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Christopher Owens 🔖 “As Conservatives, we are engaged in a battle against cultural Marxism, where banning things is becoming de rigueur, where freedom of speech is becoming a taboo, where our universities — quintessential institutions of liberalism — are being shrouded in censorship and a culture of no-platforming."


This was Suella Braverman speaking in 2019. In retrospect, the irony of a senior Tory making such comments while the party resided over people being arrested for ‘non-crime hate incidents’ and castigating the likes of Kenan Malik as someone with treacherous views, is stunning.

But what did she mean by ‘cultural Marxism’ and is there truth in the idea that the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse) are an influence?

These are questions that AJA Woods tries to answer.

Woods writes about how this demonisation actually came from an uber left wing lot called National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) and its leader, Lyndon LaRouche, went from seeing student protest movements as agents of the CIA. Attacked by the CIA’s COUNTELPRO, they eventually moved rightward with their belief that a “conspiracy to popularise theories that were specifically designed to weaken the soul of Judaeo-Christian civilisation” was due to the Frankfurt School. Thus providing an easy straw dog to blame everything from the 60’s to AIDS on.

Although an undoubtedly fascinating subject to tackle, Woods ultimately shoots himself in the foot with his myopic and cliched line of thinking when it comes to modern times.

For a start, he seems to think that the negative reaction to recent socio-political events is exclusively a right-wing phenomenon. This, conveniently, ignores criticism from left leaning luminaries like Ambalavaner Sivanandan:

. . . psychospiritual mumbo-jumbo which . . . by reducing social problems to individual solutions, passes off personal satisfaction for political liberation.

Kenan Malik:

It is . . . a measure of contemporary confusion that so many on the left imagine that an approach that draws upon ideas of group identity that lie at the heart of racial thinking can challenge inequality and injustice.

Benjamin Zachariah:

. . . we are witnessing . . . a drift away from what was once the left, via collectivist, culturalist, and communitarian thinking, through identitarianism, to ‘woke’, all of which bears little resemblance to anything we’d recognize as ‘left’.

 Even The Morning Star has called for the end of wokeness.

Woods then recounts the well-worn origins of the term ‘woke’ in order to ensure readers see it as a progressive ideology and never considers Andrew Doyle’s description of woke as being “...best understood as a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means...” and something that “...has never been a matter of left or right, but rather what John Stuart Mill in 1859 called the ‘struggle between liberty and authority’.”

By failing to grasp with alternative views, by dismissing the issue of class and by evoking the well-worn trope of how “immigrants, minorities, transgender people . . . have become the main targets of the right’s anti-woke rampage” without acknowledging the part that the left played in elevating these groups to a near holy trinity that could not be questioned: thus leading to scandals around cheating the immigration system, child abusers not being arrested and issues surrounding freedom of speech, Woods undermines the great work that he has done in tracing how a semi-obscure set of academics became the focus for a conservative right desperate to understand and explain how drastically the world had changed.

AJA Woods, 2026, The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West. Verso Books. ISBN-13: 978-1804296967

⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.

The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy 📚Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West

Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Fifty Four

 


Religious Derangement Syndrome @ 10

 

A Morning Thought @ 3226

Ciaran McClean ✍ David Adams’ recent column in The Irish News argued that reconciliation would be harder to achieve inside a united Ireland. 

Many observers quietly agree. After more than fifty years, it's time to ask a more uncomfortable question though: has the very language of "reconciliation" become part of the problem rather than the solution?

In Northern Ireland, "reconciliation" increasingly functions as a convenient rhetorical veil — one that obscures systemic failures, protects political elites, and enables the privatisation and exploitation of public resources. Just as the "two-state solution" has become an empty slogan amid the genocide in Palestine, the endless invocation of reconciliation here has allowed a new political class to thrive whilst societial division is worse than ever.

The Provisional IRA’s thirty-year campaign left a profound constitutional legacy for society to grapple with. Post the Good Friday Agreement Sinn Féin has grown electorally, delivering power-sharing government from Stormont. That success however sits on top of deep generational trauma. Many descendants of those killed in the 1970s and beyond — particularly within Protestant and unionist communities — remain staunchly resistant to New Sinn Féin.

The original civil rights movement of the late 1960s offered a different path. It confronted a discriminatory state that weaponised religion and class to maintain control. Its demands — fair housing, equal employment, one person one vote — were class-conscious and universal. That momentum was shattered when paramilitary violence overtook peaceful protest. Legal and institutional reforms continued under direct rule, but the communal well had been poisoned with the rich fabric of Northern Irish society torn to shreds.

Six decades on, we still live with the consequences. Today, constitutional arguments keep old grievances alive while real power is exercised from the Executive Office at Stormont. The ultimate irony of the republican campaign however is where they find themselves. Far from delivering a socialist republic, the new political elites have adapted comfortably to the institutions they once opposed, with promises of "industrial wages" for representatives quietly forgotten.

Meanwhile in Northern Ireland, working-age adults still live in childhood bedrooms, unable to afford homes, while the political nouveau riche lecture them about personal responsibility. This disconnect is most glaring in economic policy. Stormont facilitates creeping privatisation and development projects that prioritise short-term gains over long-term public interest, relying heavily on foreign direct investment at any cost.

