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A Morning Thought @ 3315

Andrew Quinn ☭ Writing in Red Network.

The late great revolutionary trade unionist James Connolly said it best: “As Long as I live I will have no rest, only fighting to destroy the forces that produce poverty”.


Many of us working class people now find ourselves in that very same position as the ongoing cost of living crisis drives up inflation across the board affecting all the everyday workers who keep this country going day in and day out.

This brings me to the news of the upcoming November 12th strike Day across the public sector on account of government and unions failing to come to terms on a real public sector pay increase.

Both the government and our union leaders have been left with egg on their faces for different reasons.

The Government as per usual have shown their true colours not even bringing a credible offer to the table for the unions to ballot their members on. The offer of 1.75% this year when inflation is at 4.1% is a joke.

The same goes for the 2.5% a year for next year and the year after. The governments offer turns out to be a pay cut and they want “productivity” in return?

Yet the government claim its the unions' fault and in turn unions are blaming the government in a cat and mouse game.

The truth is both sides are to blame after two weeks of fruitless talks with no end in sight to this dispute. Unions were wrong to call off the follow up stoppage on October 21st after the first Oct 14th stoppage. They pulled pickets prematurely.

The Oct 14th strike showed great community sprit across the country, however their was a feeling of disappointment from people like myself out on picket lines that union communication needed to be massively improved.

Lack of organising was evident on the 14th. Issues such as not enough union banners, placards and lack of reps on some picket lines and workers not knowing where to go and for how long.

Then came the unions collective mistake off calling the October 21st strike to enter talks when a deal wasn’t even on the table!

Rule number one of negotiations is have something to bargain with and this wasn’t the case at all, and that left a sour taste in workers mouths including mine as many workers were not being kept informed on talks between the unions and government officials.

Merely just email and WhatsApp messages plus whispering information giving little to nothing away and being very vague on how talks were progressing - this only frustrated workers even further and rightly so.

Which begs the question should workers be in the negotiations room?

The answer is yes as the workers are the bread and butter of this country. We are all the means of production and distribution in our workplaces and the unions need to do better.

I’m in the Red Network because the Red Network’s message is simple: put workers in the driving seat of a planned economy. The same needs to happen in our unions. Put the grassroots in control and we’d have fighting unions.

It starts with educating workers on the topics that affect them and holding workshops that target these type of closed door negotiations. Instead of union bureaucrats selling out members to the government we need open democratic discussion at every stage.

Many workers feel let down and misinformed and that’s unacceptable. We will enthusiastically build the November 12th strike. But the power to pull that picket is still in the hands of our leaders. not the members. It would be a huge mistake if they cancelled this strike too.

As we’ve seen across other EU countries such as France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium Italy and Netherlands workers are in the same boat as us they are protesting all throughout November for the same reasons we are in Ireland which is to fight back against an anti-worker government.

Either union officials step up or step aside and put workers in the driving seat, grassroots workers that will hold the government accountable for their mismanagement of the public sector pay deals.

Let’s get ready for the strike on November 12th. The best steps to take are the following ahead of strike.

Keep up the pressure on your union reps to make sure their doing everything in their power to achieve the best deal for workers. Email HQ, get onto your reps, let them hear us loud and clear.

Stay informed, opt in to receive all union information via emails, Whatsapp group chats, email newsletters, as well as following all union based social media outlets.

Stay mobilised in your workplaces, elect a strike committee, discuss the deal, stick together as there is always strength in numbers.

Make sure your adhering to your work to rule protocols as they can be upgraded at any time.

We all collectively need to learn from past mistakes do better in the present in order to have the future we all need and deserve not only for ourselves but for future generations to come. See you on the picket lines!

⏩Andrew Quinn is a public sector worker and Red Network activist.

How Do We Get Consistently Fighting Unions?

Heartlands Tribune ☭  Written by Paul Knaggs

“Expand or Die”: Biden’s 1997 Plan to Save NATO And The Consequences

The Soviet Union collapsed, and NATO’s job was done. Instead, the alliance went looking for customers, and Joe Biden read out the prospectus in 1997.

I served in the British Army during the Cold War, in a regiment whose entire purpose rested on the darkest calculation of that age: that the final line against nuclear escalation was the absolute certainty of what would follow it. Mutually assured destruction. MAD. A terrible doctrine, but one designed to prevent an even more terrible reality. Our purpose was never to win a nuclear war. It was to ensure nobody dared start one.

We trained for a war that must never happen. And it didn’t.

