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Louth For Ever ★ writing on 26-April-2026.

A fourth note on the questions the political moment is asking: whose grievance is recognised, whose form of expression is permitted, and what the political left would have to be able to say.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Jennifer Horgan asked, in the Examiner last month, whose anger is permitted to bring society to a standstill, and what it means that the answer is gendered. The tradition I write from has been asking, for forty years, what the relationship is between the legitimacy of a grievance and the legitimacy of its expression, and whether the tradition that produced the question has become careless about its own answer. The two questions are the same question. This is the essay that says so.

Section I: What the two arguments named

Jennifer Horgan wrote a piece in the Examiner on the 17th April that did one thing carefully. Her mother had been prevented from reaching her dying brother-in-law during the fuel blockade weekend. The piece begins from that fact and runs a substitution exercise. Horgan asks her reader to imagine the same form of disruptive protest performed by other suffering groups: parents of children with unmet needs blocking school gates, disabled people preventing able-bodied access to clinics, homeless people stopping people getting to work, women preventing the state exams from running. Each substitution is plausible as a hypothetical and impossible as a political reality. The point she is making by holding up the absences is that the form of protest available to the hauliers is not available to those other constituencies. The form is gendered, classed, and structured by which kinds of suffering the political imagination has decided to recognise as legitimate.

Horgan calls what was set that weekend a new standard for what angry men can achieve. She also calls it a new kind of terrible beauty. The Yeats reference is doing serious work. Easter 1916 is the foundational lyric of Irish republican mythology, and Horgan is invoking it in a context that is the inverse of what Yeats meant, beauty terrible because it produces destruction in service of a legitimate cause. She is asking whether the blockade week deserves the framing or parodies it. She does not answer the question. She lets the reader hold it.

The tradition I write from has been holding a related question for forty years. The question is whether the legitimacy of a grievance and the legitimacy of its form of expression can be separated. The tradition’s answer, hard-won and historically vindicated, is that they can. Engagement with grievance is appropriate even when the form of its expression is one the state cannot itself endorse. This is the insight that produced the Good Friday Agreement, and it is the insight located at Long Kesh and named, in earlier writing, lateral legitimacy.

But the tradition has been less clear on a second question that follows from the first. The lateral legitimacy a constituency earns is not infinitely transferable. It belongs to that constituency, in that historical moment, against that adversary, through the forms that constituency had been left with. It does not become a permission slip for any movement that can mobilise grievance. The principle is one thing. The transferability is another. The tradition has been clearer on the principle than on the limit, and the gap is where most of the trouble lives.

Horgan’s question and the tradition’s question converge at a specific point. Horgan is asking which forms of expression are available to which constituencies. The tradition is asking how grievance and form of expression relate to each other. Both questions, properly held, are asking about the same thing. The political conditions under which a grievance becomes visible and the form of its expression becomes legitimate. The form is not neutral. It is a political artefact. Whose form gets recognised, and whose does not, is the question both writers are touching from different sides. Neither has fully named the relationship. That relationship is what this essay is trying to articulate.

Section II: The form is the artefact

The relationship Horgan and the tradition are both touching, when their questions are set beside each other, is this. Forms of expression are not neutral instruments that constituencies pick up and use. The forms themselves are political artefacts. They are produced by histories, by economies, by the gendered and classed structures of who has access to what, and by the long memory of which kinds of action a society has trained itself to recognise as legitimate political behaviour and which kinds it has trained itself to dismiss as irrelevant, hysterical, or criminal.

The hauliers had access to a form of expression that worked. They had vehicles. They had the infrastructure to coordinate them. They had the assumption, built into Irish political culture across decades, that men with trucks blocking roads were doing politics. The infrastructure had been built before the protest began. The form was waiting for them. The grievance about diesel was real, and the constituency was real, but the form they used was not invented in the heat of frustration. It was already there. It had been there for years.

The form was not there for the women Horgan named. There is no inherited cultural infrastructure in Ireland through which carers of children with disabilities arrive at the gates of the Department of Education with vehicles, fuel, fundraising, communications networks, and the assumed legitimacy of a recognised political constituency. The form has not been built. The cultural memory does not exist. If those carers blocked the gates, the political response would not be debate about engagement. It would be removal. The form does not transfer to them, not because their grievance is less real, but because the structural conditions that make a form of expression available are themselves the product of which constituencies the political imagination has been organised around.

This is the relationship the two questions converge on. The legitimacy of a grievance and the legitimacy of its form of expression are separable in principle, as the tradition correctly insists. But the form available is not random. It is the residue of which constituencies have been politically organised, which struggles have been fought, which infrastructures have been built. The form a grievance can find is shaped by who has fought before, who has built the networks, who has been recognised as a legitimate political subject in earlier political moments. Forms of expression carry their histories with them.

