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Barry Gilheany ⚽ The conventional narrative that is being told about Leeds United’s narrow loss to Chelsea in the second of this weekend’s FA Cup Semi Finals at a gloriously sunny Wembley on Sunday past is that once again we didn’t turn up, froze, were overcome by nerves etc, etc. etc. 

Yes, we failed to break our Wembley duck for the fourth successive occasion since an Eric Cantona hat trick won us the 1992 FA Charity Shield in a 4-3 victory over Liverpool. Yes, we were outclassed in the first half thanks largely to the five back formation that Daniel Farke decided to start with and off days by Ao Tanaka and Ethan Ampadou in particular. 

Yet the statistic that I have just given should indicate just what a momentous occasion this was for Leeds United Football Club. For this was our first appearance in an FA Cup semi-final in 39 years, since a thrilling 3-2 defeat to Coventry City at Hillsborough in which we were just 24 minutes from reaching what should be the only club fixture reserved for Wembley – the Cup Final. I cannot help but feel that we would have had a better chance at a ground like Villa Park or Old Trafford which are shorter in pitch dimensions and less of a psychological occasion than Wembley.

But this really was an occasion pregnant with history, both club and personal. It took place on the 34th anniversary of the achievement of our last major honour – the old First Division Championship on Sunday 26th April 1992 which has earned us, in the words of the music journalist and author Dave Simpson, The Last Champions. It was a reprise of, and another opportunity for Leeds to gain revenge in a Cup tie for one of the many injustices suffered by Don Revie’s Legends – the 2-1 defeat in the 1970 FA Cup Final replay by Chelsea at Old Trafford. Played in front of a then record tv audience of 26 million, this match was perhaps the emblem of the brutality of 60s and 70s English football as feuds developed over the years were played out in technicolour savagery with virtually no intervention by the referee for whom, in the words of the legendary sports writer Hugh MacIlvaney, “only the production of a death certificate” would have been grounds for a booking, a sanction that that was only imposed on two occasions. 

A contemporary Premier League referee would have dished out seven red cards to Chelsea and four to Leeds; with Chelsea defender Eddie McCreadie being sent off twice. Two incidents remain seared in the memories of Leeds fans of that vintage; the scything down of Eddie Gray who had virtually conducted proceedings in the drawn Wembley match with virtuoso wing play by Ron “Chopper” Harris and a high kick on Billy Bremner by Eddie McCreadie in the penalty area near the end of normal time (Chelsea got their winner in extra time). Not that Leeds were shrinking violets. A cynical barge on Chelsea keeper Peter Bonetti early doors may have hobbled him sufficiently to prevent Mick Jones’s mazy opener for Leeds. 

This match established a specifically football related hatred among Leeds fans of Chelsea to be, as all tribal feuds are, handed down the generations though cultural factors such as the London media’s adoration of the King’s Road fashion style association in contrast to the gritty Northern character of Don Revie’s side which they loathed. The rivalry was to be fought out on terraces and service stations throughout the 1970s and 1980s by their respective hooligan firm; the Chelsea Head hunters and the Leeds Service Crew with a particularly infamous denouement at the end of the 1983-84 season at Stamford Bridge when after a 5-0 victory had secured promotion for the home side, Leeds fans charged across the pitch to take apart and smash their scoreboard. Historical antagonisms were to be exacerbated by the controversial stewardship of Leeds by former Chelsea Chairman Ken Bates in the same capacity between 2005 and 2013 who had publicly nursed a desire to have Leeds expelled from the Football League over the Scoreboard incident and his presiding over our first ever relegation to the third tier of English football, the placing of the club into administration and a subsequent 15 points deduction for exiting administration without following insolvency procedures did feed conspiracy theories about his intentions. Master Bates was a thoroughly toxic influence on the club.