The Warsaw Pact dissolved. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Third Shock Army, which we had spent our working lives preparing to confront, folded up and went home. And when the Cold War was over, our regiment was disbanded. Its job was done.

There is something in that transition which our political and military institutions seem to have forgotten: when the threat that justifies an institution’s existence disappears, its continued existence ought to be questioned.

Continue @ Heartlands.

We Won The Cold War 🪶 We Were Never Allowed To Win The Peace

Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on  226-November-2026.

“Sinn Féin’s bottom line is that it has no bottom line.” – Tommy McKearney

Photo by Lukas Souza on Unsplash

The Position

Let’s start with the history, because it’s so often recounted in reverse. Sinn Féin is not a petitioner at a gate that two older parties have long barred to it. Rather, Sinn Féin is the house those parties departed. Arthur Griffith established the movement in 1905, absorbing into it the National Council he had headed since 1903, and in time both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil would break away from Sinn Féin, not the other way around. Fine Gael did not come into being until 1933, when it was created from the fusion of three bodies: Cumann na nGaedheal, the party pro-Treaty members organised in April 1923, as the civil war that the Treaty had opened in January 1922 was ending; the Centre Party; and the Blueshirts. Fianna Fáil was not founded until 1926, when Éamon de Valera, having been defeated at the Sinn Féin ard fheis on whether to enter the Dáil, stepped down as president of the movement and took most of its membership with him. If you put aside the century of civil war mythology so carefully maintained, until recent years, by both successor parties, what is left is not an old regime confronted by a new challenger. It is one movement, and two exits from it, exits that have shaped this nation of ours for over a hundred years even as each, in turn, claims to embody the tradition and casts the movement it abandoned as the deviation.

The family tree is not tidy. The remnant that retained the Sinn Féin name after 1926 divided again in 1970, and today’s party descends from that second division rather than from an unbroken line back to Griffith. Yet the actual movement of events runs opposite to the usual assumption. Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil departed from Sinn Féin in order to construct an order, and since then they have ruled, one after the other and together, on the basis of having been the ones to leave. I make no apology for wanting this pattern to be over. I’m fucking sick of it. Sin é.

This piece is about how poorly Sinn Féin, in its present guise, is prepared to bring that order to an end. It is written by someone who still wants them to do exactly that.

What Meta Admitted

Begin with São Paulo, and with a detail that should shame a trillion dollar firm far more than it apparently does. On 16th October, Reuters said that Meta’s own employees, in internal messages examined by Folha de S.Paulo, admitted President Lula’s Instagram accounts were being blocked by campaign time restrictions even as the platform was surfacing his rival’s profile. Then, on 15th October, a Brazilian electoral court justice had to order Meta to cease the unjustified suppression of either candidate’s reach. A separate later ruling reinforces the point: after Lula’s campaign showed the company had “doctored algorithms to favor Bolsonaro in search results,” the same court issued an injunction against Meta. Meta rejected both accusations, though it conceded unspecified “technical issues.”

Nor did the problem end after Lula’s side pushed back. According to TikTok’s own published recommendation data, during the runoff it gave Flávio, Bolsonaro’s son and opponent, five recommendations to Lula’s two, by which time Lula’s digital operation was already at full speed. That skew was never fixed. He still prevailed with it in place.

Keep that in mind before reading any version of this as Lula “beat the algorithm,” remember this: he did not. No one has. He won despite it. Serbia offers the same lesson from the same week. Aleksandar Vučić stepped down as president specifically so he could run for prime minister, a workaround for the term limits that had finally caught up with him after more than ten years in power; even so, a student led list defeated his party for the parliament he needed. Within 48 hours, two entrenched political machines were beaten, not because the platforms favoured them, but for reasons entirely apart from that.

The Levee

The mobilisation did not begin with a deputy’s mobile phone. On the night Lula slipped behind in the opening round, students in Niterói were already out on the streets, drawing on their own tradition of marching against Bolsonaro’s university cuts in 2019. Only later did the machinery arrive. It amplified something that was already there.

Five days afterwards, Congressman André Janones opened a WhatsApp channel called Lula’s Army. By election day, it had 10.8 million followers and was delivering daily, unusually precise tasks: push a video hard, drive a hashtag into circulation, “no food before the mission.” Rather than distancing himself from the metaphor, Lula embraced it, naming Janones in his victory speech as the operation’s commander, a group that built its image on real soldiers, yet was outdone in the language of soldiering by a WhatsApp channel. The day before Flávio’s Avenida Paulista rally, that same effort had backers wearing the national jersey, taking back a shirt the far right had claimed as its own.