What this means for the fuel week is that the haulier protest did not invent its form. It inherited it. The form had been built by decades of male, vehicle-based, economically-organised political action that had a place in the cultural imagination as legitimate political activity. The carers, the disabled, the homeless, the women whose grievances the trilogy has been touching on across these essays, they have not been politically organised in ways that would have built equivalent infrastructure. The absence of that infrastructure is not a coincidence. It is the political residue of forty years in which certain constituencies have been organised and others have been left to wait. The form available is the artefact of that history. The form not available is the artefact of the same history.

Section III: The fuel week, read through the convergence

Mary Lou McDonald gave three public interventions across the weekend the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis closed. In her keynote address on Saturday 25th April she described the fuel protesters as having gathered with tractors, trucks and lorries — the tools of their livelihoods. She accused Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael of trying to buy off workers with half-measures. On Sunday afternoon, on BBCNI Sunday Politics, Mark Carruthers put Chris Donnelly’s polling analysis from the Irish News to her directly. McDonald praised the construction of Donnelly’s sentence and then declared the leadership question settled by her re-election by the membership at the Ard Fheis. On Monday evening, on Virgin Media’s Monday with Gavan Reilly, she made a longer case. She defended the right to protest disruptively. She said she had heard from women in inner-city Dublin who told her they had felt safer with the lads and their tractors present. She drew a distinction, when Reilly raised the experience of the Muslim Sisters of Éire, between protesters and others who had used the platform of the protest for other purposes. On the leadership question she said there had been a whole lot of, with all due respect, hot air, and that the party had decided that she was the leader of the party.

Photo by Gabriel Ramos on Unsplash

Three rhetorical moves are doing the work across these interventions. Each can be held up against the analytical frame Section II established, and each can be tested for what it carries and what it leaves out.

The first move is the framing of the hauliers as workers using the tools of their livelihoods. This framing erases the structure of the protest’s organisation. The form was not a spontaneous use of vehicles by workers under pressure. It was a coordinated political action whose logistics, fundraising, communications, and amplification had been organised by a network that pre-existed the protest. The McCarthy GoFundMe domain was registered seven weeks before the blockade began. The international amplifiers, Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, the Reform UK ecosystem, arrived on cue. McDonald’s framing collapses the constituency and the form into each other and presents both as worker self-action. The constituency is real. The form was built. The framing erases the building.

The second move is the women-and-tractors claim. McDonald said that women in the inner city had told her they felt safer with the protesters and their vehicles present. The claim is unverifiable in any specific way. It is also doing something specific. It produces a different set of women, the ones who allegedly felt safer, to displace the women whose lives the blockade actually disrupted. Jennifer Horgan’s mother, prevented from reaching her dying brother-in-law, is not in McDonald’s frame. The Muslim Sisters of Éire, told they were not welcome at their own street soup-kitchen, are bracketed in the frame as the result of others using the platform. The carers, the nurses, the women trying to reach work or hospitals or family, do not appear at all. The form rehabilitates itself by producing the women who confirm it and disappearing the women who would not.

The third move is the parsing of protesters from others using the platform. This is the rhetorical operation by which Sinn Féin retains alignment with the underlying grievance while disclaiming the worst expressions of the form. The line is drawn without naming who the others were. The McCarthy infrastructure is not named. The far-right amplifiers are not named. Gavin Pepper, the Dublin councillor who has called for mass deportations of immigrants and who agreed with McDonald’s interview on the programme’s Facebook page, is not named. The line that distinguishes legitimate protesters from illegitimate platform-users is presented as having been visible to onlookers. It was not. It was, and is, a rhetorical line drawn after the fact, doing work that political infrastructure should have been doing in advance and was not built to do.

What these three moves share is that each one preserves Sinn Féin’s ability to claim the constituency without taking responsibility for the form. The grievance is real. The form was captured. The party wants the first and not the second. The framing is the operation by which it tries to have both.

A third instance of the same principle landed on the same weekend. On Saturday night, while the Ard Fheis was in session, the New IRA hijacked a delivery driver in Twinbrook and used him to deliver a car bomb to Dunmurry police station. The group claimed responsibility on Monday and threatened to target police officers in their homes. The First Minister condemned the attack alongside the DUP Deputy First Minister and the Chief Constable. The dissident republican claim to lateral legitimacy fails on the same principle by which the haulier blockade’s claim fails. The grievance the New IRA cites is held by some who hold it as real. The form of expression they have chosen does not have the constituency, the historical conditions, or the political reality that produced the legitimacy the H-Block prisoners earned. The principle is consistent across both cases. Lateral legitimacy is not transferable. The form earns nothing on its own.