The 1970 Cup Final was my introduction to and initiation into the, as our club anthem Marching on Together, the “ups and downs”, with rather more of the latter, of the life of a Leeds United supporter. As the club went into its post Paris 75 robbery decline, the excitement of following Northern Ireland’s two World Cup Final tournaments in the 1980s partially displaced loyalties to a club which suffered relegation in 1982, and which developed a particular reputation for the thuggery and racism of more than a small minority of its following. However the semifinal run in 1987 and another near thing when promotion to the Old First Division was snatched from our grasp in extra time of a play-off final replay against Charlton Athletic who came back from a John Sheridan free kick classic to win 2-1 (the Russian Roulette torture mechanism of the Penalty Shoot Out had yet to be introduced into domestic competitions yet) rekindled the fires of a dormant passion. I became a born-again Leeds United fan; the year I became a self-imposed exile from Northern Ireland.

But now let me move from the future past to the future present. We actually started the brighter side and almost took the lead when a flick on from Dominic Calvert-Lewin presented Brenden Aaronson with a glorious opportunity, but his well-aimed shot was brilliantly saved by Chelsea keeper Sanchez. Had Norah Okafor opted to slot the ball through to an attendant Calvert-Lewin in the box rather than draw out a freekick which Tanaka disappointingly fluffed then we may have had another gilt-edged chance to score. 

But Chelsea, playing under caretaker boss Rob McFarlane - after the virtual refusal of their team to play for “supply teacher” Liam Rosenior led to their worst since 1911 of five defeats on the bounce and five clean sheets up front and the departure of the hapless Liam - soon asserted control as the law of the new manger bounce dictates. The malfunctioning of usually solid midfield partnership of captain Ampadou and Tanaka attracted the attention of Steven Gerrard making his debut as an analyst alongside Darren Fletcher and Ally McCoist in the TNT commentary box, and it was no surprise when Chelsea took the lead in the 23rd minute with a glorious header by Enzo Fernandez on his return to the side after being dropped for the last two games by Rosenior, after a pin point cross by Pedro Neto. I was frankly relieved that we went into the half-time interval just the one goal in arears.

The case for a change in formation was unanswerable and, as he showed at that crucial juncture at half-time at the Etihad in late November, Leeds manger Daniel Farke again displayed his tactical nous and flexibility by bringing on Anton Stach and Joe Rodon in place of Sebastien Bjiol and James Justin for the second half. It nearly paid immediate dividends as a fierce top corner bound pile driver was tipped over by Sanchez. Now a rejuvenated midfield and wing back pairings were really getting into their groove, and further chances came the way of Calvert-Lewin, but both efforts were dealt with relatively comfortably by Sanchez. 

It has to be pointed out that, despite the volume of well merited praise that has come DCL’s way, he has only scored once in open play in his last 18 games, and this statistic underlines the absolute necessity for Leeds to sign a younger, hungrier, and proven goal scoring forward in this summer’s transfer window. Gnonto and Nmencha came on to inject extra pace up front but there was a growing inevitability to the ultimate outcome; that we had seen this movie before. Controversy was injected into the proceedings by an increasingly common and egregious act of gamesmanship when Sanchez on the advice of a teammate sank to the ground with a phantom bout of cramp/muscle strain/thigh injury in order to enable an informal coaching session on the pitch. When Sanchez rose to the grounds in no apparent physical distress it triggered on field player confrontations and a chorus of boos from the 32,000 Leeds fans in attendance.

Such manoeuvres are clearly contrary to the laws of the game but the reluctance of referees to clamp down on these acts of, frankly, cheating are the cause of much fan outrage. Pep Guardiola employed similar dark arts during the Ramadan break at Elland Road in February with the successful aim in disrupting our rhythm. Such offences may not rank on the scales of criminality of a Ron Harris or an Eddie McCreadie but are becoming associated with the modern Chelsea and other ‘elite clubs’ for whom the normal rules of sporting probity on the pitch and financial probity seem to apply on an a la carte basis.

And so it was. A Wembley hoodoo remains uncracked, but it does not have to be a monkey on our collective shoulders. In what was more of a Premier League fixture than the genuine Cup atmosphere of the other Cup semi-final when for three magical minutes Championship Southampton dreamed of beating Manchester City after an exquisite 20 yard strike by Irish international Finn Azaz in the 79th minute and reaching the Final for only the second time since their victory also as a second tier side over Manchester United half a century ago in 1976. As it turned out, a cruelly deflected strike by Doku and a sensational long-range goal by Nico Gonzalez sent City to their fourth Cup Final in a row.

