Louth For Ever ★ writing on 26-April-2026.
A third and final note on the weekend the blockade ended: On the question beneath the government, the opposition, and the tradition, and on what comes after all three.
I owe the reader an honest opening. This essay is harder than the two that came before it, and I have put off writing it for longer than I put off either of them, because the question it addresses is harder than the questions those essays addressed.
The first essay named what had happened on the streets. The second named what had happened in the chamber of Dáil Éireann and in the party that should have met it. Both of those essays were diagnostic. They named things. Diagnosis is not easy but it is a register a writer can stand in without committing themselves to more than they can defend. You look at what is in front of you and you describe it accurately and you trust the reader to do the rest.
The third essay cannot stop there. The readership of the second essay, the one I had not imagined I had until the week I had it, has been generous and patient and has mostly asked one question in reply. What now? What should be built. What would an Irish politics look like that could meet a week like the one that just finished without collapsing into either the management of decline or the amplification of someone else’s playbook.
I do not know the full answer to that question. I want to say that at the start, because the honest cost of propositional writing is that it tempts the writer to perform a confidence the material does not yet support. What I have is a set of partial answers assembled from listening to people who have been thinking about this longer than I have. I will set them down as plainly as I can. The reader can decide whether the partial answers add up to enough.
I. The diagnosis, consolidated
Let me set down, as briefly as I can, what the honest voices on the past two weeks have between them established. The diagnosis is not retrospective. It is being demonstrated, on the front pages of every Irish daily this morning, in real time.
Sinéad O’Sullivan’s architecture gap is the first piece. An economy that transfers money at scale but has lost the capacity to build is an economy that can only respond to crisis by transferring more money. The €755 million package the Coalition reached for in the weekend the blockade ended was not a strategic choice among competing options. It was the only option the state had available. The space heater rather than the heat pump, as she put it. The structural incapacity to build a heat pump is not a political failure of this Coalition. It is the institutional inheritance of thirty years of choices made by several coalitions.
Ciara Murphy’s fossil fuel diagnosis at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice (@jcfjustice.bsky.social) is the second piece. A country that has no oil or gas of its own and depends on both for nearly every function of daily life; that has legislated ambitious emissions reductions and then actively worked to undermine its own Climate Act to permit more fossil fuel infrastructure; that calls itself energy insecure and responds to the insecurity by entrenching dependency on expensive imports — that country has, as she put it, a fossil fuel problem that operates at the level of contradiction rather than the level of policy. The contradictions are not accidental. They are what the architecture gap looks like when you apply it to a specific sector.
Saoirse McHugh’s (@saoirsemc.bsky.social) warning is the third piece. The framing that says the far right organised this space because the left failed to engage treats agrarian Ireland as an ideological blank sheet waiting for better outreach. McHugh, who comes from Achill Island, Mayo and has done the actual work in the actual constituencies, has pointed out this week that Irish agri-political culture has a developed conservative-to-reactionary worldview that reaches back three hundred years, and that many left-aligned people in rural Ireland have burnt themselves out engaging without being able to shift the ground. The belief that everybody is one good conversation away from switching ideologies, in her thinking, is a fantasy that flatters the left while underestimating the opposition. Patrick Bresnihan at Maynooth, quoted in Al Jazeera this week, named the underlying structural inequality: a grass-fed dairy and beef system oriented to commodity production for export processing, whose internal contradictions surface whenever the global price of inputs spikes. That system does not generate the politics of engagement. It generates the politics it currently has.
Sébastien Lecornu’s speech in Paris last Friday is the fourth piece, and it is the one that matters most for the forward-looking part of what follows. A sitting European Prime Minister, in the same week the Irish government was cutting excise and delaying the carbon tax, doubled structural electrification aid to ten billion euros a year and refused to lower fuel taxes on the grounds that lowering them would only benefit oil-exporting countries and that, as he put it, as long as France depended on oil and gas it would continue to pay the price of other people’s wars. Lecornu is governing in the shadow of the Gilets Jaunes, who forced a previous French government to reverse a fuel tax increase that nearly collapsed its authority. The instruments France now reaches for are the instruments a state develops after it has already lost a round and learnt what losing cost. Ireland has not yet lost that round. Last weekend was the warning.
The McCarthy GoFundMe is the fifth piece and the one most people will have missed. One hundred and fifty-two thousand euros raised in days for a stated purpose, feeding the blockaders, that could never plausibly absorb the sum. A domain (Nationrises.com) registered on the 19th of February, seven weeks before the fuel protests began. A pivot, announced when the money exceeded the cover story, toward “wish granting for children in hospitals.” A donor list of six thousand people, some of them writing from abroad, several of them committing a thousand euros or more. Read that sequence carefully. The infrastructure was built in February for an organising project that did not publicly exist in February. The fuel protests were the first deployment of the infrastructure, not the reason for it. What McCarthy is building is not a party. It is a populist mobilisation apparatus that operates outside parties, outside the state, and outside the voluntary sector, funded directly by its supporters and legitimised by social media reach. The fuel protest was the recruitment event. The nation-rises is the movement. The six thousand donors are the list.
Five diagnoses. An architecture gap that cannot build. A fossil fuel dependency that cannot be named. A rural constituency with a three-hundred-year ideological inheritance that is not a blank sheet. A European policy model that shows what building looks like but whose instruments rest on institutional capacity Ireland does not have. And a parallel right-wing infrastructure already operational and already capitalised. These are the five pieces of the picture. They have each been named, carefully and well, by people who have thought about them longer than I have. What has not yet been named is what should be built between them.