Section IV: The form available, the form not available

Horgan’s substitution exercise did one thing and stopped. She listed the constituencies whose grievance is at least as real as the hauliers’ and asked her reader to imagine those constituencies using the same form of disruptive protest. The substitutions are plausible as moral claims and impossible as political realities. She did not theorise why the impossibility holds. The exercise did its work by demonstrating the asymmetry. The theorisation is the work this essay can do.

The substitutions feel impossible because the form of expression is not separable from the infrastructure that has produced it. The hauliers’ form was inherited from decades of male, vehicle-based, economically-organised political action that has been culturally legible as politics. The carers’ form does not exist not because carers are less aggrieved but because the political organisation of caring labour has not been built. There has been no thirty-year cultural training in which Irish people learned to see women with prams blocking school gates as political subjects. There has been no infrastructure of fundraising, communications, vehicles, and amplifiers built around the unmet needs of children with disabilities. The cultural memory does not have a place for it. The political imagination has not been organised around it.

This is the residue Section II named. The constituencies whose form is unavailable are unavailable because the political work of building their form has not been done. Not because their grievance is illegitimate. Not because their numbers are insufficient. Because no political project has organised the form their grievance could take.

The numbers, when they are finally counted, are striking. The Hope and Courage Collective published its annual report on 13th April, three days after McDonald’s Reilly interview. The report’s findings are worth holding alongside the framings of the past week. 66% of people in Ireland agree that immigrants contribute positively to Irish culture and community, up two points from the previous year. 79% agree that working-class people are struggling because of systemic inequality. 69% agree that wealthy people are successful because they were given more opportunities than others. 80% agree that minority ethnic communities face greater barriers to success than white people. 75% support the freedom of transgender people to live their lives.

These are not contested propositions. They are the settled common sense of a substantial supermajority of the Irish population. The constituency that holds these views is real. It is large. It is values-aligned around a recognisably progressive political position. What it does not have is a form of expression. There is no organised infrastructure through which the 79% who recognise systemic inequality coordinate their political action. There is no fundraising apparatus, no communications network, no vehicles, no amplifiers that arrive on cue. The Hope and Courage Collective’s report is itself the only sustained piece of public infrastructure organising this constituency, and a research report is not a political form.

The far-right has built infrastructure. The supermajority has not. The asymmetry is not coincidence. It is the artefact of a political moment in which the form of expression has been built by those willing to do the building, and the constituency that would oppose them has been waiting for someone else to do the work. The constituency that lost the blockade week was not absent. It was present, in the 79% and the 66% and the 80%. What was absent was its form.

Section V: The fifth commitment

Earlier writing in this sequence proposed four commitments that any serious political project on this island would have to be capable of making. The four were honesty about the fossil fuel transition, the rebuilding of state capacity, the refusal of enemy-of-the-people politics, and the cultivation of internal dissent as a positive value rather than an embarrassment to be managed. The four are the bottom line below which the project cannot be absorbed. The three essays before this one made the case that no current Irish political formation holds them, and that their absence is the trajectory the trilogy has been mapping.

The synthesis these four essays have arrived at proposes a fifth commitment, implicit in the previous four but worth naming on its own. The political project this island needs would have to be capable of building forms of political expression for constituencies whose grievance is not currently politically visible, and of doing so without absorbing the analyses that named the invisibility in the first place.

The fifth commitment has two parts and they go together. The first part is the building work. The form is the artefact. If the form is not present for a constituency, no amount of moral correctness about the legitimacy of its grievance produces political expression. The work is to build the infrastructure: the fundraising apparatus, the communications networks, the cultural training that makes the constituency legible as a political subject, the long memory of action that allows the form to be recognised when it is used. This is decades of work. It is the kind of work the populist right has been doing while the political left has been waiting for someone else to do it.

The second part is the discipline of not absorbing the critique. When a writer like Jennifer Horgan names the gendered asymmetry of recognised grievance, the political response from the left should not be to claim the analysis for the left’s own positioning. It should be to take the analysis seriously and ask what would have to change. When a writer like Chris Donnelly names the trajectory of a particular party with electoral clarity, the response from inside that party should not be to deflect with style. When the tradition I write from has been holding the question of grievance and form for forty years, the political left should not flatter itself that the question can be resolved by adopting the language of the tradition without doing the work the tradition has been pointing at.

