resigning, said he considered himself “a gauge of the people of rural Ireland,” and walked across the chamber to vote no confidence in the leader of the country. His brother Danny, who had spent the morning on Radio Kerry calling the Taoiseach “arrogant” and demanding a change of leadership at the top of both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, voted with him. Two Healy-Raes breaking for the exit on the same evening is not a procedural footnote. It is a dynasty that has counted the ground under its own feet and found it giving way. The Healy-Raes are many things, but they are not political amateurs, and Kerry is not an audience that mistakes a serious signal for a tantrum.

That is what survival looks like in this Coalition tonight: a government that holds its numbers by shedding a junior minister and a whole political family in the same debate, while the cost-of-living crisis it could not read has still not been answered on its actual terms. The machine runs for another week. The next blockade is already being planned. Fresh attempts on Tuesday morning met by a new Garda pro-arrest strategy, drivers detained and trucks towed; Convoys on the roads of Belfast this afternoon; the Co Kildare organiser already on the record calling the package “an insult.”

The question is what fills the vacuum. The people already filling it ran a six day operation on O’Connell Street last week and extracted three-quarters of a billion euro from the Irish state. They have international amplifiers, a domestic organising infrastructure two years in the building, and a tactical template that has now been proven at scale on Irish soil. They are not waiting. The left has one job in the months ahead, and it is not to run their play from the other side of the pitch. It is to name what it would build, who it would build it with, and by what methods. Methods that are ours, drawn from a tradition that was paid for in a currency some of us remember and none of us should be willing to spend again.

That essay comes next. Tonight we named what happened. Tomorrow begins the work of naming what comes after.

It has to start with us, because nobody else is doing it.

⏩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 Money Is Not There

Louth For Ever ★ Louth For Ever ★ Three collapses in a weekend the blockade ended — notes on the government, the opposition, and the tradition I write from.

Photo by Stewart Munro on Unsplash

.The haulier was right about diesel

That sentence has to come first, or the rest does not earn its readers. The cost of diesel in Ireland in April 2026 was a genuine emergency. The man with one truck and three children and a contract he could not break was looking at a number on a pump no Cabinet minister had to look at. His grievance was real. The architecture gap underneath it, a state that has never built the institutions to absorb a shock like this without panic, was real. And the Coalition that survived a no-confidence vote tonight, having found more than €750 million in a weekend after spending six days hoping the temperature would drop on its own and having lost a junior minister on its own benches in the process, earned every word of what is coming.

But this essay is not about the haulier who came for diesel. It is about the WhatsApp group that told him where to park, the spokespeople who appeared on livestreams with Niall McConnell of Síol na hÉireann, and the elected representatives who used a fuel grievance as an audition tape for a politics the haulier himself did not want. Those are two different things. A serious left politics has to tell them apart, and the failure to do so is the second story of this week.

First, the cheque.

I. The government that could not read its own country

The Disability Federation of Ireland has been told that the permanent Cost of Disability payment cannot arrive until 2027 because, in the phrase the Department uses when it would like a conversation to end, the money is not there. The ESRI report the government itself commissioned found that the additional weekly cost of living with a disability in Ireland is between €204 and €290. Disability allowance is €244 a week, which is to say that for many recipients the entire payment is consumed by the cost of being disabled before food, shelter, or anything we might recognise as a life is touched. 2027 is the date the Cost of Disability payment becomes available. The money is not there until then.

On Sunday night, after an emergency Cabinet meeting, the government found more than €750 million in a weekend. Tánaiste Simon Harris confirmed on the record that the package came from the surplus and would affect Budget 2027. The same surplus. The same year. A different urgency.

The package is roughly two and a half times the annual budget for homeless services. It is more than four times what would be required to bring disability allowance into line with the ESRI’s own findings. It comfortably exceeds what Social Justice Ireland calculates would lift the 177,000 children living below the poverty line above it. None of those interventions has required an emergency Cabinet meeting at any point in the lifetime of this Coalition. A blockade on O’Connell Street and a refinery in Cork did. The hauliers’ direct-payment scheme, the government’s own description, is “open to anyone who owns a truck.” The Cost of Disability payment is open to no-one until 2027.

This is not, in the first instance, a moral observation. It is a mechanical one. The Coalition did not find €750 million in a weekend because it suddenly cared about hauliers. It found it because writing cheques is the only instrument it has. As Sinéad O’Sullivan has set out in her recent piece on Ireland’s “architecture gap,” 85% of Irish government spending goes to current transfers, direct payments to citizens, and 15% goes to building things. Ireland, in her phrase, treats its budget like a household that earns well and spends it all at the pub, so when the boiler breaks there is no plumber and no savings, only a €450 cheque and a recommendation to buy a blow-heater. The package announced on Sunday is the blow-heater. The Coalition reached for it because nothing else exists to reach for.