Contradictions abound in that context. Sinn Féin, in particular, presents itself internationally as a voice against imperialism and injustice — prominently criticising events in Gaza — while exercising significant influence at home with its Ministers in the Executive. The controversial Dalradian gold mining project in the Sperrin Mountains, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, stands as a case in point. By helping steer regulatory and planning processes around extractive industry, republican ministers are in effect administrators for the very speculative capital they rhetorically oppose. Their actions mirror those politicians in the USA who use public resources to fill the coffers of privateers at the expense of their own citizens.

In Northern Ireland the wound remains open. When we stop viewing "reconciliation" as a bandage and start addressing the structures of power, economic failure, and elite self-interest that sustain division — whether within the United Kingdom or toward any form of Irish unity — we will start to address the politics of illusion that prevents Northern Ireland from becoming a fairer and more equal place to live.

⏩Ciaran McClean is an anti goldmining activist from West Tyrone, an area threatened by proposals to industrialise the Sperrin Mountains.

The Wound, Not the Bandage 🪶 Why "Reconciliation" Has Become A Smokescreen

Heartlands Tribune ☭ Written by Paul Knaggs.

The Met Commissioner called it a mistake. Four months spent investigating Jack Grove, a journalist for asking questions of a Cambridge professor, Jason Arday and never once speaking to him, tells a different story.

Scotland Yard Didn’t Drop the Ball. It Picked a Side.

Sir Mark Rowley went on LBC this week and said the quiet part out loud. Asked why the Metropolitan Police spent four months investigating a journalist for the crime of asking questions, the Commissioner told Nick Ferrari: “We dropped the ball on that one, let’s not beat around the bush.” He added, more revealingly, that the complaint should never have got past the front desk in the first place.

It was meant to sound like candour. It reads more like a confession.

The journalist is Jack Grove, a reporter at Times Higher Education. His offence was emailing Professor Jason Arday, a sociology of education professor at Cambridge, with questions about his academic record, after academics tipped him off to apparent similarities between parts of Arday’s PhD thesis and another student’s work. Grove also asked about Arday’s claimed fundraising total and his ultra-distance running feats. Ordinary reporting. The kind of thing journalism exists to do.

Somebody, and it still isn’t clear exactly who, rang the police. Cambridge University has since said flatly that it never made a complaint and wasn’t aware of one being made. Whoever it was, the Met treated a plagiarism inquiry as a potential crime and sat on it for four months. Grove was never interviewed. He learned he’d been under investigation only when officers rang to say the case was closed, and told him not to contact Arday again because the professor’s “mental health” had been affected. Arday’s lawyers, Carter-Ruck, then wrote to Grove’s editors suggesting the paper’s scrutiny of a Black academic “may be” racially motivated, a charge that dissolves the moment you notice the questions were about a PhD thesis, not his skin colour.

Continue @ Heartlands.

The Case Of The Journalist, The Professor And The Police Investigation

Caoimhin O’Muraile ⚽ Now the FIFA World Cup is out of the way won, from a pure footballing point of view, deservedly by Spain we will all be expected to forget the less savoury side of the tournament.

Nobody will be expected to remember how the world’s most powerful leader overturned a referee’s decision (or the consequences of) with the connivance and total agreement of FIFA President, Gianni Infantino. We must never mention the disgusting treatment the US authorities were allowed to impose on the Iranian national side placing them at an immediate disadvantage. And let us not forget the finest referee on the African continent, Somali referee Omar Artan, being refused a visa by the Trump administration, thus insulting African football as a whole. ‘Keep politics out of sport’? It’s certainly too late for that and, truth be told, has been for many decades. What happened behind the scenes at this World Cup would turn the stomachs of most football fans.

The gentrified hooligan, Gianni Infantino, wanted, and probably with his mate Trump still does, to sell off the World Cup to private business. This carve up was probably discussed in detail during the World Cup by the two brigands. I read with a feeling of revulsion at first leading to volcanic anger about this man’s plans for the future of the world’s major tournament in football. His plans included selling a 20% stake in the World Cup to private enterprise including transnational corporations. 

For me football, the game I was brought up on, became a historical relic found mainly in good sporting history books some years ago. The television companies deciding when games will and will not kick off is one damaging change along with some of the silly rule changes making it impossible to play the game properly. The icing on the poison cake is of course Video Assisting Refereeing (VAR). But all this pales into insignificance by comparison with what Infantino had planned for the future as he plotted to sell off the World Cup! 

The FIFA President was telling the 211 member associations to sign up to his proposed sell off by mid-September or lose “$7 billion in extra funding”. According to the Irish Daily Mirror 30th July his letter to the associations stated; “should you wish to proceed, this $10 billion package will become available as of January 1 2027, ushering in the next stage of our journey together”. Who was/is Infantino talking about with this “our journey together”? Is he talking about his journey with the FIFA member associations, which may suggest the associations had some prior knowledge of his plans, or his journey with various transnational corporations? Could he have been talking of the journey embarked on with Donald Trump at the last World Cup? What did these two brigands discuss? 