The McDonald rhetorical apparatus over the past week has demonstrated what absorption looks like in real time. The workers framing absorbs the haulier constituency without naming the form’s organisation. The women-and-tractors claim absorbs the feminist critique without engaging it. The procedural framing on leadership absorbs structural critique into membership-vote vindication. The party performs the moves the trilogy’s previous essays predicted it would perform, and the moves work in the short term because the alternative, a political form built around the supermajority Hope and Courage just documented, does not exist.

The fifth commitment is the commitment to refuse this absorption from inside the left. The work is not just rhetorical positioning. It is structural and slow. It requires building forms of expression for constituencies that have been waiting for forms, refusing the easy absorption of feminist and dissident analyses into party-political messaging, and accepting that the political left this country needs will not be built in an electoral cycle. It will be built by people willing to do decades of work that no current Irish political formation is currently doing, and that the populist right has been doing for years.

Section VI: What is owed and what is not finished

The essay does what synthesis essays do. It brings two arguments into the same room and asks whether they recognise each other. They do, but only when held up alongside each other carefully. Neither argument names the other in its own register. Both arguments need each other to do the work neither can do alone.

Jennifer Horgan’s piece in the Examiner is its own work. It deserves a longer engagement than this essay has given it, and a wider readership than the political-commentary discourse will give it on its own. The substitution exercise she ran will keep doing work for any writer who picks it up carefully. The gendered moral economy she named is the analytical territory the Irish left will have to engage seriously if it is to engage anything seriously.

The tradition I write from is also its own work. Forty years of writing, much of it produced from inside conditions the writers did not choose, much of it ignored by the political class whose decisions the writing was tracking. The tradition’s question about grievance and form is the question the political moment is now asking from every direction at once. The tradition’s answer, when it is held honestly, is more textured than either its critics or its admirers tend to recognise.

What this essay has tried to do is bring the two together and ask what the synthesis points at. The fifth commitment is the proposal. The work that follows from it is decades of work that no current political formation in Ireland is doing. The supermajority that would benefit from the work is real and it is waiting. The form that would let it act has not been built. The asymmetry between what the populist right has built and what the political left has not is the political reality that the next decade will be decided inside.

I am one writer extending what others have given me. The work continues at a pace I am not the one setting. What remains to be said, others will say in their own time and their own register. This essay closes not because the argument is complete but because it has done what one piece of writing can do.

References

Primary commentary engaged in this essay

Horgan, Jennifer. “We have set a new standard for what angry men can achieve. It’s terrifying.” Irish Examiner, 17 April 2026.

Donnelly, Chris. “Warning bells should be ringing in Sinn Féin after Bobby Sands statue vote.” The Irish News, 26 April 2026.

Mary Lou McDonald public interventions, 25–27 April 2026

McDonald, Mary Lou. Keynote address to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, Belfast, 25 April 2026. Coverage: ITV News, “Sinn Féin president says referendum can be achieved by 2030,” 26 April 2026.

McDonald, Mary Lou. Interview with Mark Carruthers, Sunday Politics, BBC Northern Ireland, 26 April 2026.

McDonald, Mary Lou. Interview with Gavan Reilly, Monday with Gavan Reilly, Virgin Media, 27 April 2026. Coverage: Press Association wire, syndicated across regional Irish press including Kildare Nationalist, Roscommon Herald, Longford Live, Carlow Nationalist, Waterford News & Star, Louth Live, Laois Live, and Leitrim Live, 28 April 2026.

Empirical and contextual sources

Hope and Courage Collective. Ireland in Focus 2025: Mind the Gap. Published 30 April 2026. Reported by Conneely, Ailbhe, “Far-right doesn’t have broad public support, but is ‘shaping the conversation’ — report,” RTÉ News, 30 April 2026.

McDermott, Stephen. “GoFundMe organisers behind fuel protest: domain registrations and online infrastructure.” The Journal, April 2026.

Young, Connla. “New IRA threatens to target homes of PSNI officers as it claims station attack.” The Irish News, 28 April 2026.

On the Sands statue and the SDLP resignation

“Political row over Bobby Sands statue erected without planning permission.” Irish Examiner, 24 April 2026.

“Deputy mayor quits SDLP over Bobby Sands statue vote dispute.” BBC News Northern Ireland, 26 April 2026.

Companion essays in this sequence

The Blockade Is the Message: A first note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published April 2026. Republished on The Pensive Quill.

The Money Is Not There: A second note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published April 2026. Republished on The Pensive Quill.

What Would Have to Be Built: A third and propositional note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published 20 April 2026.

⏩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 Tools Of Their Livelihoods

Louth For Ever ★ writing on 26-April-2026.