Defeat in a Cup semi-final always used to be seen as the most bitterly disappointing of all football experiences. As an attendee of two play-off final defeats and tv viewer of one other and two semi-final defeats, I can testify to the crushing, numbing devastation of these defeats. No such distress was, for me, attached, to Sunday’s loss. We again showed we are, as a promoted club, competitive at Premier League level. We now have to secure our topflight place by beating relegated Burnley at home on Friday night and then getting perhaps another point in the remaining three games after that. Then we can build a squad that can make use more of a permanent fixture in the Premiership and finally lay that Wembley hoodoo to rest.

Marching on Together.

⏩Barry Gilheany is a freelance writer, qualified counsellor and aspirant artist resident in Colchester where he took his PhD at the University of Essex. He is also a lifelong Leeds United supporter. 

Disappointment But Not Distress ⚽ FA Cup Semi-Final – Chelsea 1 Leeds United 0

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Fifty Five

 

A Morning Thought @ 3129

Cam Ogie ✍ Son Of Sam 🪶 “ . . . The Dog Made Me D It . . . ” 🪶 Serial Killer David Berkowitz.

A serious, rigorous and coherent critique of the responses by Donald Trump, JD Vance, and commentators such as Pete Hegseth to Pope Leo XIV must begin by recognizing a fundamental asymmetry  and becomes significantly stronger when it grounds itself not only in contrast, but in evidence: this is not simply a disagreement of opinions, but a divergence between distinct intellectual frameworks. What emerges is not a clash of equal arguments, but a striking mismatch between a deeply developed theological tradition and a form of political rhetoric that often substitutes assertion for reasoning.

Pope Leo XIV’s authority is not merely symbolic—it is intellectual, historical, and rigorously earned. His academic formation alone reflects this: a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Villanova University (1977), followed by a Doctorate in Canon Law from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas. This is complemented by his life as an Augustinian friar, formed within a tradition shaped by figures such as Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. Within this framework, questions of war, justice, and human dignity are not improvised—they are debated, refined, and constrained by centuries of moral reasoning, including principles like just war theory, proportionality, and the protection of noncombatants.

Set against this, the rhetoric of his critics reveals a fundamentally different mode of engagement.

Trump’s worldview, shaped in part by his economics education at the University of Pennsylvania, is rooted in transaction, dominance, and outcome. His language about war—calls for overwhelming force, threats of destruction—does not attempt to engage moral theology. Instead, it treats force as inherently self-justifying, collapsing complex ethical questions into demonstrations of strength.

Vance, despite his credentials from Ohio State University and Yale Law School, often approaches theology through a legal or ideological lens that does not fully translate. Legal reasoning is adversarial and strategic; theology is cumulative and truth oriented. The result is a critique that may sound rigorous but rarely grapples with the depth of the tradition it addresses.

It is with Hegseth, however, that the contrast becomes most explicit—because his rhetoric provides direct examples of how religion is being deployed. In a Pentagon prayer, he stated:

Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness … and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.

Elsewhere, he invoked divine support for military success:

“May the Lord grant… total victory over those who seek to harm them.”

He has also drawn directly on scripture in a martial context:

“Blessed be the Lord… who trains my hands for war.”

And framed military action within overtly religious language:

“Recognizing the providence of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

These are not isolated remarks; they form a pattern in which religious language is used to sanction violence rather than interrogate it. At times, this rhetoric is further blended with cultural imagery—echoing tones and references reminiscent of Pulp Fiction—producing a fusion of faith, identity, and spectacle that bears little resemblance to disciplined theological discourse.

This is where the critique sharpens most effectively. The issue is not that such rhetoric is pathological. It is that it relies on assertion without examination. Appeals to “righteousness,” “victory,” or divine providence are presented as self-evident justifications, rather than claims requiring moral scrutiny.