II. The absorption pattern
Before I can say anything about what should be built, I have to name the pattern that every attempt to build it so far has walked into.
It is worth saying plainly. Every serious attempt to build a left political formation outside the two main parties in the history of the southern state has, within a generation, been absorbed into one of them. The Workers’ Party, the party that emerged from the 1970 Official-Provisional split and spent two decades trying to build a democratic-socialist electoral presence, fractured in 1992 into Democratic Left, the clean-hands breakaway that committed itself to constitutional politics and was supposed to be different. Within seven years Democratic Left had merged into Labour. Its leaders, Proinsias De Rossa, Eamon Gilmore, Pat Rabbitte, became senior figures in Labour’s front bench and eventually in the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition government of 2011. Gilmore became Tánaiste. The trajectory from founding to absorption took seven years. A political project that set out to be the clean break from the contaminated mainstream ended as Labour’s leadership in a Cabinet implementing the troika programme.
The Greens followed a variant of the same arc. The party that had spent three decades building a distinct ecological-political tradition entered government with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in 2020, spent four years defending decisions it would not have made on its own terms, and was reduced from twelve seats to one at the 2024 general election. Some of the party’s best voices, Saoirse McHugh among them, had left before the absorption, keeping publicly the commitment the party leadership had privately put aside.
Sinn Féin is on an earlier iteration of the same pattern, and the dissident-republican writers who have watched the party longest — Anthony McIntyre in his Pensive Quill archive, Tommy McKearney in From Insurrection to Parliament — have been naming the trajectory for two decades. The diagnosis need not be accepted wholesale to be taken seriously. McKearney’s formulation that the party’s bottom line is that it has no bottom line captures, in one line, a structural observation about a political formation whose posture is precisely to have no fixed position, because flexibility on principle has become the precondition for institutional survival. Read the fuel blockade week through that line and the handling makes sense.
The pattern is older than this party
The absorption pattern has a mechanism. The mechanism is that the institutional architecture of the Irish state rewards participation in its coalitions and punishes abstention from them. A left party that stays outside is condemned to permanent criticism of other people’s decisions. A left party that goes inside is given a handful of ministries, told what it cannot do, asked to defend what it would not have done, and slowly assimilated into the vocabulary of the state it was meant to change. The vocabulary is the training. The training is the absorption. The absorption is the point.
The third essay has to walk around this pattern. It has to. Because every proposition I can write: build a new left formation, fill the vacuum, organise the constituencies the establishment has lost is a proposition that has been tried before and absorbed before, and the honest writer cannot propose it again without engaging with why the previous attempts ended where they ended.
So the first thing a serious political project would have to do, before it did anything else, is understand the absorption mechanism well enough to build structural defences against it. That means organisational forms that resist leadership capture. It means decision-making processes that cannot be quietly moved inside a small group. It means a relationship to the state that is not defined by the ambition to occupy its chairs. It means, most of all, a bottom line that cannot be moved by the offer of office.
A party with an actual bottom line, a set of things it will not trade for inclusion, has a fighting chance of not ending where its predecessors ended. A party without one does not.
III. What a bottom line looks like
The difficulty with saying the project would need a bottom line is that the phrase is easy to write and hard to specify. So let me try to specify it.
A bottom line in this context is not a policy programme. Programmes can be negotiated down. A bottom line is the set of commitments the project cannot abandon without ceasing to be itself.
For a serious political project in the Ireland of the coming decade, I think there are probably four.
The first is fossil fuel honesty. The Irish state’s current climate posture rests on a set of contradictions Ciara Murphy has catalogued as cleanly as anyone has. The contradictions are the architecture gap applied to a specific sector. A political project that does not commit to naming them, that treats climate policy as a matter of percentage targets rather than structural dependency, will be absorbed the moment it enters a coalition that requires it to defend a data centre strategy, an LNG terminal, or a carbon tax freeze. The French Prime Minister told his country last Friday that as long as France depends on oil and gas it will continue to pay the price of other people’s wars. That is a sentence a Taoiseach could not have spoken last week, and the inability to speak it is a political precondition for everything that followed. A bottom line on fossil fuel honesty is the commitment that the project will not pretend this dependency is manageable by subsidy.
The second is the rebuilding of state capacity. This is the architecture-gap point turned into a positive commitment. A serious project commits to the patient, unglamorous work of rebuilding the institutional capacity to build. To construct housing, to run transport, to administer energy transition, to deliver public services. This is not a technocratic commitment. It is a political one. The populist right’s offer, in Ireland as elsewhere, is that the state is the problem and the nation is the answer. A serious left project has to make the opposite case: that the state is the only institution with the scale to do the things that need doing, and that the work of rebuilding its capacity to do them is the commitment that distinguishes a serious project from a performance of grievance.
The third is the refusal of enemy-of-the-people politics. The fuel blockade week demonstrated, with devastating clarity, what it costs when a movement cannot distinguish between hauliers with a legitimate grievance and the organised amplifiers using the grievance as cover. A serious project has to be able to stand with the hauliers on the question of diesel prices while naming, by their names, the people who told the hauliers where to park. It has to be able to do that without flinching, because the failure to do it is the mechanism by which legitimate grievance becomes reactionary politics. McHugh is right that many of the people on these streets are not one conversation away from switching ideologies. But some of them are, and the distinction between those who are and those who are not is itself the political work. A project that treats all grievance as legitimate becomes the vehicle of the worst grievances. A project that treats all grievance as suspect becomes a party of nobody. The distinction is the work.