Bruno Dias, a commentator who observed from within São Paulo, captured the logic in a line worth retaining: “to be everywhere, to act redundantly, to be unbannable.” WhatsApp is, awkwardly enough, also a Meta product. No one appeared bothered by the contradiction. The aim was never to please Meta. It was to create something that would not require it.

Two scholars examining the outcome caution against treating it as simply a platform tale. Denilde Holzhacker does credit the shift, but says the key change was tying the digital effort to on-the-ground organisation. For Mayra Goulart, it was the material world, not the phone, that reduced abstention and persuaded the undecided. Lula’s vote climbed from sixty million in 2022 to sixty four million this year, first a turnout story, and only then a persuasion one. Both are also clear that no one can say how many votes, if any, the WhatsApp operation actually shifted. That is worth holding onto before turning this into a recipe instead of one specific three weeks that happened to succeed.

The Reframe

Here is the lesson, and here is what it is not.

It is not a matter of “out amplify the right online.” The second section above, “What Meta Admitted”, makes clear that the contest is fixed at the infrastructure level, not merely at the level of content, and no one can win a match when the referee is on the other team’s payroll. Lula constructed a second pitch alongside the first, then carried out the slower task of linking it to people.

The part that can be carried over is more limited: create distribution that does not need any platform’s approval to operate. Duplicate. Peer-to-peer. Built to be impossible to ban, because it was never asking for permission in the first place, functioning as a supplement to organising, not a replacement for it. That is an organisational issue rather than a matter of message discipline, and by itself it falls far short.

Nor is this confined to one place; it is being sought elsewhere by people who have even stronger grounds for confidence. In Spain, Pedro Sánchez has asked for Janones’ help directly in his own re-election campaign. In France, opponents of Marine Le Pen are copying what is already being referred to as “Janonisme.” No one spreading this is treating it as an oddity. They are treating it as a technique.

The Coalition Problem Comes First

Here I have to be precise about which Sinn Féin I mean, because the lesson doesn’t apply evenly.

26 county Sinn Féin runs as a coalition-management operation. It holds together voters who want opposite things on housing and migration by never quite specifying what it collectively believes, because any specific answer costs something with one half or the other. Simon McGarr named the condition precisely: an “impossible coalition,” split close to evenly on whether the state’s institutions are worth preserving or burning down.

This week supplied the clearest instance yet, and it isn’t new, it’s a pattern repeating. Justice spokesperson Matt Carthy TD from Cavan & Monaghan launched Valuing Irish Citizenship, raising the residency requirement from five to eight years and adding civics and language tests, substantially matching the government’s own reform and converging with the direction Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Aontú and Independent Ireland already hold, along with other right-wingers across Europe. Asked if fewer people would be granted citizenship, Carthy said it wasn’t about “crude numbers”, an evasion almost beside the point next to what he’d already said at the National Ploughing Championships: Sinn Féin “probably wasn’t vocal enough” about the asylum system, and the party’s position should sit “where the majority of Irish people are.” That is a party locating the loudest signal and moving to stand beside it, as strategy, in his own words, and it is the same admission, in substance, that other voices on the left have been making about the party for months, Paul Murphy TD of People Before Profit said in May that Sinn Féin had “drifted to the right,” and Social Democrats TDs said they’d been “taken aback” by the party’s abstention on a reproductive rights bill the same month. This is not a single bad week. It’s a pattern other people on the left have already named.

The same week, asked why he’d deleted an earlier post attacking the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, Carthy confirmed he’d pulled it “fairly quickly” because of the “pile on” the centre was getting, while keeping his call for a funding review of organisations like it. The post goes. The position stays. The explanation offered is the backlash, not the argument.

6 county Sinn Féin is not running that problem. Three weeks before any of this, O’Neill and McDonald stood together at Garvaghy Road and held a line that cost them something real: both were later called in for PSNI interviews under caution, alongside other party figures including PBP’s Gerry Carroll MLA for west Belfast. That isn’t a movement incapable of a bottom line. The honest contrast isn’t that the north has principle and the south doesn’t, it’s that in the north, on an anti-sectarian question, the loudest signal and the party’s century old position point the same way, so holding the line costs something without forcing a choice between two things its own base wants. In the south, on migration, there is no settled position for the signal to answer to. Carthy isn’t failing to hold a line Sinn Féin has. He’s following a signal toward a line it never drew.

Even that contrast isn’t as clean as it looks. What bends, even at Garvaghy Road, isn’t whether O’Neill names something as wrong, it’s who she’s willing to name for it, the same naming capacity gradient that softens into agentless sentences the higher the cost of the name. The bottom line holds on position and loosens on attribution, north. South, it doesn’t hold on position at all.

