Ten years, a full decade of the National Party.
Ten glorious years of flags, fury, factional warfare and the sort of organisational chaos usually associated with a GAA club committee after three pints and an argument about the raffle.
And how better to celebrate a tenth anniversary than with another spectacular internal explosion? Some political organisations mark ten years by producing housing programmes, organising workers, building community campaigns, developing serious economic policies and offering people some vision of the future. The National Party apparently marks ten years by eating itself; Again!
.
Cllr Patrick Quinlan's latest statement reads less like the declaration of a political movement preparing to transform Ireland and more like the minutes of a particularly dysfunctional WhatsApp group that somehow acquired a flag, a constitution and delusions of national importance. Leaders resign. Leaders return. Leaders are removed. Leaders are reinstated. Membership lists disappear into the fog. Emails become strategic assets. Social-media accounts apparently require diplomatic negotiations. And somewhere in the middle of all this, an important leadership decision is apparently being settled by telephone polling. Democracy by group chat. This is the organisation that presumably wants to save Ireland.
Ten years, a whole fucking decade. And after all that time, what have they actually built? Where is the serious housing programme? Where is the workers' programme? Where is the healthcare strategy? Where is the plan for education, public transport, childcare, addiction services or rebuilding communities gutted by poverty and deprivation? Where is the economic programme explaining who pays, who benefits and what exactly they intend to do once the flags come down and somebody hands them the keys to the country?
There is remarkably little there to argue with because there is remarkably little there. Instead we get the same tired political magic trick: take a complicated social problem, point at somebody poorer or more vulnerable, preferably somebody foreign, and scream until nobody notices who actually owns the fucking building.
Ireland has a housing crisis? Blame migrants. Rents are unaffordable? Blame migrants. Public services are collapsing? Blame migrants. Communities are being abandoned? Somehow, once again, blame migrants. It is a magnificent political con because it costs absolutely nothing. You don't have to confront landlords. You don't have to confront investment funds. You don't have to confront developers. You don't have to confront governments that spent decades treating housing as an investment commodity instead of a human necessity. You simply point sideways.
And there it is: the great genius of reactionary politics. It costs nothing to hate sideways. It costs everything to organise upwards.
There is nothing remotely radical about turning workers against one another because of nationality, ethnicity or immigration status. Irish history should have beaten that particular disease out of us generations ago. Our own people were scattered across the world by famine, poverty, colonialism and economic necessity. Irish emigrants were not universally greeted abroad with open arms and a complimentary three-bedroom house.
The working-class tradition worth defending is not one built around bloodlines and passports. It is solidarity. The person working beside you might have been born in Dublin, Donegal, Lagos, Warsaw or Damascus. If you're both being exploited by the same landlord, squeezed by the same cost of living and working for wages that barely cover the rent, you've got considerably more in common than the flag-waving nationalists would like you to believe.
Your enemy isn't the family arriving with two suitcases. It's the landlord collecting the rent. It's the investment fund buying housing. It's the employer squeezing wages. It's the government refusing to build enough homes. It's the economic system that can find billions for property speculation while telling ordinary people there simply isn't enough money for a secure home. That is the fight. But apparently the National Party has spent ten years looking in precisely the wrong direction.
And now, on its tenth birthday, we have another split. There is something almost poetic about it. Ten years spent proclaiming the coming nationalist revolution, only to discover that the revolutionary vanguard's most dangerous enemy is apparently the bloke sitting in the next chair. You couldn’t write a better satire.
The party cannot apparently agree on who is allowed to lead it, who possesses the membership list, who controls the communications machinery or how its own internal decisions should be made, yet somehow expects the rest of the country to believe it possesses the organisational genius required to transform an entire state. This isn't the disciplined nationalist movement promised in the propaganda. It's a group chat with a flag pinned to it.
And perhaps that is the real tragedy beneath the comedy. Because Ireland's working class deserves better than this. People sleeping on the streets deserve better. Families trapped in emergency accommodation deserve better. Young workers handing half their wages to landlords deserve better. People waiting years for healthcare deserve better. Communities destroyed by poverty and addiction deserve better. And migrants and refugees who have come here looking for safety deserve better than being turned into political scapegoats for failures they did not create. They deserve politics that actually fights for them. Not politics that tells them to fight each other.
The great nationalist revolution has not stormed the barricades. It appears to have misplaced the membership list somewhere between the Ard Chomhairle and the group chat. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still waiting for the houses. Maybe, after another ten years, they'll finally get around to building one.
And how better to celebrate a tenth anniversary than with another spectacular internal explosion? Some political organisations mark ten years by producing housing programmes, organising workers, building community campaigns, developing serious economic policies and offering people some vision of the future. The National Party apparently marks ten years by eating itself; Again!