A fourth note on the questions the political moment is asking: whose grievance is recognised, whose form of expression is permitted, and what the political left would have to be able to say.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

Jennifer Horgan asked, in the Examiner last month, whose anger is permitted to bring society to a standstill, and what it means that the answer is gendered. The tradition I write from has been asking, for forty years, what the relationship is between the legitimacy of a grievance and the legitimacy of its expression, and whether the tradition that produced the question has become careless about its own answer. The two questions are the same question. This is the essay that says so.

Section I: What the two arguments named

Jennifer Horgan wrote a piece in the Examiner on the 17th April that did one thing carefully. Her mother had been prevented from reaching her dying brother-in-law during the fuel blockade weekend. The piece begins from that fact and runs a substitution exercise. Horgan asks her reader to imagine the same form of disruptive protest performed by other suffering groups: parents of children with unmet needs blocking school gates, disabled people preventing able-bodied access to clinics, homeless people stopping people getting to work, women preventing the state exams from running. Each substitution is plausible as a hypothetical and impossible as a political reality. The point she is making by holding up the absences is that the form of protest available to the hauliers is not available to those other constituencies. The form is gendered, classed, and structured by which kinds of suffering the political imagination has decided to recognise as legitimate.

Horgan calls what was set that weekend a new standard for what angry men can achieve. She also calls it a new kind of terrible beauty. The Yeats reference is doing serious work. Easter 1916 is the foundational lyric of Irish republican mythology, and Horgan is invoking it in a context that is the inverse of what Yeats meant, beauty terrible because it produces destruction in service of a legitimate cause. She is asking whether the blockade week deserves the framing or parodies it. She does not answer the question. She lets the reader hold it.

The tradition I write from has been holding a related question for forty years. The question is whether the legitimacy of a grievance and the legitimacy of its form of expression can be separated. The tradition’s answer, hard-won and historically vindicated, is that they can. Engagement with grievance is appropriate even when the form of its expression is one the state cannot itself endorse. This is the insight that produced the Good Friday Agreement, and it is the insight located at Long Kesh and named, in earlier writing, lateral legitimacy.

But the tradition has been less clear on a second question that follows from the first. The lateral legitimacy a constituency earns is not infinitely transferable. It belongs to that constituency, in that historical moment, against that adversary, through the forms that constituency had been left with. It does not become a permission slip for any movement that can mobilise grievance. The principle is one thing. The transferability is another. The tradition has been clearer on the principle than on the limit, and the gap is where most of the trouble lives.

Horgan’s question and the tradition’s question converge at a specific point. Horgan is asking which forms of expression are available to which constituencies. The tradition is asking how grievance and form of expression relate to each other. Both questions, properly held, are asking about the same thing. The political conditions under which a grievance becomes visible and the form of its expression becomes legitimate. The form is not neutral. It is a political artefact. Whose form gets recognised, and whose does not, is the question both writers are touching from different sides. Neither has fully named the relationship. That relationship is what this essay is trying to articulate.

Section II: The form is the artefact

The relationship Horgan and the tradition are both touching, when their questions are set beside each other, is this. Forms of expression are not neutral instruments that constituencies pick up and use. The forms themselves are political artefacts. They are produced by histories, by economies, by the gendered and classed structures of who has access to what, and by the long memory of which kinds of action a society has trained itself to recognise as legitimate political behaviour and which kinds it has trained itself to dismiss as irrelevant, hysterical, or criminal.

The hauliers had access to a form of expression that worked. They had vehicles. They had the infrastructure to coordinate them. They had the assumption, built into Irish political culture across decades, that men with trucks blocking roads were doing politics. The infrastructure had been built before the protest began. The form was waiting for them. The grievance about diesel was real, and the constituency was real, but the form they used was not invented in the heat of frustration. It was already there. It had been there for years.

The form was not there for the women Horgan named. There is no inherited cultural infrastructure in Ireland through which carers of children with disabilities arrive at the gates of the Department of Education with vehicles, fuel, fundraising, communications networks, and the assumed legitimacy of a recognised political constituency. The form has not been built. The cultural memory does not exist. If those carers blocked the gates, the political response would not be debate about engagement. It would be removal. The form does not transfer to them, not because their grievance is less real, but because the structural conditions that make a form of expression available are themselves the product of which constituencies the political imagination has been organised around.

This is the relationship the two questions converge on. The legitimacy of a grievance and the legitimacy of its form of expression are separable in principle, as the tradition correctly insists. But the form available is not random. It is the residue of which constituencies have been politically organised, which struggles have been fought, which infrastructures have been built. The form a grievance can find is shaped by who has fought before, who has built the networks, who has been recognised as a legitimate political subject in earlier political moments. Forms of expression carry their histories with them.