Build a Janones style machine for 26 county Sinn Féin as it stands, and you aren’t amplifying a position. You’re amplifying whichever position tested best that week.

What’s Actually Being Asked

There are two questions here, and history answers only one of them unequivocally. The lineage is not pristine, I acknowledged that at the outset: because of the 1970 split, the current party comes from one faction within a faction, not from an unbroken chain reaching back to Griffith. Still, that is very different from what Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael did. Each of those parties departed and then created something else under a fresh label. In the end, the Officials, the wing of the 1970 split that did not become today’s Sinn Féin, did the same: they dropped the lineage entirely by changing their name and became the Workers’ Party. Today’s Sinn Féin never took that route. It retained the name and continued to stand as Sinn Féin through every split dating back to Griffith. That is the real point, and it is narrower than words like “unbroken” or “settled” may imply: not the sole successor, but the one that never walked away and never rebranded itself. Whatever the party does this week does not alter that.

The second issue is about conduct, and on that score the answer has just emerged in the least encouraging way. Choose a line. Not the one a pollster would call safest. Work out what the party believes a renter is entitled to in relation to a homeowner, what it thinks of a system that is failing people on all sides of the migration debate, and then accept that taking such a stance will cost something with someone. Carthy made that clear this week. He directed it at Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Aontú and Independent Ireland, and described it as the majority view rather than his own.

I should add the detail I am not going to omit, because it is the most important part. In a Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll of 1,181 voters carried out the day after the launch (30th October), Sinn Féin was up two points to 21, putting it ahead of the rest of the field. Aontú climbed to 9, which is its highest figure in this series. Independent Ireland moved up two to 7. Fianna Fáil alone took the hit, falling two to 16. Even allowing for the 2.9 margin of error, the trend is plain and real: that entire bloc shifting right on migration advanced in the same week Sinn Féin aligned itself with it.

I want to be explicit about what that means for me, because I am not prepared to let a poll decide the matter. Sinn Féin has once again been nudged rightward on immigration, this time by a cue it treated as if it were a mandate, and I cannot endorse that, whatever the numbers say this week or next. If a party rises in the polls by doing the wrong thing, that does not justify the thing itself. It explains why the thing continues. McKearney’s point was never simply that failure had been identified. It was that a strategy can work on its own terms, and precisely for that reason it endures; that is why it has to be named plainly, not excused because of the outcome.

Brazil did not show that making a position explicit is the key. What it showed is that being explicit in opposition to the noisiest signal, even when it carries a cost, and having something to organise around, does work, and that the approach is portable enough that Madrid and Paris are already requesting it by name. Garvaghy Road showed that Sinn Féin can do exactly that when the signal and the principle point in the same direction. This week, however, the signal was different, there was no principle beneath it, and the poll told the party that none of that mattered.

The embryo is real. It was there in 1905, and its claim on the tradition is the stronger one. But an embryo is not a guarantee. A movement can have the better claim on its own history, proof it can hold a line, a method already carrying its name abroad, and still spend a week discovering none of it costs the party anything, and take the easy road of least resistance regardless.

⏩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.

Unbannable 🪶 What Lula’s Levee En Masse Can, And Cannot, Teach Sinn Féin

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Forty Three

 

Pastords @ 69

 

A Morning Thought @ 3314

Gary Robertson ⚽ Sunday evening, as I do each and every night, I video called my son and his mother to have a little chat and wish them both a good night.
 
During our conversation my son pipped up “Da are you ok? You look pissed off” I told him I was fine and not to worry about me. It was at this moment his mother hit the nail right
on the head. “Celtic got beat again didn’t they?” I nodded and the veil was lifted, all was clear and in unison they said “sorry”.
 
I told them it was fine. I lied, it’s Monday morning and I feel like faeces.
 
I rather hoped the “who blinked first” battle in Scottish League one would take centre stage in this column however the footballing Gods had ideas of their own. Before I spiral further into the pit of despair that is Martin O’Neill's Celtic let’s have a quick reminder of what’s happened this weekend in Scottish football.
 
For the four remaining teams in the league cup this was semi finals time.
 
First up at 5-30 on Saturday night Rangers faced Aberdeen in their tie. There was, as always some controversy, some controversial decisions, a tackle that on any other night would have almost certainly resulted in a red card somehow seen differently by Ref Ryan Lee and his VAR team.
 