.
Cllr Patrick Quinlan's latest statement reads less like the declaration of a political movement preparing to transform Ireland and more like the minutes of a particularly dysfunctional WhatsApp group that somehow acquired a flag, a constitution and delusions of national importance. Leaders resign. Leaders return. Leaders are removed. Leaders are reinstated. Membership lists disappear into the fog. Emails become strategic assets. Social-media accounts apparently require diplomatic negotiations. And somewhere in the middle of all this, an important leadership decision is apparently being settled by telephone polling. Democracy by group chat. This is the organisation that presumably wants to save Ireland.
Ten years, a whole fucking decade. And after all that time, what have they actually built? Where is the serious housing programme? Where is the workers' programme? Where is the healthcare strategy? Where is the plan for education, public transport, childcare, addiction services or rebuilding communities gutted by poverty and deprivation? Where is the economic programme explaining who pays, who benefits and what exactly they intend to do once the flags come down and somebody hands them the keys to the country?
There is remarkably little there to argue with because there is remarkably little there. Instead we get the same tired political magic trick: take a complicated social problem, point at somebody poorer or more vulnerable, preferably somebody foreign, and scream until nobody notices who actually owns the fucking building.
Ireland has a housing crisis? Blame migrants. Rents are unaffordable? Blame migrants. Public services are collapsing? Blame migrants. Communities are being abandoned? Somehow, once again, blame migrants. It is a magnificent political con because it costs absolutely nothing. You don't have to confront landlords. You don't have to confront investment funds. You don't have to confront developers. You don't have to confront governments that spent decades treating housing as an investment commodity instead of a human necessity. You simply point sideways.
And there it is: the great genius of reactionary politics. It costs nothing to hate sideways. It costs everything to organise upwards.
There is nothing remotely radical about turning workers against one another because of nationality, ethnicity or immigration status. Irish history should have beaten that particular disease out of us generations ago. Our own people were scattered across the world by famine, poverty, colonialism and economic necessity. Irish emigrants were not universally greeted abroad with open arms and a complimentary three-bedroom house.
The working-class tradition worth defending is not one built around bloodlines and passports. It is solidarity. The person working beside you might have been born in Dublin, Donegal, Lagos, Warsaw or Damascus. If you're both being exploited by the same landlord, squeezed by the same cost of living and working for wages that barely cover the rent, you've got considerably more in common than the flag-waving nationalists would like you to believe.
Your enemy isn't the family arriving with two suitcases. It's the landlord collecting the rent. It's the investment fund buying housing. It's the employer squeezing wages. It's the government refusing to build enough homes. It's the economic system that can find billions for property speculation while telling ordinary people there simply isn't enough money for a secure home. That is the fight. But apparently the National Party has spent ten years looking in precisely the wrong direction.
And now, on its tenth birthday, we have another split. There is something almost poetic about it. Ten years spent proclaiming the coming nationalist revolution, only to discover that the revolutionary vanguard's most dangerous enemy is apparently the bloke sitting in the next chair. You couldn’t write a better satire.
The party cannot apparently agree on who is allowed to lead it, who possesses the membership list, who controls the communications machinery or how its own internal decisions should be made, yet somehow expects the rest of the country to believe it possesses the organisational genius required to transform an entire state. This isn't the disciplined nationalist movement promised in the propaganda. It's a group chat with a flag pinned to it.
And perhaps that is the real tragedy beneath the comedy. Because Ireland's working class deserves better than this. People sleeping on the streets deserve better. Families trapped in emergency accommodation deserve better. Young workers handing half their wages to landlords deserve better. People waiting years for healthcare deserve better. Communities destroyed by poverty and addiction deserve better. And migrants and refugees who have come here looking for safety deserve better than being turned into political scapegoats for failures they did not create. They deserve politics that actually fights for them. Not politics that tells them to fight each other.
So happy tenth anniversary to the National Party. Ten years on the road to absolutely fucking nowhere. Ten years of splitting, resigning, returning, expelling, issuing statements about statements and apparently conducting revolutionary democracy through the holy sacrament of the WhatsApp poll.
The great nationalist revolution has not stormed the barricades. It appears to have misplaced the membership list somewhere between the Ard Chomhairle and the group chat. Meanwhile, the rest of us are still waiting for the houses. Maybe, after another ten years, they'll finally get around to building one.
Written in solidarity with every worker, every homeless person, every migrant and every ordinary human being this crowd has ever tried to turn against their neighbour instead of the people who actually hold the fucking power.
⏩Pádraig Drummond is an anti-racism activist.
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