The fourth is internal dissent as a positive value. A party that cannot disagree with itself cannot correct itself. This is the observation the dissident-republican tradition has been making for thirty years. That the structural reason a movement drifts without course-correction is that the culture of deference established during long periods of centralised leadership removes the party’s capacity to generate and tolerate internal disagreement. Internal dissent is not a weakness a serious project manages. It is an asset the project actively cultivates, because it is the mechanism by which the project stays honest to itself. The parties that have been absorbed were, without exception, the parties in which dissent had been most successfully suppressed before the absorption happened.
Four commitments. Fossil fuel honesty. State capacity. The refusal of enemy-of-the-people politics. Internal dissent as value. None of them are a policy programme. All of them are the ground a policy programme would have to stand on.
IV. What the right has already built
I want to return to the McCarthy piece, because it tells us something the left in Ireland has not yet fully absorbed.
The populist-right infrastructure that surfaced during the fuel week did not surface. It was already there. The domain registration in February tells us that. The speed with which the fundraising scaled — one hundred and fifty thousand euros in under a week, six thousand donors, international contributions — tells us the list was being assembled long before the fuel price spike gave it something to mobilise around. The pivot to “wish granting for children in hospitals,” announced when the cover story ran out of financial plausibility, tells us the organisers understood from the beginning that the fuel protest was the recruitment moment, not the movement.
This matters for the question this essay is asking. The populist right in Ireland has built, and is continuing to build, an organising infrastructure that operates outside the parties, outside the state, and outside the voluntary sector. It is funded by its supporters. It is legitimised by social media reach. It can deploy at speed against whatever grievance the moment supplies. It does not need a political party to function because it is building the substrate on which a party will eventually stand, when it chooses to constitute one.
The Irish democratic left does not have an equivalent infrastructure. It has political parties of varying size and varying coherence. It has trade unions with varying degrees of political connection. It has a network of NGOs and policy researchers. Ciara Murphy’s Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice is one; there are others, doing honest diagnostic work. It has a set of public intellectuals and journalists. What it does not have is the integrated organising substrate that would let it mobilise at the speed and scale the right has just demonstrated.
A serious political project, then, cannot be primarily a political party. Or rather, it cannot be a political party in the first instance. The party is the last thing to build, not the first. What has to be built first is the infrastructure on which a party could eventually stand: the fundraising capacity, the organising networks, the media channels, the policy institutions, the intellectual and cultural spaces where the four commitments above are developed, contested, and defended.
The mistake of every Irish left project for two generations has been to build a party first and an infrastructure afterwards, and the party has always been absorbed before the infrastructure was built to defend it. The right is currently making the opposite mistake in reverse — building the infrastructure first without a coherent party to carry it. The project this essay is trying to imagine would have to do what neither side has yet done, which is to build the infrastructure first and let the electoral form of it emerge later, from the strength the infrastructure had built rather than the weakness it was trying to compensate for.
V. The constituencies the project does not need to convert
McHugh’s BlueSky thread on agri-politics is important here, and the third essay has to engage with it honestly.
She is right that the left fantasy of being one good conversation away from converting conservative-to-reactionary constituencies is a fantasy. Three hundred years of rural political culture do not dissolve because a better-briefed candidate shows up at the door. Some of the people on the streets last week are the descendants of families who have held reactionary political positions for six generations, and they are not going to become progressive because an earnest young canvasser from Dublin, or Dundalk or Belfast, arrives with a leaflet on the just transition. This is true and it is worth saying.
But McHugh’s argument does not, I think, extend as far as some of the reactions to it have suggested. What she is naming is that the left has been wrong to treat agri-politics as a blank sheet. She is not, as far as I can read her, arguing that the left should abandon the countryside. She is arguing that the left should engage with rural Ireland as it actually is, with the political inheritance it actually carries, rather than as the left would prefer it to be.
The distinction matters because a serious political project cannot win a majority in Ireland without holding some of the rural vote. The electoral arithmetic does not permit it. What the project has to understand is that it is not competing for the whole of the rural constituency. It is competing for the rural voters who are available, the ones whose grievances are genuinely material rather than ideological, the ones whose politics have not already been captured by generational reactionary inheritance, the ones who are open to hearing that the grass-fed dairy-and-beef export model Bresnihan described at Maynooth is not actually working for them even if it is working for the processors.
That is a smaller constituency than the total rural vote. But it is not zero. And it is the constituency a serious project has to identify and address, without pretending the rest of rural Ireland is available and without writing off the part that is.
This is one of the places the project will have to be propositional without being prescriptive. I do not know how to address that constituency. I know that the policies are adjacent to the ones Bresnihan and Social Justice Ireland and the more serious rural-ecological writers have been sketching. A genuine diversification of rural livelihoods, a land-use transition that compensates the people whose livelihoods depend on the current system, a re-localisation of food economies that gives rural communities something to defend other than the export commodity chain. I know that the politics that makes those policies possible does not yet exist. The work of building it is the work the project would have to do.