I’d love to hear the audio of that conversation, if there even was one and how they concluded that studs in the loin wasn’t worthy of even a yellow. This wasn’t a game of quality. I think even the most ardent of Rangers fans (Steve R I’m looking at you) would admit this was far from a classic. Ultimately though a winner had to be found and that winner came from the boot of the ever reliable Naderi for Rangers in the 83rd minute. Not a game for the purist but well done Rangers for grinding out a result in this one and securing your place in the final.
 
Aberdeen did all they could, they battled but came up short. However this performance was one of their best this season and here’s hoping they can use this as a springboard and give them confidence to go onward and upward throughout the rest of the season.
 
So to League One. Hamilton and Raith Rovers met during the week and rather predictably the match finished a 1-1 draw. Neither team willing to give an inch in this title race so Saturday's fixtures for both indicated a victory apiece. Hamilton's opponents Montrose had other ideas.
 
While title rivals Ross County took care of East Kilbride away, Hamilton faced Montrose at home.
Bookmakers' odds suggested this would be a formality and when Hamilton finally took the lead in the second minute of stoppage time in the first half it looked like the floodgates would open and a plethora of goals in the second half looked likely.
 
This is football, soccer, though and nothing is guaranteed.
 
Hamilton pushed for a second, Montrose drove forward seeking an equaliser and their prayers were answered as the clock ticked past the 80th minute and with eitght left Freeman fired home to send the Montrose support into ecstasy. A celebration reminiscent of a victory and rightly so. New Douglas Park is not an easy place from which to take points and the long trip home would be all the more enjoyable.
 
Other results of note: East Fife recorded only their second victory of the season with a comfortable 2-0 victory over Queen of the South.
 
An away victory for bottom side Cove Rangers over Airdrie by a single goal to nil also giving them their second win of the season. With a game in hand and a minus three goal difference to make up it’s getting tight at the bottom too.
 
League Two and high flying Stranraer were held to a 0-0 draw by second placed Clyde. Only goal difference separates the two and like League One it’s a fascinating game of cat and mouse developing this season.
 
Where there is pleasure there is often pain and South West Scotland side Annan are now 3 points adrift at the bottom of the table having lost out in a thrilling 5 goal match at Spartans. The final score of 3-2 somewhat sums up the luck they're having right now and there’s still a long way to go. Whilst it’s not a comfortable position for the Annandale men to be in I’m sticking my neck out here and going to state confidently they’ll remain in League Two next season. They aren’t a bad side and I’m sure they’ll drag themselves up the league and while not champions I’m sure they’ll find their happy place in mid table come May.
 
Sunday
 
The Edinburgh Derby and the tie of the round in the League Cup.
 
Hearts must have felt confident walking into this one after having pummelled city rivals Hibs by 3 goals to 1 back in September at Easter Road and when Braga scored in the fourth minute the script looked already written. Derek McInnes' Rangers to face Derek McInnes' old team Hearts in the final.
As the old saying goes games aren’t won on paper and when Boyle equalised in the 19th minute the pedestal Hearts had made for themselves began to wobble. Nothing to choose between the two belied Hibs recent league form, which sees them rooted firmly at the bottom of the SPL. Then when you need a hero a hero appears this time however in green and white, step forward Jamie McGrath who fired Hibs into the lead to score what was to be the deciding goal of the game.
 
Hibs meet Rangers in the final to be played on Sunday December 13th.
 
I’ll keep readers posted and give viewing info when I have it.
 
While we’re on the subject of watching TV anyone looking for free legal streaming apps for movies and TV shows, 100% legal and legit feel free to DM me on Bluesky. I would never however advise anyone to use the illegal apps in these stores to watch sports. Piracy is an awful crime that costs companies like multi multi billionaire Sky thousands if not millions every year. I’d absolutely never ever tell you there’s apps in these stores that allow you to watch free sports. If I did I’d be promoting something you’d absolutely never catch me doing. No!! Pay the hundreds of euros or pounds monthly to Sky, be a good citizen and never ever pirate anything.
 
Talking of crime, another took place at Falkirk. Where Celtic turned up to collect their wages, gift the home side three points and leave the fans who’d made the trip up the M9 wishing they’d stayed in bed.
It was awful, I know I’m beginning to sound repetitive at this point but Celtic were just very very poor. Granted Falkirk's Ex Celtic keeper Bain had the game of his life and pulled off some magnificent saves but then you’re a professional football player, you have a God given talent and that’s what you’re paid to do and do it he did.
 