This plan was something straight out of the Trump ‘Get Rich Quick and Fuck the Consequences’ book. Infantino had given the associations until 19th September to accept his proposal. This scheme “would see a private company with links to the extended family of Donald Trump run FIFA competitions” reported in the Irish Daily Mirror 30th July. Was this another deal Infantino concocted with Trump during the World Cup? Perhaps they could launch a new trophy called the ‘Donald Trump World Cup Trophy’ in much the same mould as the previous cup was called the Jules Rimet Trophy, won and kept by Brazil in 1970, giving Trump his name, authority, and finance over all future World Cup competitions!! Little wonder Trumps interference in the last tournament was accepted by Infantino as almost part and parcel of the game. What were this pair of crooks concocting? I think the possibilities may have no boundaries and should be becoming obvious to those who want to see.

The European governing body, UEFA, have voted to boycott any FIFA competitions should this privatisation of the World Cup have gone ahead. UEFA represent 55 European football associations and are, to be fair, not exactly squeaky clean themselves. Was it not UEFA who destroyed the once prestigious European Champions Cup (the European Cup) once the elite European competition? Only a country’s league champions could enter the competition with the second and third places going into the UEFA Cup along with the winners, until 2020, of the English Football league Cup. The winners of the FA Cup would go into the European Cup Winners Cup which UEFA abolished downgrading by de-facto the FA Cup. They replaced these competitions with something called the ‘Champions League’ which is anything but. The league champions qualify but so too do those teams finishing second, third, and fourth who are hardly champions. 

However, UEFAs destruction of European competition at club level is small beer compared with what Infantino had, and probably still has, in mind. The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) have joined UEFA in rejecting Gianni Infantino’s proposals as have Concacaf (North/Central America and Caribbean) football. 

The omens were not good for Infantino and the math did not smile in his favour. He would have needed 106 yes votes out of FIFAs 211 member nations and already UEFA with 55 members, AFC with 47 members, and Concacaf with 41 members already have enough to kick the proposal out. The African confederation, CAF, and CONMEBOL in South America will reportedly vote in August. Though now the plan according to reports has been scrapped they may not bother to meet as this was the only item on the agenda. With 143 votes already against Infantino it should be purely academic kicking out the proposal, which is exactly what appears to have happened but don’t hold your breath. 

Infantino reportedly turned to the 30 pieces of silver tactic ‘bypassing continental confederations entirely, writing directly to individual national football federations’. He reportedly offered them “$40 million windfall if they accept the FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE) plan” by 19th September. This underhand tactic was unlikely to succeed if for no other reason UEFA have voted to boycott any future FIFA World Cup competition if this plan went ahead. Europe has some of the world’s most marketable teams and investors would be unlikely to be interested in a World Cup or any other FIFA competition without these teams present. Talking of teams as “marketable” is bad enough and should have no place but given where we are use it as a counterbalance to even worse extremes.

Back in 1970 British football's greatest manager of all time, in my view, Matt Busby gave a stark warning about the possible future of the game. He pointed out the growing influence business was having on the game stating:

I hope we shall never sacrifice our sporting principles on the altar of big business. We must prevent a football club ever being run like a supermarket with profit the only real motive. The fear is that the big business of soccer will dwarf the sport. 

Matt Busby gave his warning decades before the inception of the so-called Premier League, massive TV broadcast deals, and multi-billion-dollar corporate takeovers. His comparison with supermarkets directly mirrors modern fan complaints about ticket prices, commercial sponsorships, and billionaire owners prioritising brand growth over local community identity. Busby believed strongly that a football club belonged first and foremost to its working-class community. Rather than purchasing success, like what happens now, with massive corporate funding, he focused primarily on cultivating home grown talent. These were the principles and ethos which gave birth to the immortal ‘Busby Babes’ of the 1950s, a team built entirely on youth development, community identity and sporting romance. This community identity Matt carried through with him and four of the European Cup Final team on the pitch in 1968 came from Manchester. They were Nobby Stiles, Brian Kidd, John Aston, and Seamus Brennan, all signed from school coming through the youth system at Old Trafford, with Bill Foulkes (a Munich survivor) coming from St Helens, Whiston Boys Club, not far away.

Infantino’s proposal to create a $20 billion commercial subsidiary of the World Cup selling a 20% stake to private Wall Street investors goes against everything Matt Busby and other managerial legends, Bill Shankly, Bill Nicholson, Bertie Mee, Joe Mercer, Harry Catterick, Don Revie, and let us not forget Jock Stein in Scotland, plus later, in the next generation no doubt, Brian Clough.

Whether the plan had gone ahead or not is perhaps not the main issue here. The fact the game at the highest managerial level has reached a stage where such ideas are discussed let alone passed is the real concern. The possibility that FIFA chief, Infantino, may have discussed such a move with Donald Trump is also a major question which requires an answer. Like the ill-fated (for now) European Super League which was dropped in the face of supporter opposition this FFE dressed up as something else is likely to return in future decades. This plan of Infantino’s probably with US Presidential assistance was never likely to succeed this time with the voting weights before the Africans were due to meet already stacked against Infantino. Watch this space in the future because another plan with an even fancier name to mask its reality will likely be put forward again. 