One Coalition minister, speaking anonymously to the Irish Times after the package was signed off, gave the Coalition’s own diagnosis in nine words: “We emboldened the mob, essentially, then nothing happened.” The minister meant it as criticism of the slow response. Read it as the Coalition’s accidental confession. The mob was emboldened because the Coalition had nothing to bring to the conversation except a six day pause and a cheque, and the cheque was the only instrument it had ever built.

What the package buys is not policy. It is a one-week stand-down. The organisers, the Co. Kildare farmer who called the 2.4c cut on green diesel “an insult,” the people still attempting fresh convoys on Tuesday morning, have already announced they are not finished. The Garda Commissioner, having declared an “exceptional event” for the first time in years, is now signalling the “full rigours of the law” for any future action. Seven arrests have been made in Cork city. The state’s only two visible instruments this week were a cheque and 200 gardaí with a water cannon. That is the architecture. That is what the surplus has built.

One detail that has not had the attention it deserves: Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan announced the Defence Forces deployment without informing the Minister for Defence, Helen McEntee. In every comparable European democracy the line between justice and defence is a constitutional red line, police and soldiers are different instruments, deployed against citizens under different legal frameworks, for different reasons. In Ireland this week the line was an inter-departmental phone call that did not happen. That is not a procedural footnote. That is a Coalition that does not know which of its own ministers is supposed to be putting soldiers on Irish streets, in the middle of putting soldiers on Irish streets. Labour nicknamed O’Callaghan “Rambo” during today’s debate. The nickname is funny. The underlying failure is not.

And then, as if to underline the point, a second instrument. On vote day, Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan confirmed he was writing to Coimisiún na Meán, the media regulator, to raise concerns about the fairness of coverage of the fuel protests. The National Union of Journalists called this “sinister and deeply disturbing.” They are right, and the sinister part is not the specific intervention — it is the reflex underneath it. A Coalition that cannot build, that cannot negotiate, that cannot respond to a domestic crisis with anything except cash and a public order unit, reaches for the regulator the moment the coverage displeases it. The first instrument is cash. The second is pressure on the press. Neither builds anything. Both are what is available when nothing else has been built.

This Coalition has earned a motion of no confidence. It earned one on Sunday. It would have earned one on a hundred previous Sundays for things that were not televised. The case for its fall is moral, not tactical: a state that can find €750 million in a weekend for a blockade and cannot find €100 million in five years for the Cost of Disability payment is a state that has chosen who counts. I want this government to fall. I want the next one to answer the question “where is the money?” without waiting to see who has parked a tractor on a bridge.

That is the first collapse. The Coalition spent six days hoping the country would calm down and then, when it didn’t, reached for the only instrument it had ever built. It read the country wrong because it has no apparatus for reading the country. The premature state, faced with its first serious domestic crisis in a generation, did the only thing the premature state knows how to do.

II. The opposition that could not lead its own base

The Ireland Thinks poll published in last Sunday’s Independent found that 56% of the Irish public backed the protesters and 38% opposed them. The internals are where the story is. 96% of Sinn Féin voters backed the protests. 94%of Aontú voters. 99%of Independent Ireland voters. 78% of independents. Among Fine Gael voters, 18%. Among Fianna Fáil voters, 14%.

Read those numbers slowly. The Sinn Féin base was not following the Sinn Féin leadership into the blockade conversation. The Sinn Féin base was already inside the blockade conversation before the leadership got there. The leadership was trailing.

This is the most important fact of the week and it is the one that has been least discussed. Sinn Féin’s Sunday lunchtime motion of no confidence, filed before the €750 million package had even been signed off, was not a leadership decision in any meaningful sense. It was the only motion available to a party that cannot publicly cross 96% of its own voters in the middle of a cost-of-living spike. Pearse Doherty’s statement that “this government clearly aren’t listening to the people” was technically wrong and tactically inevitable. The government was listening; it was listening to the wrong people with the wrong instrument. So was Doherty.

The most generous reading of Sinn Féin’s week is this: a party that needs to convert 25% support into a parliamentary majority cannot afford to be on the opposite side of 96% of its own voters at the moment the cost of living becomes the only conversation in the country, and the only motion available on Sunday lunchtime was one that asked the government to give the blockaders more, not one that asked the base who had been talking to it for the last two years, and why it had not been Sinn Féin. That is a structural bind. It is not nothing. A party in a structural bind deserves the courtesy of being told so.