Celtic's only threat was once again Duran and it was a somewhat baffling decision by O’Neill to take him off on the 64th minute when Celtic needed two goals. Was I happy to see Høgh take the field? Of course but are we truly incapable of playing two up front? Is a 4-4-2 beyond the thinking of the Celtic management team?
 
We got what we deserved though. I’ve said it for weeks - we’re riding our luck and midweek it took a goal from Ireland's very own Liam Scales to grab an unjustified point against Dundee Utd. Sunday, well Sunday was coming. This looks like a team devoid of answers, a team lacking in direction. A team desperately in need of change.
 
I’m a great admirer of Martin O’Neill and what he’s done for Celtic over the years has been wonderful but I, like many others, now think it’s time to go.
 
Plenty yell that you can’t sack Martin just look at his history, but let me take you back first to 1967 and Celtic Captain Billy McNeill lifting the trophy that was the greatest achievement in Celtic history and a trophy countless others wish they could display in their trophy rooms. Fast forward to 1991 Billy McNeill and after having two spells and 9 years as Celtic manager McNeill is Sacked by Celtic as the on-field performances simply weren’t good enough.
 
No one is bigger than the club and if Billy McNeill can be fired so can anyone.
 
I don’t want to see Martin fired, I’d prefer him to walk away but whatever happens I for one believe his tenure as manager is over.
 
Celtic face Besiktas this Thursday in the Europa League. I’ve booked Thursday for a cut shampoo and blow dry.
 
Right now watching Celtic should come with a little red triangle warning in the corner of the screen.🔺Celtic can ruin your week/weekend approach with care.

So that’s it another week, another Celtic loss, another Rangers win, and assuming Rangers win their game in hand the lead at top of the table will become a mere point.
 
Right now though all I can think of is “goodbye and thanks for all the fish Martin”

Have a great week and whatever you’re doing do it well, stay safe and have fun

Til next time …… 🐼

🐼 Gary Robertson is the TPQ Scottish football correspondent.

A Tale Of Two Crimes

Dixie Elliot ✊The same old bullshit only now a crust has formed on top of it.


 
My response

'This election is the most important in generations' - Sinn Féin Ireland.
 
You lot say that every election, yet here we are and the only thing that has changed since the last most important election in generations is that the British Prime Minister has taken the border poll off the table.
 
The DUP are still bullying Sinn Féin with the veto despite the fact that they have been holed below the waterline by the small Loyalist mouthpiece Jamie Bryson, Carla Lockhart and Jolly Jim Allister.
 
'No Going Back' is also your latest slogan.
 
Remember 'No Return to the Status Quo'? 
 
But you Did Go Back and nothing changed.
 
The Dark has been proven right when he referred to the GFA as Got Fuck All.
 
The so called peace process might well mean that the war is over but sectarian division still gets you lot and the DUP elected.
 
So no change there.
 
And the only people suffering are those who vote Sinn Féin to get one over on the Unionists, those sectarian idiots who do your canvassing every election.

So here's a question.
 
Let's say that Sinn Féin gets everyone who is standing elected, what then?
 
Will it force the British Prime Minister to put the Border Poll back on the table, which if he does means waiting until Nationalists get a majority which might encourage the British Secretary of State to allow a Border Poll to be held?
 
I'm thinking about the great things we were told would happen if Michelle O'Neill became the Colonial First Minister and what actually did happen . . .  nothing!

Previously the DUP's Arlene Foster was able to use her position as First Minister to veto everything they didn't like, while now Emma Little-Pengelly is using her position as Deputy First Minister to punish Sinn Féin with the veto.

Thomas Dixie Elliot is a Derry artist and a former H Block Blanketman.
Follow Dixie Elliot on Twitter @IsMise_Dixie

Same Old, Same Old

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand One Hundred And Forty Two

 

A Morning Thought @ 3313

People And Nature ☭ Written by Simon Pirani.  Republished with thanks from Labour Hub

24-September-2026

The disastrous failure of the government’s ECO4 scheme – which was supposed to retrofit homes with insulation, heat pumps and solar panels – is “the next Post Office scandal”, Imogen Thomas of Fuel Poverty Action warned last week.

“It’s that level of outrageous”, Imogen told the campaign’s Make Green Fair conference in Manchester on Saturday.

Campaigners arriving for a meeting with Martin McCluskey, minister at the
Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, in June. Photo by Fuel Poverty Action

Homes wrecked by incompetent or fraudulent contractors are facing their fourth winter without heating. People claiming compensation are given the run-around.

The retrofit measures – that could and should help tackle climate change, while making people’s lives better – have made them worse. And this plays into the hands of opponents of climate action.