On top of this ridiculous plan what else could Gianni Infantino and his partner in criminality, Donald Trump, have discussed?

Last Thursday 30th July marked the sixtieth anniversary of England’s well-deserved capture of the World Cup in 1966. The Manager, Alf Ramsey, was paid by the FA £4,500 per annum which is around £109,000 in today’s money. The FA today pay incumbent manager Thomas Tuchel around the same figure Per Week, and the victorious players sixty years ago were on a bonus of £1,000 before tax! Now six decades on from that day back in 1966 the FIFA President of today wants to sell off the competition England won, the World Cup. I wonder what those great Brazilian teams of the past would make of this abomination? How things have declined as the FIFA President plans to sell off the Word Cup “for Ten Billion dollars”. What do, I wonder, Geoff Hurst, Ian Callaghan, and Terry Paine, the three surviving members of Alf Ramsey’s squad, make of this mess? This report was compiled prior to the scheme being scrapped on 1st August.

I feel sorry for young fans attending football games in the present climate. Due to their age they will never have watched a genuine match, they will never have experienced the atmosphere of Old Trafford, Anfield, Maine Road, Elland Road, Saint James Park, Roker Park, and Goodison Park in the sixties, seventies and eighties when standing accommodation was available along with, for those who wished, seats. Back in the seventies football fans, myself included, were branded ‘mindless thugs’ who would ruin the game. Well, I’ve got news for these Philistines in grey suits who think of money and money only, you have done more to kill football than a hundred pitch invasions could ever have done. Granted we were a little overenthusiastic whereas this shower of money grabbing parasites are thugs of the highest magnitude dressed in suits! As if allowing Donald Trump to trump a referee’s decision in full view of the football public the sycophant responsible for not addressing the problem, interference by Trump, Infantino is now creating more havoc throughout world football.

Manchester United’s Red Army were described as “mindless thugs” who were killing the game with the trouble they caused away from home by the ever-dishonest media as we travelled around England and Europe. Compared with the real thugs in suits like Infantino and his gang our occasional pitch invasion or battle on the terraces did absolutely no harm whatsoever as even some commentators joined in admiring some terrace events, though not pitch invasions or terrace fights. Not only have Matt Busby’s worse fears being realised they have gone far beyond his supermarket comparison. The once great game which for many of us became an obsession has become like the Yeti, abominable!!

Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

From Great Game ⚽ Now An Abomination

Ten links to a diverse range of opinion that might be of interest to TPQ readers. They are selected not to invite agreement but curiosity. Readers can submit links to pieces they find thought provoking.


Lynx By Ten To The Power Of Two Thousand And Fifty Three

 

A Morning Thought @ 3225

Jim Duffy ✍ A core problem with the neo-realist theory advocated by Mearsheimer comes from the generation of academics of his era. 


They were either conscientiously or subconsciously influenced by the dominant Marxist theory that swept through academia, which argued against the "great man" theory of history and instead focused on structural issues in society. The theory was that outcomes were decided by structural issues in a society, not leaders.
 
I completely disagreed in classes on it. Yes, the "great man" theory was wildly overblown and also completely ignored the critical role of structure and failings in a society. But the structural theory that neo-rationalism is built on ignored the crucial role a leader played. Yet at critical junctures the leader was central, either positively or negatively. If one takes the leader out of the equation, the outcome could have been radically different even with the same structural issues.
 
A classic example is that of King Louis XVI and the French revolution. A standard theory was that he was a weak not particularly able man unable to handle the structural flaws in the Ancien Regime. However some years ago unknown papers of Queen Marie Antoinette were found in the archives of a prominent figure in the period who had been close to her. She had given her papers to him for safe keeping.
 
What they showed, first of all, was that Louis XVI was actually a very capable man. He was however seriously ill and she described it in detail. Her description showed unambiguously that Louis had what we would describe as clinical depression. In his case it was to an extreme degree. I happen to have battled clinical depression. Reading her diary entries were shocking and I instantly understood what was happening. His already severe clinical depression was made dramatically worse when his elder son, the first Dauphin, died. He so went to pieces he could barely talk, barely react, barely get out of bed and wash. So, a man who was exceptionally able and might have been able to handle the crisis, was left effectively catatonic by mental illness.
 
Contrary to myth she didn't seize power. Her diaries show she never wanted power. The trouble was that there was nobody else available while Louis was in a catatonic state. He had two brothers. One was seen as cynical, manipulative and untrusted - the future Louis XVIII. The other, the future Charles X, was an intolerant extreme reactionary unfit ever to be monarch. The new Dauphin was a child so couldn't rule.
 
Marie Antoinette knew she was unqualified to rule. As the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis she had never been trained to rule, whereas male heirs were. She knew she was out of her depth, but asked herself in her diary "but who else is there?" She reluctantly took on a governing role as there was nobody else in the Royal Family trusted enough and competent enough to do it, and her husband was catatonic.
 
Had Louis XVI not had extreme clinical depression, the talent he had shown before experiencing the extreme bursts of clinical depression might, just might, have avoided the revolution. It happened because he was severely ill and unable to physically or mentally function, and she wasn't qualified to, and the vacuum led to the revolution.
 