At times, this structure of reasoning can sound—rhetorically, not literally—uncomfortably close to the logic of “the dog made me do it.” Not because the speakers are irrational, but because the argument rests on an external authority that is invoked rather than examined. The authority may be framed as divine mandate, national security/destiny, historical right or civilizational defence—but the effect is similar: justification is asserted, not argued.

The crucial difference, of course, is that these are not the actions of individuals detached from reality. They are deliberate, structured, and politically reinforced narratives. This makes them more serious, not less. The problem is not irrationality—it is rationalization. Violence is framed as necessary, righteous, even inevitable, within systems that can obscure the need for deeper ethical evaluation.

This stands in stark contrast to the tradition Pope Leo XIV represents. Catholic theology does not permit violence to justify itself. It demands that it be constrained, questioned, and morally accounted for. Where Hegseth’s language calls for “no mercy,” the Church’s tradition insists on limits. Where political rhetoric celebrates total victory, theology asks whether such victory can ever be morally legitimate.

What we are seeing, then, is not simply disagreement—it is a category mismatch. Trump, Vance, and Hegseth are not engaging the Pope within the framework of theology; they are addressing him as though he were a political actor operating within their own logic. In doing so, they flatten a complex moral tradition into something that can be overridden by rhetorical force.

In the end, the contrast is stark. On one side stands a figure formed by decades of disciplined study within a two-thousand-year-old intellectual tradition. On the other are critics whose engagement with that tradition is partial, instrumental, and at times dismissive. The result is not a meaningful theological debate, but a misalignment—one in which assertion replaces reasoning, and where, at moments, the justification for violence can sound as though it rests on an authority that need not explain itself.

The problem is not that U.S. and Israeli actions resemble the irrational violence of a serial killer; it is that they are far more troubling than that. They are rationalized, systematized, and justified through the language of law, security, and even morality. Where Berkowitz claimed a ‘demon dog’ told him to kill, states invoke national security, historical destiny, or divine sanction. The danger lies not in madness, but in the normalization of extreme violence under the cover of legitimacy.

And it is precisely in that gap—between reasoned moral argument and unexamined certainty—that the critique finds its full force.

⏩ Cam Ogie is a Gaelic games enthusiast.

The Dog Made Me Do it

Seamus Kearney 🎤 It has to be noted here and highlighted that the Unionist leadership has a particular problem with Bobby Sands, the nine other hunger strikers and the whole H Block issue of 1981.


In 2013, even after the European Union offered over 18 million pounds for the construction of a Conflict Resolution Centre at the Long Kesh /H Block site, it was the DUP and the Unionist bloc that rejected it on the grounds that the site would become 'a shrine to Republican terrorists'. 

Even after Martin McGuinness and Peter Robinson declared the Long Kesh site 'spade ready', in July 2013, a letter from America by the same Peter Robinson declared a change of heart and rubbished the whole idea of the preservation of the site. The Unionist leadership went on to state that the H Blocks, including the prison hospital where the ten hunger strikers died, should be demolished, flattened and 'social housing' built on the site.

On closer examination one must ask the pertinent question - why so much vitriol around this particular issue, even to the point of demanding the demolition of the recently erected statue of Bobby Sands near his home in Twinbrook, on a site which threatens no one?

The answer lies in the human condition of not allowing the real story to be told in the public arena. When the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin, Germany, was informed about the prisoner revolt in August 1943 at the Treblinka death camp in Eastern Poland, Heinrich Himmler ordered the camp to be demolished, flattened and 'pine trees' to be planted on the former site in an attempt to cover up the evidence of what actually happened there. The Nazi leadership understood correctly the horror which lay within the Treblinka death camp and tried to eradicate the evidence of their own guilt.

Equally, be rest assured, deep within the Unionist psyche the same guilt lies in the decision not to build the Conflict Resolution Centre and to eradicate the statue of Bobby Sands in Twinbrook. Because by recognising Bobby Sands in any shape or form, or by finally agreeing to the Conflict Resolution Centre at Long Kesh, shelved since 2013 by Unionist intransigence, they would effectively lose the argument and the narrative surrounding their failed state. 