VI. What I will not pretend to know
I have set down four commitments, an account of the absorption pattern, a reading of what the right has built, and a partial answer to McHugh’s challenge. The fuel crisis is not over. As I write, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, oil markets have opened sharply higher, the Coalition is asking the EU for trade relief on jet fuel, the strategic reserve is being publicly considered for release, and the Taoiseach is publicly committing to lead his party into the next election as internal unease over his handling of the first wave continues to surface. The conditions the essay diagnoses are not stable. They are accelerating. I want to close by naming what I do not know and will not pretend to know.
I do not know whether Sinn Féin can be the vehicle for any of this. The trajectory appears to be against it, and the Keir Starmer temptation: neutralising the far-right wave by adopting enough of its vocabulary to make the far-right redundant, is the path of least resistance for a party whose leadership has never been structurally anchored to a left position it could not abandon. I do not know whether Sinn Féin will reach for that temptation or resist it. The question is alive inside the party, as it is alive inside every party of the European left that has watched Starmer’s version of it succeed in electoral terms while emptying the party of the content it used to carry.
I do not know whether the existing small left parties and independents can coalesce around the four commitments in a way that avoids absorption. People Before Profit and the Social Democrats and smaller formations have each been doing honest work in their own registers, but none of them has yet demonstrated the scale of organising infrastructure the right is now building. The Greens, in the leadership of Roderic O’Gorman, are one of the few voices I heard during the fuel week naming the structural dependency and the embassy-level chain of cause and effect. Whether that voice can survive the next coalition offer is the question the Greens are going to have to answer again, having failed to answer it the last time.
I do not know whether the intellectual and cultural resources exist to build the infrastructure the project would need. The policy researchers are there. The journalists are there. The trade unions are partly there. The cultural figures are there. What I have not seen is the integrated form that would bring those resources together into something that could organise the available constituencies. That form will have to be built, or it will not exist, and the consequence of its not existing will be that the right-wing infrastructure already operational will continue to grow without serious opposition.
There is one piece of evidence worth naming before I close, because it happened this weekend and it bears directly on the question. Uachtarán na hÉireann, on her first foreign trip as head of state, travelled to Barcelona to share a platform with Lula, Petro, Ramaphosa, Sheinbaum and Sánchez at a summit framed explicitly as a defence of democracy against the global authoritarian right. In her address she asked how the international system had moved “from the crystal-clear language of the UN charter championing human rights to the crystal-clear language that now champions ‘might is right’”, and she answered her own question with a sentence worth copying out: “Each time a violation was absorbed without consequence, the threshold for the next one was raised.” She framed Ireland’s perspective in terms the Coalition has spent the last decade carefully avoiding, as a neutral, post-famine, post-colonial republic with an unbroken UN peacekeeping record since 1958 and an obligation to refuse the normalisation of war. The presidency does not make policy. What it can do is name what the state is doing and what it is not doing. This presidency has just named it. That does not amount to a political project, and the office is not one a political project can enlist. It does amount to evidence that the vocabulary a serious project would need to speak is already, quietly, available from at least one Irish institution.
What I know is that the diagnosis is now available from enough honest voices that the question has changed. The question is no longer whether we can see the shape of what is happening. The question is whether we can build the political form that would let us act on what we see.
The tradition I write from has an answer to this question, and the answer is that building is harder than diagnosing, and that the people who have paid most for previous attempts to build are not the people who will lightly authorise the next attempt. That is why the weight of the diagnosis, the weight Sinéad O’Sullivan and Ciara Murphy and Saoirse McHugh and Patrick Bresnihan and Roderic O’Gorman and Fintan O’Toole have each contributed to, from their different vantage points, has to be held carefully. It is not a mandate. It is an invitation.
The invitation is to take the diagnosis seriously enough to act on it before the infrastructure being built against it becomes impossible to catch up with. That is the work. It is slower than the news cycle and it will not land on any editor’s desk as a scoop. It is the work anyway.
I will keep writing while it is being done. The people actually doing it, the ones I will not name because they are still deciding whether to be public about what they are building, will do more than I will. This is a small contribution to a conversation that will have to be had properly elsewhere, in rooms I do not sit in, by people who have more at stake than I do.
What comes next is theirs to build. What I can do is keep the question alive until they are ready to answer it.
Sources and further reading
The five diagnostic voices this essay draws on, in the order they appear in Section I:
Sinéad O’Sullivan, “Mind The Gap,” But This Time It’s Different (Substack).
Sinéad O’Sullivan, “The protests aren’t just about fuel, they’re a revolt against a hollow state,” The Journal, 14 April 2026,
Ciara Murphy, “We have a fossil fuel problem,” Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, 15 April 2026.
Saoirse McHugh, thread on agri-politics and the left, Bluesky, April 2026 — @saoirsemc.bsky.social
Patrick Bresnihan, quoted in Tommy Greene, “Why are fuel price protests sweeping the Republic of Ireland?,” Al Jazeera, 16 April 2026.
Sébastien Lecornu, televised address reported in America Hernandez, “France doubles electrification aid to cut fossil fuel dependency,” Reuters, 10 April 2026.
Stephen McDermott, “What happens now to the €150,000 raised on GoFundMe to feed the fuel protesters?,” The Journal, 16 April 2026.
Additional context:
Fintan O’Toole, “Rule of the ‘breakfast roll-atariat’ — this is how Ireland’s far-right movement will emerge,” Irish Times, 14 April 2026 —
Keith Kelly, “‘Too much is at stake’ — Catherine Connolly tells world leaders ‘democracy is under attack’ on first foreign trip as president,” Irish Independent, 18 April 2026.