The more I read the more I felt sympathy for the King and Queen. I knew from experience exactly what he was going through. I could read her descriptions of Louis day by day and recognise things I went through. She was in despair. He was catatonic. There was nobody else suitable to act for the King among the senior royals, leaving her, to her horror, having to do it.

So that example, in that case of the impact of a vacuum at the heart of decision-making, showed that leaders do matter and it is not all about structural issues.
 
There were major structural issues in society in inter-war Germany. However there was nobody else able to take over and dominate Germany the way Hitler could. His unique personality enabled him to appear to speak for ordinary Germans. Take him out of history and again there is no certainty that the same outcome would have happened.
 
So while the 'great men' theory overestimated the impact someone could have as what they did or did not do was massively impacted by structural issues, structural issues won't deliver the same outcome without the impact of leaders.
 
Winston Churchill's pre-1940 career was haunted by many spectacular mistakes. He was desperately unpopular. He became prime minister in 1940 because everyone was tainted by appeasement, and all his warnings about Hitler proved prophetic. World War II would have been profoundly different without the impacts of Churchill, FDR, Stalin, Hitler - notwithstanding the structural issues.
 
Mearsheimer's problem in Ukraine is that his theoretical framework has always had significant design flaws in the area of the psychology of identity, nationalism, nations and nation-states. It has been an area many liberals cannot understand. It doesn't fit their rationalist theoretical framework. It is why they cannot understand the public opposition to mass migration, why they cannot understand the appeal of the nation state, etc. Mearsheimer's thesis cannot explain why Putin's nationalist view would invade Ukraine as neo-realist theory said he wouldn't. It cannot explain the determination of Ukraine to fight for its survival. It cannot explain why countries invaded fight more aggressively and determinedly than the invader. (The invaded are fighting for their survival. The invader's existence is not dependent on winning the war so they are less motivated.)
 
Mearsheimer's increasingly desperate efforts to double down, despite a 100% rate of being wrong on the war, are because his entire theory, his life's work, is on the line. If Ukraine wins, his theory is wrong. In the last few weeks he has spun stories of mythical Russian advances - all based on Putin spins.
 
Yet even Russian military bloggers and former Russian generals have rubbished those claims by the Kremlin. They have access to satellite images that entirely disproves the Kremlin claims. Those same bloggers and ex-generals are not pro-Ukraine. Many were enthusiastic supporters of the 'special military operation' but they can see in the data that the Kremlin claims are entirely disprovable. In one case, Russia announced that it was now just thirty miles from a critical target. That was spun by the Russian media as an "advance". Mearsheimer called it a "breakthrough". The bloggers pointed out that one year ago Russia was five miles from the city. Now it is thirty miles. It isn't an advance. It is actually a retreat of twenty-five miles! Furthermore, satellite images show that Russia had retreated.
 
Not alone that, but in a single month Russia suffered more deaths than the US suffered in the entire Vietnam war, and suffered more deaths than it was able to recruit. Russia's "advance" and it hasn't won more territory than it lost since March, is actually slower than in the notorious Battle of the Somme. One 'Z blogger', as they called themselves, pointed out that at that rate, it would take Russia 261 years to conquer Ukraine!!!
 
Mearsheimer's core problem is that his theory, his life's work, is being disproved daily by Ukraine. He cannot back down without admitting his theory, and life's work, is wrong. So he must double down on ludicrous predictions, even swallowing disproved Kremlin spin. As a result, it isn't just Putin's Russkiy Mir that risks being destroyed in Ukraine, but Mearsheimer's intellectually dubious claims in his life's work - his theoretical framework.

Some years ago, Putin gave a top military honour to a Russian soldier over his military leadership in Ukraine. One month ago, that now ex-soldier said "the war is lost. We cannot win it." Many oligarchs and generals believe that too. It a comment that Mearsheimer cannot echo. He and Putin are in the same boat, with their reputations dependent on winning in Ukraine, despite all the evidence that at best Russia is not winning. At worst, Ukraine is.

⏩ Jim Duffy is a writer-historian.

Mearsheimer's Core Problem

Louth For Ever ★ writing in Medium on 3-August-2026.

A sequel to No Form To Hold It, beginning with a correction to it.


What I Got Wrong

In May, in No Form To Hold It, I read Sinn Féin’s abstention on the Social Democrats’ Reproductive Rights (Amendment) Bill as absence from the abortion terrain: one of two grounds, with migration, where the party leans away when a line would cost it. The trailer, No Villain In It, carried the reading forward. The record does not bear it, and it is withdrawn.

Here is the fuller record. On 13th May the Dáil defeated the Social Democrats’ bill by 85 votes to 30, with 36 abstentions, Sinn Féin’s whole bench among them. But the bill was a bundle: removal of the mandatory three-day waiting period for abortion in early pregnancy, a revised test for terminations on fatal foetal abnormality grounds, and the removal of criminal sanctions from the 2018 Act. On the night, the party’s health spokesperson David Cullinane told the chamber that Sinn Féin supported removing the three-day wait, had never supported its introduction, and had already tabled its own legislation to remove it. The abstention was an objection to the bundle, argued on the floor in those terms. It was not absence from the headline measure.