But the failure being named here is not the bind. The failure is the response to the bind. The motion criticises the government for “not reconvening the Dáil last week and not engaging directly with the protesters” and calls for “the maximum action necessary” to cut fuel prices. Read those two clauses together. The leadership of a republican party, of all parties, stood on the floor of the Dáil tonight asking the government to negotiate with the people Paul Murphy was physically driven from O’Connell Street by. The people who shouted “What’s a woman?” at him and made him turn and leave, and to give them a larger cheque than the €750 million already extracted from the surplus that funds disability allowance. The motion does not ask the question the leadership of a republican party should have been first to ask: who organised the anger before we arrived, and what does it tell us that we were not the ones organising it? The motion accepts the blockaders’ framing. It accepts, by doing so, that the cost-of-living crisis in Ireland is best addressed by a larger cheque to people who own trucks. It is the right motion of no confidence on the wrong grounds, and the wrong grounds will compound, because the organisers are not finished and the next demand will be larger.

There is a temptation, watching the government take a slap in the chamber tonight, to enjoy the slap and call the enjoyment a strategy. It is not. The pleasure of watching Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael squirm is real and earned and will not, by itself, replace them with anything. Psychological satisfaction is not political strategy, and a left that confuses the two will spend the next decade losing while feeling good about it.

Worse than that. The funeral cortège for this Coalition is gathering, and the front row is filling up with black ties on blue shirts. Tommy Robinson flew into Dublin last week. Bannon’s WarRoom ran the data on a Sunday evening. Reform UK is mapping the ground. The left, in this country and across the water, is tailing the cortège rather than walking its own, and tailing it under cover of a strategic posture, the politics of the worse, the better, that has not done the work of specifying what fills the vacuum when the system goes. The worse, the better is not a strategy. It is the absence of one, dressed up as patience. A left that cannot say what fills the vacuum is a left that has handed the vacuum to the people already filling it. The slap is not the plan. The plan is the question the motion did not ask, and the answer to the question is not “let it burn.”

One piece of clean left analysis was offered during the blockade week, and it came from the leader of the party the blockade organisers have spent two years smearing with homophobic memes. Roderic O’Gorman called for protesters to direct their energy at the US and Israeli embassies, naming the actual chain of cause and effect: the diesel spike in Ireland is a downstream consequence of a war the Irish working class had no say in, prosecuted by a government in Washington and a government in Tel Aviv, neither of which sits at a Cabinet table in Dublin. That was the framing a serious left politics needed. It came from the Greens, treated by everyone to the left of Fianna Fáil as the punchline of every cost-of-living conversation in this country for three years. The cleanest analysis of the week came from the party with the smallest claim on the populist-left vocabulary. That tells you something about who has been doing the work and who has been doing the posting.

I owe People Before Profit a concessive note here. On most weeks of most years, Paul Murphy and his colleagues are among the few voices in the Dáil asking the questions the Irish establishment would prefer were not asked. Their record on Gaza, on housing, on climate, on the policing of protest, has been clearer than that of any party larger than them. What I am about to say is not about Murphy’s politics in general. It is about this week’s politics, and this week’s politics were a mistake.

Murphy walked onto O’Connell Street during the blockade, was screamed at by people he himself identified as known far-right agitators (one shouted “What’s a woman?” at him), had to physically turn and leave, and afterwards told The Journal that the left should not abandon the protest. At a press conference this morning, hours before the vote, a journalist asked him directly about the presence at the protests of people making racist jokes online, including one prominent figure who had posted he would not care if Greta Thunberg was raped. Murphy’s answer did more work than his BlueSky thread had done on Sunday night. He named the people who screamed at him as right-wing Trump supporters cynically trying to hijack the movement, said they did not represent the contractors and hauliers on the ground, and pointed to reports of far-right figures being ejected from protests over the weekend by ordinary participants saying “this is not what we are here for.” He said explicitly that the left’s job was to refuse to let the movement be divided on race and sexuality, and to unite the vast majority - workers, small farmers, small businesses - on the basis of common interests.

That is a better answer than I gave him credit for on Sunday night, and I owe him the acknowledgement. Murphy is not collapsing the organisers/participants distinction. He is using it. What he is arguing, in effect, is that the left has to compete for the hegemonic ground on cost of living or lose it to the far right, and that the way to compete is to take the lead on the movement the far right is currently trying to hijack. That is a serious argument, recognisably the Gramscian move. Contest the ground, do not cede it. The instinct is right. A left that refuses to be on the side of people suffering from the cost-of-living spike because the wrong people showed up is a left that has chosen its comfort over its constituency.