The first essay named what had happened on the streets. The second named what had happened in the chamber of Dáil Éireann and in the party that should have met it. Both of those essays were diagnostic. They named things. Diagnosis is not easy but it is a register a writer can stand in without committing themselves to more than they can defend. You look at what is in front of you and you describe it accurately and you trust the reader to do the rest.
The third essay cannot stop there. The readership of the second essay, the one I had not imagined I had until the week I had it, has been generous and patient and has mostly asked one question in reply. What now? What should be built. What would an Irish politics look like that could meet a week like the one that just finished without collapsing into either the management of decline or the amplification of someone else’s playbook.
I do not know the full answer to that question. I want to say that at the start, because the honest cost of propositional writing is that it tempts the writer to perform a confidence the material does not yet support. What I have is a set of partial answers assembled from listening to people who have been thinking about this longer than I have. I will set them down as plainly as I can. The reader can decide whether the partial answers add up to enough.
I. The diagnosis, consolidated
Let me set down, as briefly as I can, what the honest voices on the past two weeks have between them established. The diagnosis is not retrospective. It is being demonstrated, on the front pages of every Irish daily this morning, in real time.
Sinéad O’Sullivan’s architecture gap is the first piece. An economy that transfers money at scale but has lost the capacity to build is an economy that can only respond to crisis by transferring more money. The €755 million package the Coalition reached for in the weekend the blockade ended was not a strategic choice among competing options. It was the only option the state had available. The space heater rather than the heat pump, as she put it. The structural incapacity to build a heat pump is not a political failure of this Coalition. It is the institutional inheritance of thirty years of choices made by several coalitions.
Ciara Murphy’s fossil fuel diagnosis at the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice (@jcfjustice.bsky.social) is the second piece. A country that has no oil or gas of its own and depends on both for nearly every function of daily life; that has legislated ambitious emissions reductions and then actively worked to undermine its own Climate Act to permit more fossil fuel infrastructure; that calls itself energy insecure and responds to the insecurity by entrenching dependency on expensive imports — that country has, as she put it, a fossil fuel problem that operates at the level of contradiction rather than the level of policy. The contradictions are not accidental. They are what the architecture gap looks like when you apply it to a specific sector.
Saoirse McHugh’s (@saoirsemc.bsky.social) warning is the third piece. The framing that says the far right organised this space because the left failed to engage treats agrarian Ireland as an ideological blank sheet waiting for better outreach. McHugh, who comes from Achill Island, Mayo and has done the actual work in the actual constituencies, has pointed out this week that Irish agri-political culture has a developed conservative-to-reactionary worldview that reaches back three hundred years, and that many left-aligned people in rural Ireland have burnt themselves out engaging without being able to shift the ground. The belief that everybody is one good conversation away from switching ideologies, in her thinking, is a fantasy that flatters the left while underestimating the opposition. Patrick Bresnihan at Maynooth, quoted in Al Jazeera this week, named the underlying structural inequality: a grass-fed dairy and beef system oriented to commodity production for export processing, whose internal contradictions surface whenever the global price of inputs spikes. That system does not generate the politics of engagement. It generates the politics it currently has.
Sébastien Lecornu’s speech in Paris last Friday is the fourth piece, and it is the one that matters most for the forward-looking part of what follows. A sitting European Prime Minister, in the same week the Irish government was cutting excise and delaying the carbon tax, doubled structural electrification aid to ten billion euros a year and refused to lower fuel taxes on the grounds that lowering them would only benefit oil-exporting countries and that, as he put it, as long as France depended on oil and gas it would continue to pay the price of other people’s wars. Lecornu is governing in the shadow of the Gilets Jaunes, who forced a previous French government to reverse a fuel tax increase that nearly collapsed its authority. The instruments France now reaches for are the instruments a state develops after it has already lost a round and learnt what losing cost. Ireland has not yet lost that round. Last weekend was the warning.
The McCarthy GoFundMe is the fifth piece and the one most people will have missed. One hundred and fifty-two thousand euros raised in days for a stated purpose, feeding the blockaders, that could never plausibly absorb the sum. A domain (Nationrises.com) registered on the 19th of February, seven weeks before the fuel protests began. A pivot, announced when the money exceeded the cover story, toward “wish granting for children in hospitals.” A donor list of six thousand people, some of them writing from abroad, several of them committing a thousand euros or more. Read that sequence carefully. The infrastructure was built in February for an organising project that did not publicly exist in February. The fuel protests were the first deployment of the infrastructure, not the reason for it. What McCarthy is building is not a party. It is a populist mobilisation apparatus that operates outside parties, outside the state, and outside the voluntary sector, funded directly by its supporters and legitimised by social media reach. The fuel protest was the recruitment event. The nation-rises is the movement. The six thousand donors are the list.
Five diagnoses. An architecture gap that cannot build. A fossil fuel dependency that cannot be named. A rural constituency with a three-hundred-year ideological inheritance that is not a blank sheet. A European policy model that shows what building looks like but whose instruments rest on institutional capacity Ireland does not have. And a parallel right-wing infrastructure already operational and already capitalised. These are the five pieces of the picture. They have each been named, carefully and well, by people who have thought about them longer than I have. What has not yet been named is what should be built between them.