The Unionist leadership must not be appeased because appeasement only feeds into their ignorance and intransigence, instead they must be confronted and outflanked by a common sense approach which allows the history of partition, the last 40 years of conflict to be properly told, the crucible being the H Block struggle at Long Kesh, and history to be recorded properly for posterity.

Seamus Kearney is a former Blanketman and author of  
No Greater Love - The Memoirs of Seamus Kearney.

Bobby Sands Still Confronting Unionist Ignorance And Intransigence

Dr John Coulter ✍ The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has in reality sent a shockwave to Iran in the wake of downgrading the United Kingdom’s growth estimate in the IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook.

Reading between the lines, the political message to Iran is simply - accept the deal with the United States and stop attacking shipping in the vital oil supply route, the Strait of Hormuz.

The IMF has already forecast that the energy shock from the Iran war will hit the UK the hardest of all the globe’s advanced economies. The UK is already suffering from the cost of living crisis, and the fuel price crisis does not auger well for PM Keir Starmer ahead of crucial elections in England, Scotland and Wales on 7th May.

The pressure has been piled on Starmer’s premiership when the IMF cut its estimate for UK growth in 2026 to 0.8% from the 1.3% prediction made a few months ago in January before the Iran war erupted.

In justifying its estimate, the IMF said the downgrade was due to that war, fewer interest rates cuts and the expectation that the impact of higher energy costs would linger into next year - the same year as crunch council and Assembly elections in Northern Ireland.

The IMF’s downgrade flies in the face of the UK statistics own figures of a growth of 0.5% in the economy. However, this will not be good enough to fend off a potential Labour meltdown on 7th May when the Left-wing Green Party and Right-wing Reform UK party are expected to make substantial gains at the expense of Starmer’s party.

A catastrophic result on 7th May is expected to well be the death knell for Starmer’s leadership and the behind the scenes jockeying for position to replace him as both party leader and PM is already underway.

But what is really driving the IMF downgrade is the global context rather than purely the cost of living crisis within the UK. The IMF is really trying to prepare the overall global economy for President Donald Trump’s next move on Iran.

The major problem facing Trump is how to lean politically on the Iranians to promise never to develop their nuclear capabilities to the extent that they possess a nuclear bomb. The real concern in the Trump camp in Washington is that the Iranians want a nuclear capacity, not to heat homes or fuel factories, but to attack Israel - hence the latter’s part in assisting the US in air strikes against Iran.

Mind you, Israel is also a nuclear power and possesses nuclear bombs so is Iran merely trying to create a 1950s Cold War scenario in the Middle East in the hope that no one is silly enough to press the red buttons? In the Fifties and Sixties, both the US and the communist USSR had nuclear bombs, but no one would fire as they became deterrents to avoid a nuclear war.

In military terms, can Trump and the Israelis give the Iranian regime such a bloody nose that the country’s Revolutionary Guard-dominated leadership signs a concrete and long-term agreement that it will never develop a nuclear arms capability?

Currently, Trump and the Israelis are attempting to get Iran to agree to this scenario purely through an air bombardment offensive. But what happens if Iran can hold the line militarily and soaks up the pressure of air strikes - will a ground offensive be required as with Kuwait and Iraq in terms of ‘boots on the ground’?

Trump will certainly not want any Iran conflict - especially if it requires ‘boots on the ground’ - to deteriorate into another embarrassing Vietnam or Afghanistan. In the Seventies, the US had to abandon South Vietnam to the North Vietnamese communists after at least a decade of ‘boots on the ground’ fighting the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong guerrillas; a campaign which cost the lives of some 10,000 American service personnel.

During the previous Joe Biden Presidential administration, the US had to crawl away from Afghanistan leaving the radical Islamic Taliban back in control of the country. What did all those coalition forces die for?

Any ground offensive will not be as militarily simple as driving the late dictator Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait or Iraq. A conventional war against Iran could be very costly in lives for the US, and there is no guarantee that other NATO countries would join America in such a conflict.