What this means for the fuel week is that the haulier protest did not invent its form. It inherited it. The form had been built by decades of male, vehicle-based, economically-organised political action that had a place in the cultural imagination as legitimate political activity. The carers, the disabled, the homeless, the women whose grievances the trilogy has been touching on across these essays, they have not been politically organised in ways that would have built equivalent infrastructure. The absence of that infrastructure is not a coincidence. It is the political residue of forty years in which certain constituencies have been organised and others have been left to wait. The form available is the artefact of that history. The form not available is the artefact of the same history.

Section III: The fuel week, read through the convergence

Mary Lou McDonald gave three public interventions across the weekend the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis closed. In her keynote address on Saturday 25th April she described the fuel protesters as having gathered with tractors, trucks and lorries — the tools of their livelihoods. She accused Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael of trying to buy off workers with half-measures. On Sunday afternoon, on BBCNI Sunday Politics, Mark Carruthers put Chris Donnelly’s polling analysis from the Irish News to her directly. McDonald praised the construction of Donnelly’s sentence and then declared the leadership question settled by her re-election by the membership at the Ard Fheis. On Monday evening, on Virgin Media’s Monday with Gavan Reilly, she made a longer case. She defended the right to protest disruptively. She said she had heard from women in inner-city Dublin who told her they had felt safer with the lads and their tractors present. She drew a distinction, when Reilly raised the experience of the Muslim Sisters of Éire, between protesters and others who had used the platform of the protest for other purposes. On the leadership question she said there had been a whole lot of, with all due respect, hot air, and that the party had decided that she was the leader of the party.

Photo by Gabriel Ramos on Unsplash

Three rhetorical moves are doing the work across these interventions. Each can be held up against the analytical frame Section II established, and each can be tested for what it carries and what it leaves out.

The first move is the framing of the hauliers as workers using the tools of their livelihoods. This framing erases the structure of the protest’s organisation. The form was not a spontaneous use of vehicles by workers under pressure. It was a coordinated political action whose logistics, fundraising, communications, and amplification had been organised by a network that pre-existed the protest. The McCarthy GoFundMe domain was registered seven weeks before the blockade began. The international amplifiers, Tommy Robinson, Katie Hopkins, the Reform UK ecosystem, arrived on cue. McDonald’s framing collapses the constituency and the form into each other and presents both as worker self-action. The constituency is real. The form was built. The framing erases the building.

The second move is the women-and-tractors claim. McDonald said that women in the inner city had told her they felt safer with the protesters and their vehicles present. The claim is unverifiable in any specific way. It is also doing something specific. It produces a different set of women, the ones who allegedly felt safer, to displace the women whose lives the blockade actually disrupted. Jennifer Horgan’s mother, prevented from reaching her dying brother-in-law, is not in McDonald’s frame. The Muslim Sisters of Éire, told they were not welcome at their own street soup-kitchen, are bracketed in the frame as the result of others using the platform. The carers, the nurses, the women trying to reach work or hospitals or family, do not appear at all. The form rehabilitates itself by producing the women who confirm it and disappearing the women who would not.

The third move is the parsing of protesters from others using the platform. This is the rhetorical operation by which Sinn Féin retains alignment with the underlying grievance while disclaiming the worst expressions of the form. The line is drawn without naming who the others were. The McCarthy infrastructure is not named. The far-right amplifiers are not named. Gavin Pepper, the Dublin councillor who has called for mass deportations of immigrants and who agreed with McDonald’s interview on the programme’s Facebook page, is not named. The line that distinguishes legitimate protesters from illegitimate platform-users is presented as having been visible to onlookers. It was not. It was, and is, a rhetorical line drawn after the fact, doing work that political infrastructure should have been doing in advance and was not built to do.

What these three moves share is that each one preserves Sinn Féin’s ability to claim the constituency without taking responsibility for the form. The grievance is real. The form was captured. The party wants the first and not the second. The framing is the operation by which it tries to have both.

A third instance of the same principle landed on the same weekend. On Saturday night, while the Ard Fheis was in session, the New IRA hijacked a delivery driver in Twinbrook and used him to deliver a car bomb to Dunmurry police station. The group claimed responsibility on Monday and threatened to target police officers in their homes. The First Minister condemned the attack alongside the DUP Deputy First Minister and the Chief Constable. The dissident republican claim to lateral legitimacy fails on the same principle by which the haulier blockade’s claim fails. The grievance the New IRA cites is held by some who hold it as real. The form of expression they have chosen does not have the constituency, the historical conditions, or the political reality that produced the legitimacy the H-Block prisoners earned. The principle is consistent across both cases. Lateral legitimacy is not transferable. The form earns nothing on its own.