But here is where I still disagree, and the disagreement is strategic rather than moral. Murphy’s prescription is that the trade unions should now take the lead on this , a new phase of this movement, built on these methods, because “militant action has won concessions.” Richard Boyd Barrett was more explicit at lunchtime, calling for a repeat of the tax marches of the 1980s and saying the lesson of last week is that “people power works.” But the specific methods that won the concessions this week were blockades organised in WhatsApp groups whose infrastructure was built by people Murphy has just, correctly, condemned. You cannot separate the method from the organiser here, because the method is the organiser’s template. The paid Facebook ad, the trucker-convoy framing, the infrastructure-obstruction model, the international amplifier pipeline. These are not neutral tools the left can pick up and use better. They are a specific political technology developed over the last two years by a specific organising tendency, and that tendency’s first successful domestic deployment extracted €750 million from the Irish state in six days. The lesson is not “these methods work, let us use them.” The lesson is that these methods work for this tendency, because the tendency built them for this purpose, and the vacuum that made them work is the vacuum we should be filling with something else. The slap is not the plan. Running the same play from the other side of the pitch is not the plan either. The plan is the question the motion did not ask: what fills the vacuum, and with what methods that are ours?

That is the second collapse. The opposition that should have been first to name what was happening in the WhatsApp groups did better than that this week — to Murphy’s credit, at the press conference this morning, he did name it. But having named it, he and his colleagues proposed to adopt the tactical template the tendency had just demonstrated, on the theory that the left could run the same play better. The right motion of no confidence was filed on the wrong grounds. The right grounds were sitting on the page in front of every opposition TD: €750 million in a weekend, against “the money is not there” for disabled people until 2027.

III. The tradition I write from

This is the part of the essay only I can write, because it requires standing inside the tradition rather than outside it.

The republican tradition’s hardest won insight is this: the legitimacy of a grievance does not depend on the respectability of its expression. Irish diplomats spent thirty years explaining this to British counterparts who insisted there could be no negotiation while the IRA was bombing, that calm discussion could not happen while the law was being broken, that to engage with the grievance was to legitimise the method. Those diplomats were right and the British were wrong. The Good Friday Agreement happened because enough people on both sides eventually accepted that the legitimacy of a grievance had to be addressed on its own terms, regardless of the respectability of its expression. That insight was built in Belfast and Derry, Dundalk and Crossmaglen and the H-Blocks, by people who counted the dead. It is the most important political idea Ireland has given the world in a century, and it belongs to the tradition I write from.

This week, that insight was claimed, structurally, whether they know it or not, by the people blockading Whitegate refinery, by every commentator pointing out that the Coalition’s response was illegal under European protest jurisprudence, and by Paul Murphy when he wrote that militant action wins concessions. The insight is doing real work for all of them. It is, in fact, the only insight that explains why the government had to engage with the blockaders rather than simply arrest them, and why writing the blockaders off as “illegitimate” because of the company they kept was a category error any Irish republican should have been able to spot.

And here is the thing a republican writer owes their tradition, when the tradition is being pulled somewhere the writer does not want it to go.

The insight is ours and it is being misused, and refusing to name the misuse is not loyalty to the tradition. It is its abandonment.

The lateral legitimacy that the IRA earned, the legitimacy that came from the size of its constituency and the depth of the grievance and the failure of the state to address either, was not transferable to anyone who could mobilise a constituency around a grievance. It was specific. It belonged to a struggle for self-determination on this island, against a state that had partitioned the island, in defence of communities that had been excluded from the franchise, the workforce, the housing list, and the protection of the law. The hunger strikers did not win lateral legitimacy because they were angry. They won it because the thing they were angry about was the thing this island had been angry about for eight hundred years, and the methods they used were the only methods the British state had left them.

What is being claimed this week is something different. The grievance about diesel is real. The architecture gap is real. The Coalition deserves to fall. None of that confers, on the people who organised the blockade and the people who flew in to amplify it, the lateral legitimacy that was won at Long Kesh. The international amplifiers of this week’s blockade, Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, Steve Bannon, the Reform UK ecosystem in Britain, are the direct heirs of the tabloid columnists who called Bobby Sands a terrorist and the Conservative ministers who sat on their hands while he died. These are not adjacent traditions. These are the people who were on the other side of the line the tradition was built to cross.