Could Trump actually find himself in the same position as a Presidential predecessor - Harry S. Truman - who approved the atomic bombing of two major Japanese cities in 1945 to force the Japanese military government to finally surrender.

One reason for using the nuclear option against Japan was the conventional experience for the Americans in capturing islands, such as Iwo Jima and Okinawa, given the estimated number of Allied lives it would have cost to capture mainland Japan, given the fanaticism of the Japanese military leadership. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard is a 21st century example of that Japanese World War Two-style fanaticism.

So let’s pose the controversially unthinkable - Trump has used colourful language during the Iran crisis to describe what could happen, so would the President be prepared to use limited nuclear strikes against Iran if the current war deteriorated into a Vietnam-style conflict?

The bitter reality which the Trump administration has to face is that while Starmer remains as PM, there is no chance of British security forces being used in a ‘boots on the ground’ scenario in Iran. As for the European Union, it is too politically scared to act against the current regime in Iran in a military capacity.

Iran knows it cannot win a conventional war against the US. It’s only hope of any success is to drag the conflict out in the hope that either Trump gets fed up with the war and shifts his attention back to taking over Greenland, or Iran signs a deal concerning the Strait of Hormuz, or Trump’s term as Presidency runs out of time and the more liberal Democratic Party wins the next race for the White House.

As my recent participation on Algeria’s AL24 News television discussion on the Iran war shows - a lasting solution is far from clear:

Discussing the Iran war on the English language Algerian tv channel AL24 News.


 
Follow Dr John Coulter on Twitter @JohnAHCoulter
John is a Director for Belfast’s Christian radio station, Sunshine 1049 FM. 

Iran Needs To Take Note Of IMF Downgrade For UK

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Fifty Four

 

A Morning Thought @ 3128

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

Photo by Stewart Munro on Unsplash

.The haulier was right about diesel

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

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

First, the cheque.

I. The government that could not read its own country

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. The opposition that could not lead its own base

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. The tradition I write from

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing

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

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

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

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

Coda: The government survived by losing a minister

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

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

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

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

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

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

⏩Louth For Ever writes on Irish politics and constitutional change. Follow for analysis of Ireland’s democratic future as it’s constructed by those actually engaged in the work.

The Money Is Not There

Anthony McIntyre ☠ Nobody here needs to be told that Drogheda Stands With Palestine has gathered at this spot every Saturday since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza. 

Sometimes when we raise our voices there is a sense of whistling while walking past the graveyard. On those occasions our raised voices serve as a counterweight to the drop in morale that tends to set in when every week it is the same story - during the seven days since we last assembled, Israel has murdered more children. Somethings never change and that refrain is a constant here. Child murder seems to work like Viagra for Judeo Nazis like Itimar Ben Gvir, Security Minister of the occupying state and leader of the far right political party, Jewish Power. The very term Jewish Power to those who remember the genocide spawned by Hutu Power in Rwanda three decades ago, causes the most uncomfortable of shudders.

Yet for all of that, skimming over a friend's Fakebook page yesterday, I was heartened to note his take that Israel is growing more isolated in the international community, losing friends as quickly as Donald Trump seems to lose control of his bowels, unsure whether to spew their contents out his backside or mouth. But when it doubt, shit it out either which way, spread the MAGA crowd in slurry and have them express their undying gratitude for the privilege.

My friend wrote on his page:

In September 2025, an opinion poll in Germany, once Israel's most loyal ally, 62% of German voters believe Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. A vast majority (82%) of Germans reject military support for Israel in its conflict, with only 36% holding a positive view of the country, marking a notable decline in favourability.

If there is such a thing as good news during a genocide this is what makes it. One would imagine that Germany having perpetrated a genocide against the Jews and an even greater one against the Russians - the Holocaust industry tries to flip that so that the Jews, rather than the Slavs, are privileged as the most targeted and violated group during Worlds War 2 - would set its face like stone against any repeat. But no, Germany has found itself in the position of having supported two genocides in the space of a century.

When Israel stood accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice, Germany defended it against the charge, claiming in January 2024 that the allegation was baseless and amounted to a “political instrumentalization” of the 1948 Genocide Convention. As such, back then, the German government undertook to file an intervention on behalf of Israel.