Section IV: The form available, the form not available

Horgan’s substitution exercise did one thing and stopped. She listed the constituencies whose grievance is at least as real as the hauliers’ and asked her reader to imagine those constituencies using the same form of disruptive protest. The substitutions are plausible as moral claims and impossible as political realities. She did not theorise why the impossibility holds. The exercise did its work by demonstrating the asymmetry. The theorisation is the work this essay can do.

The substitutions feel impossible because the form of expression is not separable from the infrastructure that has produced it. The hauliers’ form was inherited from decades of male, vehicle-based, economically-organised political action that has been culturally legible as politics. The carers’ form does not exist not because carers are less aggrieved but because the political organisation of caring labour has not been built. There has been no thirty-year cultural training in which Irish people learned to see women with prams blocking school gates as political subjects. There has been no infrastructure of fundraising, communications, vehicles, and amplifiers built around the unmet needs of children with disabilities. The cultural memory does not have a place for it. The political imagination has not been organised around it.

This is the residue Section II named. The constituencies whose form is unavailable are unavailable because the political work of building their form has not been done. Not because their grievance is illegitimate. Not because their numbers are insufficient. Because no political project has organised the form their grievance could take.

The numbers, when they are finally counted, are striking. The Hope and Courage Collective published its annual report on 13th April, three days after McDonald’s Reilly interview. The report’s findings are worth holding alongside the framings of the past week. 66% of people in Ireland agree that immigrants contribute positively to Irish culture and community, up two points from the previous year. 79% agree that working-class people are struggling because of systemic inequality. 69% agree that wealthy people are successful because they were given more opportunities than others. 80% agree that minority ethnic communities face greater barriers to success than white people. 75% support the freedom of transgender people to live their lives.

These are not contested propositions. They are the settled common sense of a substantial supermajority of the Irish population. The constituency that holds these views is real. It is large. It is values-aligned around a recognisably progressive political position. What it does not have is a form of expression. There is no organised infrastructure through which the 79% who recognise systemic inequality coordinate their political action. There is no fundraising apparatus, no communications network, no vehicles, no amplifiers that arrive on cue. The Hope and Courage Collective’s report is itself the only sustained piece of public infrastructure organising this constituency, and a research report is not a political form.

The far-right has built infrastructure. The supermajority has not. The asymmetry is not coincidence. It is the artefact of a political moment in which the form of expression has been built by those willing to do the building, and the constituency that would oppose them has been waiting for someone else to do the work. The constituency that lost the blockade week was not absent. It was present, in the 79% and the 66% and the 80%. What was absent was its form.

Section V: The fifth commitment

Earlier writing in this sequence proposed four commitments that any serious political project on this island would have to be capable of making. The four were honesty about the fossil fuel transition, the rebuilding of state capacity, the refusal of enemy-of-the-people politics, and the cultivation of internal dissent as a positive value rather than an embarrassment to be managed. The four are the bottom line below which the project cannot be absorbed. The three essays before this one made the case that no current Irish political formation holds them, and that their absence is the trajectory the trilogy has been mapping.

The synthesis these four essays have arrived at proposes a fifth commitment, implicit in the previous four but worth naming on its own. The political project this island needs would have to be capable of building forms of political expression for constituencies whose grievance is not currently politically visible, and of doing so without absorbing the analyses that named the invisibility in the first place.

The fifth commitment has two parts and they go together. The first part is the building work. The form is the artefact. If the form is not present for a constituency, no amount of moral correctness about the legitimacy of its grievance produces political expression. The work is to build the infrastructure: the fundraising apparatus, the communications networks, the cultural training that makes the constituency legible as a political subject, the long memory of action that allows the form to be recognised when it is used. This is decades of work. It is the kind of work the populist right has been doing while the political left has been waiting for someone else to do it.

The second part is the discipline of not absorbing the critique. When a writer like Jennifer Horgan names the gendered asymmetry of recognised grievance, the political response from the left should not be to claim the analysis for the left’s own positioning. It should be to take the analysis seriously and ask what would have to change. When a writer like Chris Donnelly names the trajectory of a particular party with electoral clarity, the response from inside that party should not be to deflect with style. When the tradition I write from has been holding the question of grievance and form for forty years, the political left should not flatter itself that the question can be resolved by adopting the language of the tradition without doing the work the tradition has been pointing at.