Five weeks later the party proved it. On 17th June Sinn Féin brought the removal of the three-day wait back as a clean, single-issue bill and carried it by 86 votes to 70, with the government whip lifted, against on-the-record opposition from the Catholic bishops and from Aontú. On the three-day wait, Sinn Féin was not absent. It led, and it won.

The abortion strand of the hedge argument was overcharged, and this essay begins by striking it. The migration strand rests on its own record and stands. A body of work that reads political actors against the record has to submit to the same reading. That is the correction.

The Floor That Holds

What the correction clarifies is the question. Sinn Féin can move. It moved on the three-day wait and it won. Look at what it moved on: the broadly supported measure, stripped of the two provisions that carried a price, carried with government votes. The contested ground it left at the door. The question in front of the Irish left was never whether its parties will act. It is what they will spend.

Now put that question beside the newest numbers, because they contain a puzzle that ought to keep every person of the left in this country awake.

In the Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll taken on the last day of July, 61% of voters disapprove of how the government is doing its job. 53% say the country is going in the wrong direction; 28% say the right one. The concerns topping the list are the cost of living and housing, the left’s home ground. Fianna Fáil has fallen to 16, its lowest in more than two years, and the two parties that have governed this state for a century hold 36 points between them, at the floor of a decline the Irish Times has mapped at roughly ten points a decade since the 1990s.

A government disapproved of by 2:1. A duopoly at its historic low. And the principal beneficiary of all that discontent, in the same table, is Fine Gael: unchanged at 20 and climbing steadily since April, when it stood at 17. The country wants something else, says so to every pollster who asks, and delivers its verdict to one half of the government it disapproves of.

The floor holds. What is holding it up is the question, because it is not the strength of the parties standing on it.

The Two Columns

Do the sums both ways, because doing them one way was the mistake I made first.

The left’s column: Sinn Féin 20, the Social Democrats 10, Labour 3, the Greens 3, People Before Profit-Solidarity 2. Thirty-eight. On Red C’s figures for the Business Post five weeks earlier, the same five parties came to 44, with Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats alone on 33 against the duopoly’s 32. Depending on the house and the month, the left aggregation runs from 38 to 44: somewhere between level with the two old parties and well adrift of them.

That range still contains something no previous generation of the Irish left has possessed. A two-party core within touching distance of the duopoly at its lowest ebb was not available in 1987 or 2011 or 2020. But the honest sum does not stop there, and the writer Eamonn Sweeney put the harder one publicly within hours of the poll: add Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Independent Ireland and Aontú, and the column on the right comes to 50. On Red C’s kinder June figures it came to 43 against the left’s 44. On the newest numbers it leads by twelve.

Whether that 50 is a bloc or merely a column is a fair question, but it is less open than it looks. Aontú’s leader has been canvassing coalition openly since his spring Ard Fheis, and his account of Fianna Fáil as a partner is worth quoting for its candour: attractive precisely “because they have no ideological core”, and therefore easy for a party that has one to steer. He keeps a Sinn Féin-led government in view as well. Independent Ireland has bound itself to nothing. Between the two columns, this much is established: the votes for an alternative government exist at the outer edge of the left’s range, and the votes for a broader conservative one exist comfortably, on every house’s figures, with nobody required to change their mind about anything.

The Áras Was Free

The optimists have a precedent, and it deserves its full weight before any qualification. On 24th October last year, Catherine Connolly won the presidency with 63.4% of the valid poll: 914,143 first preferences, the largest personal mandate in the history of the State. She was backed by the entire Irish left: Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats, Labour, People Before Profit-Solidarity, the Greens, 100% Redress, the Workers’ Party, and a slate of independents. Paul Murphy called it “the first time the left has won a majority of votes in a national election.” He was right. The demand for a politics outside the duopoly is not a theory. It has a number, and the number is 63.4.

But look at what the presidency asked of the parties that combined to win it, because the answer is nothing. The Áras is a single prize, winner-take-all. Backing a shared candidate required no party to shrink, no seat to be conceded, no rivalry to be suspended, because Sinn Féin and the Social Democrats are not rivals for it. Coordination cost nothing, so coordination happened. The presidency proved the two things genuinely in doubt: that the demand exists, and that the machinery of the left can point in one direction. It is silent on the only question that matters, which is what happens when pointing in one direction has a price.

Two details from October say the silence is not accidental. Sinn Féin, widely expected to run its own candidate, joined the Connolly coalition last of all the parties, on 20th September: the party-first instinct visible even in the costless case. And on the morning after the landslide, the Socialist Party, itself inside the coalition, asked publicly whether these parties could work together in the years ahead, and called it “an open question”. The left named its own translation problem before the count was cold.

The Costly Case

A general election inverts every term of the presidential one. The prizes are plural: more than forty constituencies, not one. The parties are direct rivals in most of them. Every seat the Social Democrats gain is, in large part, a seat Sinn Féin does not take.

May made the inversion concrete. In the Dublin Central by-election, in Mary Lou McDonald’s own constituency, the Social Democrats’ candidate took 12,050 first preferences to Sinn Féin’s 7,787, and took the seat. The Business Post’s polling analysis the following month attributed Sinn Féin’s slide directly to those by-elections. October proved the parties can coordinate when the prize is single and free. May proved what they do when the prizes are plural and priced: they take them off each other.