However, as the deadline for submission to the ICJ loomed, Germany pulled back. The reason was not that the German state had second thoughts about what Israel was doing in Gaza but that Nicaragua had taken a case against Germany for assisting Israel through arming its genocide. While The ICJ rejected an application from Nicaragua for emergency action to be taken against Berlin, it did allow the Central American state's case to proceed.

A German Foreign Ministry spokesperson explained that: “We are now ourselves part of a contentious case before the ICJ and have therefore decided not to make use of this option.” 


Germany’s failure to file an intervention on Israel’s behalf means Israel is without the support of one of its more stalwart European supporters. Germany is Israel’s second-largest weapons supplier after the United States and has rarely criticized Israel’s prosecution of the war. It lifted a partial arms embargo on Israel in November.

My friend on Facebook concluded:

The collapse in Israel's reputation, and support for it, is worldwide, and particularly marked in countries seen as guaranteed Israeli supporters. Three quarters of the world's states now recognise the State of Palestine, including Germany and the UK, formerly long-time Israeli allies. Meanwhile, Belgium has become the latest country to call for the suspension, if not the full termination, of the EU-Israel trade deal.
Israel's reputation internationally has never been lower since the state's existence. Support for its existence is rock solid but respect for, and trust in, the state is collapsing, as is military support for it. The actions of indicted war criminal Netanyahu has done catastrophic damage to Israel's reputation.

That is the value of turning up in West Street each week no matter how despondent or despairing it seems. The genocidal juggernaut is finding its tracks increasingly clogged up with the type of grit that turns out here every Saturday.

⏩Follow on Bluesky.

True Grit

National Secular Society ★ Men who dress as women "revolting" and "repulsive", says chair of trustees.


The National Secular Society has reported a newly registered Christian charity to the regulator after its chair claimed "the devil will come in" if wives refuse their husbands sex.

It also broadcast a sermon implying being gay should be treated as a mental illness.

Wellspring Ministry registered under the charitable purpose 'the advancement of religion' in January. Its registered address is in Southwest London but the church itself is in Reading. Charities are legally required to act for the public benefit.

'You do not have authority over your body'

In a 2022 sermon titled 'End Time Message & Sex', chair of trustees Bienvenue Hombessa, who also goes by Ben Bienvenue, tells married women in the audience: "you do not have authority over your body". The sermon is available on the charity's YouTube channel.

Men in the audience can be heard saying "amen", but Hombessa rebukes the women for not being loud enough: "I can't hear you sisters, no I can't hear you".

He goes on: "Within the context of marriage, your body, sister – it does not belong to you."

Continue @ NSS.

Christian Charity 🪶‘Devil Will Come In’ If Wife Refuses Husband Sex

Right Wing Watch 👀Written by Peter Montgomery.


A Christian nationalist organization that is vetting potential Supreme Court nominees for their adherence to the group’s biblical worldview standard says that previous Supreme Court rulings have invited God’s punishment on the U.S., and that President Donald Trump must name the “right” people to fill any vacancies “to escape national judgment.”

AFA Action, the political arm of the American Family Association, distributed an email last Thursday and again on Tuesday warning of “fearful consequences” if Trump doesn’t use any future Supreme Court nominations to restore a national relationship with God that AFA says was broken by SCOTUS rulings upholding church-state separation.

“America desperately needs our Supreme Court Justices to turn back to God,” declares the fundraising email, which comes at a time of widespread speculation about the likelihood of one or more justices resigning this year. Highlighting the uncertainty of justices’ intentions is the fact that on the same day AFA’s email said a vacancy was likely soon, the allied Family Research Council published an article saying it is unlikely that Justice Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas would be retiring soon.

AFA Action’s Center for Judicial Renewal is run by a long-time right-wing judicial activist Phillip Jauregui . . .

Continue @ RWW.

AFA 🪶 Trump Justices Must Turn SCOTUS 'Back to God' To Avoid Fearful Judgment

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of One Thousand Nine Hundred And Fifty Three

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