II. The absorption pattern
Before I can say anything about what should be built, I have to name the pattern that every attempt to build it so far has walked into.
It is worth saying plainly. Every serious attempt to build a left political formation outside the two main parties in the history of the southern state has, within a generation, been absorbed into one of them. The Workers’ Party, the party that emerged from the 1970 Official-Provisional split and spent two decades trying to build a democratic-socialist electoral presence, fractured in 1992 into Democratic Left, the clean-hands breakaway that committed itself to constitutional politics and was supposed to be different. Within seven years Democratic Left had merged into Labour. Its leaders, Proinsias De Rossa, Eamon Gilmore, Pat Rabbitte, became senior figures in Labour’s front bench and eventually in the Fine Gael-Labour Coalition government of 2011. Gilmore became Tánaiste. The trajectory from founding to absorption took seven years. A political project that set out to be the clean break from the contaminated mainstream ended as Labour’s leadership in a Cabinet implementing the troika programme.
The Greens followed a variant of the same arc. The party that had spent three decades building a distinct ecological-political tradition entered government with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in 2020, spent four years defending decisions it would not have made on its own terms, and was reduced from twelve seats to one at the 2024 general election. Some of the party’s best voices, Saoirse McHugh among them, had left before the absorption, keeping publicly the commitment the party leadership had privately put aside.
Sinn Féin is on an earlier iteration of the same pattern, and the dissident-republican writers who have watched the party longest — Anthony McIntyre in his Pensive Quill archive, Tommy McKearney in From Insurrection to Parliament — have been naming the trajectory for two decades. The diagnosis need not be accepted wholesale to be taken seriously. McKearney’s formulation that the party’s bottom line is that it has no bottom line captures, in one line, a structural observation about a political formation whose posture is precisely to have no fixed position, because flexibility on principle has become the precondition for institutional survival. Read the fuel blockade week through that line and the handling makes sense.
The pattern is older than this party
The absorption pattern has a mechanism. The mechanism is that the institutional architecture of the Irish state rewards participation in its coalitions and punishes abstention from them. A left party that stays outside is condemned to permanent criticism of other people’s decisions. A left party that goes inside is given a handful of ministries, told what it cannot do, asked to defend what it would not have done, and slowly assimilated into the vocabulary of the state it was meant to change. The vocabulary is the training. The training is the absorption. The absorption is the point.
The third essay has to walk around this pattern. It has to. Because every proposition I can write: build a new left formation, fill the vacuum, organise the constituencies the establishment has lost is a proposition that has been tried before and absorbed before, and the honest writer cannot propose it again without engaging with why the previous attempts ended where they ended.
So the first thing a serious political project would have to do, before it did anything else, is understand the absorption mechanism well enough to build structural defences against it. That means organisational forms that resist leadership capture. It means decision-making processes that cannot be quietly moved inside a small group. It means a relationship to the state that is not defined by the ambition to occupy its chairs. It means, most of all, a bottom line that cannot be moved by the offer of office.
A party with an actual bottom line, a set of things it will not trade for inclusion, has a fighting chance of not ending where its predecessors ended. A party without one does not.
III. What a bottom line looks like
The difficulty with saying the project would need a bottom line is that the phrase is easy to write and hard to specify. So let me try to specify it.
A bottom line in this context is not a policy programme. Programmes can be negotiated down. A bottom line is the set of commitments the project cannot abandon without ceasing to be itself.
For a serious political project in the Ireland of the coming decade, I think there are probably four.
The first is fossil fuel honesty. The Irish state’s current climate posture rests on a set of contradictions Ciara Murphy has catalogued as cleanly as anyone has. The contradictions are the architecture gap applied to a specific sector. A political project that does not commit to naming them, that treats climate policy as a matter of percentage targets rather than structural dependency, will be absorbed the moment it enters a coalition that requires it to defend a data centre strategy, an LNG terminal, or a carbon tax freeze. The French Prime Minister told his country last Friday that as long as France depends on oil and gas it will continue to pay the price of other people’s wars. That is a sentence a Taoiseach could not have spoken last week, and the inability to speak it is a political precondition for everything that followed. A bottom line on fossil fuel honesty is the commitment that the project will not pretend this dependency is manageable by subsidy.
The second is the rebuilding of state capacity. This is the architecture-gap point turned into a positive commitment. A serious project commits to the patient, unglamorous work of rebuilding the institutional capacity to build. To construct housing, to run transport, to administer energy transition, to deliver public services. This is not a technocratic commitment. It is a political one. The populist right’s offer, in Ireland as elsewhere, is that the state is the problem and the nation is the answer. A serious left project has to make the opposite case: that the state is the only institution with the scale to do the things that need doing, and that the work of rebuilding its capacity to do them is the commitment that distinguishes a serious project from a performance of grievance.
The third is the refusal of enemy-of-the-people politics. The fuel blockade week demonstrated, with devastating clarity, what it costs when a movement cannot distinguish between hauliers with a legitimate grievance and the organised amplifiers using the grievance as cover. A serious project has to be able to stand with the hauliers on the question of diesel prices while naming, by their names, the people who told the hauliers where to park. It has to be able to do that without flinching, because the failure to do it is the mechanism by which legitimate grievance becomes reactionary politics. McHugh is right that many of the people on these streets are not one conversation away from switching ideologies. But some of them are, and the distinction between those who are and those who are not is itself the political work. A project that treats all grievance as legitimate becomes the vehicle of the worst grievances. A project that treats all grievance as suspect becomes a party of nobody. The distinction is the work.