A republican writer who cannot say that has not understood what they inherited.

This is the third collapse, and it is the slowest and the hardest to see. The republican tradition is being reshaped from below by people who are neither republican nor left, because the tradition’s own institutional voices, Sinn Féin and the broader republican-left, have been afraid for two years to ask their own base where the anger was being organised. Brian Feeney has been writing about it. So has Patrick Murphy. So has Jude Collins. The November 2023 Dublin riots were the first warning. The blockades were the second. The third will arrive on its own schedule, and when it does, the question of who has been talking to the Sinn Féin voter base for the last two years will be answered by whoever shows up.

What does a republican writer owe the tradition, when the tradition is being pulled somewhere the writer does not want it to go?

The tradition was built by people who said no when standing still was easier. The tradition is not a brand and it is not a flag and it is not a vote share. It is a hard-won set of insights about how grievance, legitimacy, methods, and the state interact, and it was paid for in a currency I am not willing to spend a second time. Defending the insights from people who would have cheered when Sands died is not a departure from the tradition. It is the only thing the tradition has ever asked of anyone who carries it.

Closing

Three collapses in a weekend. A government that could not read its own country and reached for the only instrument it had ever built. An opposition that could not lead its own base and filed the right motion on the wrong grounds. A tradition that is being claimed by people the tradition was built against, while the institutional voices of the tradition look the other way.

The architecture gap that Sinéad O’Sullivan has named so cleanly is the ground all three collapses happened on. None of them would have happened the way they did in a state that had built itself instead of distributing itself. The €750 million was the cheque the premature state writes when it has nothing else. The motion was the motion an opposition writes when it has been outpaced by a base it stopped talking to. The silence is the silence of a tradition that has confused holding its vote share with holding its insights.

I still want this government to fall. I want the next one to be a government that has stopped confusing the surplus with a state, the cheque with a policy, the vote share with a constituency, and the methods with the grievance. I want a republican-left politics that can say to its own base, before anyone else does, that the people who flew Tommy Robinson into Dublin this week are not the answer to the cost of disability and that anyone who tells you they are is selling you something the tradition was built to refuse. And I want a left politics that can say what fills the vacuum, in this country, on this island, in the next ten years, because the people already filling it are not waiting for us to work it out.

Whoever shows up to that conversation first wins the next decade. This week showed who is currently showing up. It is not us. It is going to be us. And the work of making it us starts now, with naming what happened in the right words, on the right grounds, in the right order, and without flinching at any of the three.

Coda: The government survived by losing a minister

The Coalition survived tonight by 92 votes to 78. The government won the confidence vote in itself, will now pass its €505 million package of fuel supports on the back of it, and Budget 2027 will be the bill.

But the government survived by losing the Healy-Raes. In the middle of the debate, Kerry TD Michael Healy-Rae, Minister of State at the Department of Agriculture, rose from the Coalition benches, announced he was resigning, said he considered himself “a gauge of the people of rural Ireland,” and walked across the chamber to vote no confidence in the leader of the country. His brother Danny, who had spent the morning on Radio Kerry calling the Taoiseach “arrogant” and demanding a change of leadership at the top of both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, voted with him. Two Healy-Raes breaking for the exit on the same evening is not a procedural footnote. It is a dynasty that has counted the ground under its own feet and found it giving way. The Healy-Raes are many things, but they are not political amateurs, and Kerry is not an audience that mistakes a serious signal for a tantrum.

That is what survival looks like in this Coalition tonight: a government that holds its numbers by shedding a junior minister and a whole political family in the same debate, while the cost-of-living crisis it could not read has still not been answered on its actual terms. The machine runs for another week. The next blockade is already being planned. Fresh attempts on Tuesday morning met by a new Garda pro-arrest strategy, drivers detained and trucks towed; Convoys on the roads of Belfast this afternoon; the Co Kildare organiser already on the record calling the package “an insult.”

The question is what fills the vacuum. The people already filling it ran a six day operation on O’Connell Street last week and extracted three-quarters of a billion euro from the Irish state. They have international amplifiers, a domestic organising infrastructure two years in the building, and a tactical template that has now been proven at scale on Irish soil. They are not waiting. The left has one job in the months ahead, and it is not to run their play from the other side of the pitch. It is to name what it would build, who it would build it with, and by what methods. Methods that are ours, drawn from a tradition that was paid for in a currency some of us remember and none of us should be willing to spend again.

That essay comes next. Tonight we named what happened. Tomorrow begins the work of naming what comes after.

It has to start with us, because nobody else is doing it.

⏩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.
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