Some people tell us we shouldn’t focus on things being done wrong”, Ruth London of FPA told the conference. “We don’t agree. We are taking this up because we want retrofit to be done right.

When the ECO4 catastrophe was exposed in parliament last year, echoes of the Post Office scandal – the victimisation, for years, of more than 900 subpostmasters wrongly accused of theft, to cover up the failings of a Fujitsu computer programme – were unmistakeable.

The House of Commons public accounts committee said the “clear and catastrophic failure” of ECO4 had left 30,000 homes with defects. The National Audit Office and Serious Fraud Office are on the case. (See box at the end.)

But campaigners say that the ongoing failure to repair damage, and to pay compensation, is compounding the problem.

“Some people have gone for four winters without heating”, Imogen Thomas said at last week’s conference.:

People have had tens of thousands of pounds’ worth of damage done to their homes. Some have suffered being without a roof, because badly-installed solar panels collapsed their roof. People have been unable to get insurance policies to pay out. They have been sent round in circles by the government and Trustmark [the agency created by the government supposedly to oversee the schemes].

Signature fraud, where contractors put fake signatures on documents, has been widely reported, but “there is no access to justice”, Imogen added.

Trustmark’s “Find & Fix” scheme, that is supposed to put badly-done work right, produces too few results, too slowly, campaigners say.

Victims of the scandal are “coming together and organising”, Imogen said. In June, a group of them met with Martin McCluskey, the responsible minister in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), and put their demands directly to him.

McCluskey promised that all damaged homes would be fixed, at no cost to victims – but when he addressed the issue in the House of Commons, the principal commitment was to launch a consultation on “how we can simplify the current fragmented landscape” … something campaigners have demanded for years.

The damage done by the ECO4 scandal would be sorted out by TrustMark, the National Energy Foundation and Installation Assurance Authority, McCluskey said.

Jonathan Bean of Fuel Poverty Action said in an interview:

McCluskey has left tens of thousands of ECO4 victims suffering for another year. He doesn’t even know how many homes have been fixed, and his new package of measures excludes most of the victims.

At the Make Green Fair conference, Imogen Thomas warned that “the people who are contacting each other, setting up meetings with DESNZ and are Still not seeing remediation” are “the tip of the iceberg”.

Many others who do not have the capacity, or are not well enough, to fight their corner year after year, are being ignored. The scheme was contracted out, often to “completely unregulated cowboys”, who preyed on vulnerable people, going door to door to find those they could make money from.

The conference heard a video message from Katie Barrett, a cell biologist whose home was damaged by ECO4 contractors, and who met with DESNZ officials and with McCluskey.

“Months later, I am still no further in my quest to get the damage to my property fixed. My house is damp and cold – and I am one of many many people in this situation. It’s miserable”, she said.

Members of Living Rent from Lochend, Edinburgh, ran a session on “No Trust No Retrofit”
at an International Retrofit conference this month. Photo by Mel Esquerre, from Linkedin

The complaints procedure has made things so much worse:

We are absolutely ground down by this. It has taken years, and we’re still not there. We’re still living in houses that can’t be redecorated because the insulation needs to be taken out. We have sent hundreds of emails, and wasted hours and hours of time trying to get some kind of justice, and to get remediation.

In a recent social media post, Katie said “residents are being sent around the same loop” in a “failed accountability system”.

Retrofitting of flammable cladding, after the Grenfell disaster, has sometimes been as bad as ECO4 misery, the Make Green Fair conference heard.

Graeme Langton, a resident of the Malus Court council estate in Salford, where flammable cladding was removed, described in a message the multiple problems that ensued. Replacement cladding was installed at snail’s pace, energy bills shot up and equipment did not work.

“The retrofit has been an unmitigated disaster, even though Pendleton Together [that manages housing on behalf of Salford council] receives awards for excellence”, Langton said. The heating and hot water systems installed are difficult to run, “extremely costly”, and had never worked to standard.

Many tenants were unable to use heat pumps that “take up a huge amount of space in tiny kitchens”. Unsuitable windows were fitted. Energy Performance Certificates were “not worth the paper they were written on”.

No-one had been held responsible for what had gone wrong, Langton said. “Retrofitting is good in principle, but requires strong oversight to ensure that it meets the standards on completion.”

The Malus Court scandal has been raging for years. When the cladding was removed in 2020, tenants faced freezing indoor temperatures – and soaring energy bills. In 2022, Pendleton offered £30 a month to help with bills, but the shortfall for some tenants was ten times that. Rents went up too; mould caused more misery.