The fourth is internal dissent as a positive value. A party that cannot disagree with itself cannot correct itself. This is the observation the dissident-republican tradition has been making for thirty years. That the structural reason a movement drifts without course-correction is that the culture of deference established during long periods of centralised leadership removes the party’s capacity to generate and tolerate internal disagreement. Internal dissent is not a weakness a serious project manages. It is an asset the project actively cultivates, because it is the mechanism by which the project stays honest to itself. The parties that have been absorbed were, without exception, the parties in which dissent had been most successfully suppressed before the absorption happened.
Four commitments. Fossil fuel honesty. State capacity. The refusal of enemy-of-the-people politics. Internal dissent as value. None of them are a policy programme. All of them are the ground a policy programme would have to stand on.
IV. What the right has already built
I want to return to the McCarthy piece, because it tells us something the left in Ireland has not yet fully absorbed.
The populist-right infrastructure that surfaced during the fuel week did not surface. It was already there. The domain registration in February tells us that. The speed with which the fundraising scaled — one hundred and fifty thousand euros in under a week, six thousand donors, international contributions — tells us the list was being assembled long before the fuel price spike gave it something to mobilise around. The pivot to “wish granting for children in hospitals,” announced when the cover story ran out of financial plausibility, tells us the organisers understood from the beginning that the fuel protest was the recruitment moment, not the movement.
This matters for the question this essay is asking. The populist right in Ireland has built, and is continuing to build, an organising infrastructure that operates outside the parties, outside the state, and outside the voluntary sector. It is funded by its supporters. It is legitimised by social media reach. It can deploy at speed against whatever grievance the moment supplies. It does not need a political party to function because it is building the substrate on which a party will eventually stand, when it chooses to constitute one.
The Irish democratic left does not have an equivalent infrastructure. It has political parties of varying size and varying coherence. It has trade unions with varying degrees of political connection. It has a network of NGOs and policy researchers. Ciara Murphy’s Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice is one; there are others, doing honest diagnostic work. It has a set of public intellectuals and journalists. What it does not have is the integrated organising substrate that would let it mobilise at the speed and scale the right has just demonstrated.
A serious political project, then, cannot be primarily a political party. Or rather, it cannot be a political party in the first instance. The party is the last thing to build, not the first. What has to be built first is the infrastructure on which a party could eventually stand: the fundraising capacity, the organising networks, the media channels, the policy institutions, the intellectual and cultural spaces where the four commitments above are developed, contested, and defended.
The mistake of every Irish left project for two generations has been to build a party first and an infrastructure afterwards, and the party has always been absorbed before the infrastructure was built to defend it. The right is currently making the opposite mistake in reverse — building the infrastructure first without a coherent party to carry it. The project this essay is trying to imagine would have to do what neither side has yet done, which is to build the infrastructure first and let the electoral form of it emerge later, from the strength the infrastructure had built rather than the weakness it was trying to compensate for.
V. The constituencies the project does not need to convert
McHugh’s BlueSky thread on agri-politics is important here, and the third essay has to engage with it honestly.
She is right that the left fantasy of being one good conversation away from converting conservative-to-reactionary constituencies is a fantasy. Three hundred years of rural political culture do not dissolve because a better-briefed candidate shows up at the door. Some of the people on the streets last week are the descendants of families who have held reactionary political positions for six generations, and they are not going to become progressive because an earnest young canvasser from Dublin, or Dundalk or Belfast, arrives with a leaflet on the just transition. This is true and it is worth saying.
But McHugh’s argument does not, I think, extend as far as some of the reactions to it have suggested. What she is naming is that the left has been wrong to treat agri-politics as a blank sheet. She is not, as far as I can read her, arguing that the left should abandon the countryside. She is arguing that the left should engage with rural Ireland as it actually is, with the political inheritance it actually carries, rather than as the left would prefer it to be.
The distinction matters because a serious political project cannot win a majority in Ireland without holding some of the rural vote. The electoral arithmetic does not permit it. What the project has to understand is that it is not competing for the whole of the rural constituency. It is competing for the rural voters who are available, the ones whose grievances are genuinely material rather than ideological, the ones whose politics have not already been captured by generational reactionary inheritance, the ones who are open to hearing that the grass-fed dairy-and-beef export model Bresnihan described at Maynooth is not actually working for them even if it is working for the processors.
That is a smaller constituency than the total rural vote. But it is not zero. And it is the constituency a serious project has to identify and address, without pretending the rest of rural Ireland is available and without writing off the part that is.
This is one of the places the project will have to be propositional without being prescriptive. I do not know how to address that constituency. I know that the policies are adjacent to the ones Bresnihan and Social Justice Ireland and the more serious rural-ecological writers have been sketching. A genuine diversification of rural livelihoods, a land-use transition that compensates the people whose livelihoods depend on the current system, a re-localisation of food economies that gives rural communities something to defend other than the export commodity chain. I know that the politics that makes those policies possible does not yet exist. The work of building it is the work the project would have to do.