And July added a finding this argument did not have. The discontented vote in this state is not one pool but two, moving in opposite directions. On the right of the anti-establishment space, Aontú is up a point to 7, Independent Ireland holds 7, independents and others are up to 12. On the left of it, the Social Democrats are down two to 10, and Labour, the Greens and People Before Profit sit on 3, 3 and 2. The pool that is growing is the one with no objection in principle to putting Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael back in office. A last detail worth sitting with: Holly Cairns tops the country’s leader ratings on 38 while her party polls 10, and Mary Lou McDonald rates 30 while hers polls 20. The people are rated and the project is not, which is what a will without a form looks like in a table.

The Cheaper Path

Name the bloc’s actual requirement exactly, because it is smaller than the sceptics pretend. Nobody has to merge. Nobody has to dissolve. Under proportional representation with the single transferable vote, two parties can remain two parties, keep their names, their organisations and their rivalry in every count, and still function as one bloc, through two instruments as old as the system: a transfer pact, asking each electorate to continue its preferences to the other, and a shared governing commitment, published before the election, saying what a combined majority would do with office. It is the Connolly model transposed to government: separate parties, one direction.

And note that the first instrument half-exists already. The May by-elections showed left votes transferring left, a pattern Cairns herself praised, with four in five of her party’s Galway West transfers flowing to Labour. The voters are running the pact informally, unasked. What has never existed is the second instrument. The price is one sentence, said in public, before the votes are counted: we will not enter government with Fianna Fáil or Fine Gael. Everything reduces to that sentence. And the sentence is precisely the thing neither party will say.

The Door

They have both declined to say it this year, on the record, in their own words.

Mary Lou McDonald, asked directly in January whether she had made coalition with Fianna Fáil impossible, said her ambition was a government beyond the two old parties, and then supplied the qualification that unsays it: she is a political realist, and “the numbers for government have to add up.” The Irish Times, reading her position, put it in six words: Sinn Féin has “placed a foot in every camp.”

Holly Cairns has ruled out no party. She has ruled out exactly one thing, and has said so at least twice since June, to the Business Post and again to the Sunday Independent: a formal left-wing alliance ahead of the next election. The Social Democrats’ red lines for government were set, on the leadership’s own account, to be reachable, because the party wants in; Jennifer Whitmore said it plainly: “we really want to get into government.” Read those positions together. Every door to office stays open. The one foreclosure on the record is of the bloc, and it is scoped, deliberately, to the window before the votes are counted, which is the only window in which a bloc can be made.

Understand the open door as an asset and the pattern resolves. An unshut door is worth something in every possible future: leverage in every negotiation, relevance in every formation, office by more than one route, survival if the left falls short. Closing it buys exactly one thing, the possibility of a bloc, and pays for it with every other future at once.

But there is a stronger form of this argument, and it was put to me in good faith by readers of the last essay: that Sinn Féin’s door is not merely open, but that the party might sooner walk through it than through the left’s. The evidence is not nothing. In July the party whipped its TDs into the government lobby against a hare coursing ban brought by People Before Profit; the Bill fell by 125 votes to 24, every other party of the left voted for it, and the party’s leader had described the question in advance as not one that “decides your politics” of right or left. The party has hardened on migration through the spring while the Social Democrats went on record as concerned by exactly that hardening. And beneath the positioning sits the deeper affinity: for a party whose foundational objective is constitutional rather than distributional, the other republican party is, on the objective that matters most, a more natural counterpart than a partner with no position on the border at all.

I do not assert that Sinn Féin prefers Fianna Fáil. I note that a serious part of its own sympathetic readership now believes it might, and that nothing the party has said forecloses it. That is not a rebuttal of this essay’s argument. It is the strongest version of it. A bloc whose largest component may prefer the other column is not a bloc at all.

And this week the poll asked the voters themselves, which settles nothing and clarifies everything. Only 4% of Fianna Fáil voters would accept coalition with Sinn Féin; among Fine Gael voters, none at all said yes, 93% said no and the rest stayed neutral. Sinn Féin’s own voters, asked to choose a partner, picked the Social Democrats by 65%. And Social Democrat voters split almost evenly on Sinn Féin, 45 for and 40 against. Assemble those numbers and the largest opposition party in the state stands partnerless in every direction: the duopoly’s bases would revolt at it, the partner its own base wants has just declined the formal version of the pairing, and the party’s leadership keeps every door open into rooms where nobody is holding one open from the other side. The Sunday Independent drew the conclusion itself: increasingly isolated from the coalition parties and from the rest of the opposition left alike.

The Asymmetry, and the Test

Here, then, is what is holding the floor up.

The right’s column converts without anyone paying anything. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael govern together already, and their electorates have ratified the merger: 93% of Fianna Fáil voters now call Fine Gael an acceptable partner, a figure the civil-war parties could not have imagined a generation ago. The parties beyond them face no bar of principle; one of them is openly courting, and the price of entry for any of them is a negotiation, not a renunciation. 50% assembles, whenever it is needed, out of parts that require no door to be closed.