The McDonald rhetorical apparatus over the past week has demonstrated what absorption looks like in real time. The workers framing absorbs the haulier constituency without naming the form’s organisation. The women-and-tractors claim absorbs the feminist critique without engaging it. The procedural framing on leadership absorbs structural critique into membership-vote vindication. The party performs the moves the trilogy’s previous essays predicted it would perform, and the moves work in the short term because the alternative, a political form built around the supermajority Hope and Courage just documented, does not exist.

The fifth commitment is the commitment to refuse this absorption from inside the left. The work is not just rhetorical positioning. It is structural and slow. It requires building forms of expression for constituencies that have been waiting for forms, refusing the easy absorption of feminist and dissident analyses into party-political messaging, and accepting that the political left this country needs will not be built in an electoral cycle. It will be built by people willing to do decades of work that no current Irish political formation is currently doing, and that the populist right has been doing for years.

Section VI: What is owed and what is not finished

The essay does what synthesis essays do. It brings two arguments into the same room and asks whether they recognise each other. They do, but only when held up alongside each other carefully. Neither argument names the other in its own register. Both arguments need each other to do the work neither can do alone.

Jennifer Horgan’s piece in the Examiner is its own work. It deserves a longer engagement than this essay has given it, and a wider readership than the political-commentary discourse will give it on its own. The substitution exercise she ran will keep doing work for any writer who picks it up carefully. The gendered moral economy she named is the analytical territory the Irish left will have to engage seriously if it is to engage anything seriously.

The tradition I write from is also its own work. Forty years of writing, much of it produced from inside conditions the writers did not choose, much of it ignored by the political class whose decisions the writing was tracking. The tradition’s question about grievance and form is the question the political moment is now asking from every direction at once. The tradition’s answer, when it is held honestly, is more textured than either its critics or its admirers tend to recognise.

What this essay has tried to do is bring the two together and ask what the synthesis points at. The fifth commitment is the proposal. The work that follows from it is decades of work that no current political formation in Ireland is doing. The supermajority that would benefit from the work is real and it is waiting. The form that would let it act has not been built. The asymmetry between what the populist right has built and what the political left has not is the political reality that the next decade will be decided inside.

I am one writer extending what others have given me. The work continues at a pace I am not the one setting. What remains to be said, others will say in their own time and their own register. This essay closes not because the argument is complete but because it has done what one piece of writing can do.

References

Primary commentary engaged in this essay

Horgan, Jennifer. “We have set a new standard for what angry men can achieve. It’s terrifying.” Irish Examiner, 17 April 2026.

Donnelly, Chris. “Warning bells should be ringing in Sinn Féin after Bobby Sands statue vote.” The Irish News, 26 April 2026.

Mary Lou McDonald public interventions, 25–27 April 2026

McDonald, Mary Lou. Keynote address to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, Belfast, 25 April 2026. Coverage: ITV News, “Sinn Féin president says referendum can be achieved by 2030,” 26 April 2026.

McDonald, Mary Lou. Interview with Mark Carruthers, Sunday Politics, BBC Northern Ireland, 26 April 2026.

McDonald, Mary Lou. Interview with Gavan Reilly, Monday with Gavan Reilly, Virgin Media, 27 April 2026. Coverage: Press Association wire, syndicated across regional Irish press including Kildare Nationalist, Roscommon Herald, Longford Live, Carlow Nationalist, Waterford News & Star, Louth Live, Laois Live, and Leitrim Live, 28 April 2026.

Empirical and contextual sources

Hope and Courage Collective. Ireland in Focus 2025: Mind the Gap. Published 30 April 2026. Reported by Conneely, Ailbhe, “Far-right doesn’t have broad public support, but is ‘shaping the conversation’ — report,” RTÉ News, 30 April 2026.

McDermott, Stephen. “GoFundMe organisers behind fuel protest: domain registrations and online infrastructure.” The Journal, April 2026.

Young, Connla. “New IRA threatens to target homes of PSNI officers as it claims station attack.” The Irish News, 28 April 2026.

On the Sands statue and the SDLP resignation

“Political row over Bobby Sands statue erected without planning permission.” Irish Examiner, 24 April 2026.

“Deputy mayor quits SDLP over Bobby Sands statue vote dispute.” BBC News Northern Ireland, 26 April 2026.

Companion essays in this sequence

The Blockade Is the Message: A first note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published April 2026. Republished on The Pensive Quill.

The Money Is Not There: A second note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published April 2026. Republished on The Pensive Quill.

What Would Have to Be Built: A third and propositional note on the weekend the blockade ended. Published 20 April 2026.

⏩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.
Fuel blockade Irish Far Right Jennifer Horgan Louth For Ever Mary Lou McDonald Sinn Fein

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