VI. What I will not pretend to know
I have set down four commitments, an account of the absorption pattern, a reading of what the right has built, and a partial answer to McHugh’s challenge. The fuel crisis is not over. As I write, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, oil markets have opened sharply higher, the Coalition is asking the EU for trade relief on jet fuel, the strategic reserve is being publicly considered for release, and the Taoiseach is publicly committing to lead his party into the next election as internal unease over his handling of the first wave continues to surface. The conditions the essay diagnoses are not stable. They are accelerating. I want to close by naming what I do not know and will not pretend to know.
I do not know whether Sinn Féin can be the vehicle for any of this. The trajectory appears to be against it, and the Keir Starmer temptation: neutralising the far-right wave by adopting enough of its vocabulary to make the far-right redundant, is the path of least resistance for a party whose leadership has never been structurally anchored to a left position it could not abandon. I do not know whether Sinn Féin will reach for that temptation or resist it. The question is alive inside the party, as it is alive inside every party of the European left that has watched Starmer’s version of it succeed in electoral terms while emptying the party of the content it used to carry.
I do not know whether the existing small left parties and independents can coalesce around the four commitments in a way that avoids absorption. People Before Profit and the Social Democrats and smaller formations have each been doing honest work in their own registers, but none of them has yet demonstrated the scale of organising infrastructure the right is now building. The Greens, in the leadership of Roderic O’Gorman, are one of the few voices I heard during the fuel week naming the structural dependency and the embassy-level chain of cause and effect. Whether that voice can survive the next coalition offer is the question the Greens are going to have to answer again, having failed to answer it the last time.
I do not know whether the intellectual and cultural resources exist to build the infrastructure the project would need. The policy researchers are there. The journalists are there. The trade unions are partly there. The cultural figures are there. What I have not seen is the integrated form that would bring those resources together into something that could organise the available constituencies. That form will have to be built, or it will not exist, and the consequence of its not existing will be that the right-wing infrastructure already operational will continue to grow without serious opposition.
There is one piece of evidence worth naming before I close, because it happened this weekend and it bears directly on the question. Uachtarán na hÉireann, on her first foreign trip as head of state, travelled to Barcelona to share a platform with Lula, Petro, Ramaphosa, Sheinbaum and Sánchez at a summit framed explicitly as a defence of democracy against the global authoritarian right. In her address she asked how the international system had moved “from the crystal-clear language of the UN charter championing human rights to the crystal-clear language that now champions ‘might is right’”, and she answered her own question with a sentence worth copying out: “Each time a violation was absorbed without consequence, the threshold for the next one was raised.” She framed Ireland’s perspective in terms the Coalition has spent the last decade carefully avoiding, as a neutral, post-famine, post-colonial republic with an unbroken UN peacekeeping record since 1958 and an obligation to refuse the normalisation of war. The presidency does not make policy. What it can do is name what the state is doing and what it is not doing. This presidency has just named it. That does not amount to a political project, and the office is not one a political project can enlist. It does amount to evidence that the vocabulary a serious project would need to speak is already, quietly, available from at least one Irish institution.
What I know is that the diagnosis is now available from enough honest voices that the question has changed. The question is no longer whether we can see the shape of what is happening. The question is whether we can build the political form that would let us act on what we see.
The tradition I write from has an answer to this question, and the answer is that building is harder than diagnosing, and that the people who have paid most for previous attempts to build are not the people who will lightly authorise the next attempt. That is why the weight of the diagnosis, the weight Sinéad O’Sullivan and Ciara Murphy and Saoirse McHugh and Patrick Bresnihan and Roderic O’Gorman and Fintan O’Toole have each contributed to, from their different vantage points, has to be held carefully. It is not a mandate. It is an invitation.
The invitation is to take the diagnosis seriously enough to act on it before the infrastructure being built against it becomes impossible to catch up with. That is the work. It is slower than the news cycle and it will not land on any editor’s desk as a scoop. It is the work anyway.
I will keep writing while it is being done. The people actually doing it, the ones I will not name because they are still deciding whether to be public about what they are building, will do more than I will. This is a small contribution to a conversation that will have to be had properly elsewhere, in rooms I do not sit in, by people who have more at stake than I do.
What comes next is theirs to build. What I can do is keep the question alive until they are ready to answer it.
Sources and further reading
The five diagnostic voices this essay draws on, in the order they appear in Section I:
Sinéad O’Sullivan, “Mind The Gap,” But This Time It’s Different (Substack).
Sinéad O’Sullivan, “The protests aren’t just about fuel, they’re a revolt against a hollow state,” The Journal, 14 April 2026,
Ciara Murphy, “We have a fossil fuel problem,” Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, 15 April 2026.
Saoirse McHugh, thread on agri-politics and the left, Bluesky, April 2026 — @saoirsemc.bsky.social
Patrick Bresnihan, quoted in Tommy Greene, “Why are fuel price protests sweeping the Republic of Ireland?,” Al Jazeera, 16 April 2026.
Sébastien Lecornu, televised address reported in America Hernandez, “France doubles electrification aid to cut fossil fuel dependency,” Reuters, 10 April 2026.
Stephen McDermott, “What happens now to the €150,000 raised on GoFundMe to feed the fuel protesters?,” The Journal, 16 April 2026.
Additional context:
Fintan O’Toole, “Rule of the ‘breakfast roll-atariat’ — this is how Ireland’s far-right movement will emerge,” Irish Times, 14 April 2026 —
Keith Kelly, “‘Too much is at stake’ — Catherine Connolly tells world leaders ‘democracy is under attack’ on first foreign trip as president,” Irish Independent, 18 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.
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