The left’s column cannot assemble at all on those terms. It requires its two largest components to stop competing and start transferring, and it requires at least one of them to foreclose the rightward option in public, in advance, at its own sole cost, for a shared gain. The right’s arithmetic is additive. The left’s is conditional, and the condition is the one act the incentive structure of every party in the column is built to avoid.

And if anyone doubts that the sentence can be said at all in Irish politics, they have forgotten who says it. Before the last election, in the final television debate, the leaders of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael both ruled out government with Sinn Féin, plainly, on principle, before a single vote was cast. Simon Harris said it in eight words: “We will not go into government with Sinn Féin.” Micheál Martin grounded it in core principle. Neither man paid any price for the foreclosure, and neither was called reckless for surrendering his options. The sentence this essay keeps asking for is not unsayable. It is said at every election, fluently, in one direction only. The duopoly forecloses leftward as a matter of routine and it costs nothing. Their voters have the rule by heart: 4% of Fianna Fáil supporters and none of Fine Gael’s would accept the coalition their leaders had already ruled out. And look where the hard walls stand in Fianna Fáil’s base. Sinn Féin at 87% unacceptable. People Before Profit at 70%, with no measurable acceptance at all. But Labour, the Social Democrats and the Greens sit in the soft middle as prospective junior partners, better regarded than Aontú or Independent Ireland. The base does not veto the left. It vetoes the left that cannot be absorbed.

The left cannot foreclose rightward at all. That is not two blocs playing the same game with different nerves. It is a hegemon and its containment, visible in a single grammatical fact: who gets to say no to whom.

That is why the floor holds at the lowest level in a century. The two old parties are not kept in office by their own strength. They are kept there by the structure of what faces them: a discontent that splits into two pools, of which only the right one grows; a notional alternative whose components will not pay the single price of becoming actual; and a rule of the game, enforced by nobody and obeyed by everybody, that exclusion runs downhill only. The establishment does not need to win the argument anymore. It needs only for no vessel to form, and no vessel is forming, and that is not an accident or a mood. It is the predictable output of every actor’s rational self-interest, which is exactly what a hegemony is.

A reading of incentives should say what would prove it wrong, so here it is. This essay is falsified on the day either Sinn Féin or the Social Democrats rules out government with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in public and binds itself to the other in a pre-election governing commitment. The window runs to the next general election, which the Government does not expect until the winter of 2029. Connolly does not count; the Áras was free. A seat pact without the commitment does not count; that is a door held ajar with better manners. And the counter-test runs alongside: watch whether Aontú or Independent Ireland declares outright for the duopoly, because one of them is already circling, and the day the declaration comes, the right’s column becomes a bloc while the left’s is still a column.

It may never be paid, and this essay’s claim is not prophecy. The claim is only this: the demand is proven, at 63.4% of a presidential poll and 61% of a disapproval rating. The materials are proven, at the outer edge of the left’s range. The machinery is proven, from last October. What is missing is a sentence, and the sentence is missing because saying it costs the sayer everything while its absence costs no one in particular. Only everyone in general.

No Form To Hold It named the absence: a reforming will with no vessel large enough to hold it. This is the mechanism of the absence, and it is smaller and harder than a vessel. Not a form they cannot build. A door they will not shut. The test runs from here to the dissolution of this Dáil.

Watch the doors. Both sets of them.

References

Sunday Independent/Ireland Thinks poll, fieldwork 31 July 2026 (reports by Aisling Moloney, 1 and 2 August 2026): party figures, government disapproval, direction-of-country, issue priorities, leader ratings, coalition-acceptability figures, and the winter 2029 election expectation.

Red C for the Business Post, 27 June 2026 (Daniel Murray): June party figures.

Dáil Éireann division records: Reproductive Rights (Amendment) Bill, second stage, 13 May 2026 (85 to 30, 36 abstentions); Sinn Féin bill removing the three-day waiting period, 17 June 2026 (86 to 70); Animal Health and Welfare (Ban on Hare Coursing) Bill, 8 July 2026 (125 to 24).

David Cullinane, Dáil debate, 13 May 2026 (Oireachtas record).

Gavan Reilly, reporting of the 17 June vote.

Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference statement, 14 June 2026 (via RTÉ).

Presidential election result, 24 October 2025 (official return); Paul Murphy, The Nation, October 2025; Socialist Party statement, October 2025.

Dublin Central by-election result, May 2026; Holly Cairns remarks, Irish Times, 25 May 2026.

Business Post polling analysis, 30 May 2026.

Mary Lou McDonald interview, Irish Times, January 2026.

Holly Cairns: Business Post, 17 June 2026; Sunday Independent interview, reported 2 August 2026.

Jennifer Whitmore, RTÉ, February 2026.

Mary Lou McDonald on the coursing bill, Newstalk via The Journal, 6 July 2026.

Irish Times reporting on Sinn Féin’s migration positioning, January and May 2026.

Peadar Tóibín remarks, RTÉ analysis, 7 March 2026.

Simon Harris and Micheál Martin, final leaders’ debate, November 2024 (via BBC).

Eamonn Sweeney, public Bluesky post, 1 August 2026.

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

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