As well as efforts to defend people from the impact of failed government “green” schemes, the Make Green Fair event discussed the prospects for genuinely transformative decarbonisation, that moves homes off fossil fuels and makes them better to live in.

Ian Madley of Rossendale Valley Energy, a community-owned renewable energy group, described its project to insulate homes and install Smart Local Energy Systems that use ground-source heat, solar and batteries. The systems can cut energy bills by up to four-fifths.

Energy poverty is “not just about people not being able to pay the bill”, Ian said, but also about people having access to the advantages that renewables offer.

RVE has surveyed Victorian terraced houses in Rossendale, where it hopes its systems will operate at street level. They can be economically viable with one-third or more of households participating.

Energy affordability affects people’s health. We want people to have warm, healthy homes, without having to pay up-front for a new system.

Electricity produced by the systems will be sold locally through an energy club, at lower prices than those charged by the companies that dominate the grid.

Ellen Robottom of the Campaign Against Climate Change trade union group called for a “universal programme of retrofit, covering all tenures, free at the point of delivery”. This could be funded by “taxing the wealthy, diverting funds away from false energy solutions and the military”.

Such work could best be done by “local authorities, funded properly for the purpose”, and delivered by local-government-controlled Direct Labour Organisations. These have been run down by neoliberal economic policies, but still survive in some cities and could be revived.

Such a model, supported by training in climate literacy, could create hundreds of thousands of “good unionised jobs”, Ellen said. It would enable “the necessary planning, monitoring, enforcement of standards, dialogue with communities – and accountability to households for any sub standard work – that we all want”.

Forward-looking demands were the focus of an afternoon session at the conference. Working groups highlighted demands including:

  • On the built environment: holistic apprenticeships to make retrofit jobs well-paid and respected, and a focus on supporting women in construction;
  • On electricity networks: nationalise distribution system operators, move the climate levy (a regressive tax) off energy bills to general taxation, remove regulatory barriers to microgrids, and mandate solar and battery storage on newly-built homes;
  • To tackle heat waves: all heat pumps to be capable of cooling, and government to set guidelines that ensure a right to a safe home in high summer heat;
  • On heat pumps: reliable training amd accreditation for installers, and end-to-end support for households, to ensure they know what technology is suitable for their home and how to use it;
  • On heat networks: a price cap, and the same rights as gas and electricity consumers, standards of service, maintenance and back-up; and the unbundling of heat and water charges from rent, transparency of charges and a ban on evictions for non-payment.

The troubles with retrofit

The Energy Company Obligation (ECO) was first launched in 2013. Energy companies were required to finance the decarbonisation of homes. They raised money from energy bills, and offered grants through a patchwork of schemes that favoured higher-income households. Contracts went to certified installers. They usually sub-contracted to small businesses, who were sometimes incompetent and/or corrupt.

ECO4, the latest version of the scheme, was launched in 2022 after energy prices leapt up, and will run until the end of this year. The parallel Great British Insulation Scheme (GBIS) mainly provides for cavity wall and loft insulation.

Regulation of these schemes, by Trustmark, was a disaster. The National Audit Office found “major issues requiring remediation” in 98% of homes fitted with external wall insulation, and 29% of those fitted with internal wall insulation under ECO4 and GBIS.

The offer of government money, and lack of effective regulation, produced dangers of fraud and badly-done work plain as the nose on your face.

Three years ago, a contributor to a popular consumer forum told of “a summer of hell” after an ECO4 retrofit. When he tried to complain, he found that “there is no one body to go to, each element has a different complaint process. So you have to navigate [the electricity regulator] Ofgem, [the quality mark body for renewables] MCS, [the electricians’ certification body] NICEIC, Trustmark, and British Gas (the ultimate funder).”

Two years ago, Samuel Young, a fraud prevention officer at a charity, wrote of his surprise at:

the sheer number of reports linked to the ECO4 scheme”, which was “essentially a neoliberal, free-market approach to carbon reduction.

And this year, journalists are still unearthing stories of blatant fraud.

The root cause of the problem is decades of neoliberal economic policy that has eaten away at housing, the construction industry and local government. The dogma that the market knows best means that the work of decarbonisation is left to small companies who are incentivised to cut corners. The lack of regulation opens the door to corruption and fraud.

Campaigners have warned that, if lessons are not learned and the neoliberal ratchet reversed, the government’s Warm Homes Plan – one of its key policies to meet climate targets – could end in failure on a still greater scale.

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Climate Action 🔥 Failed Government Retrofit Scheme Is ‘The Next Post Office Scandal’

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