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Showing posts with label Irish Border Poll. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irish Border Poll. Show all posts
Dixie Elliot ✊Why did a British PM eventually slam the door shut on Sinn Féin's last hope, a referendum on Irish Unity?


From McGuinness to O'Neill, Sinn Féin have constantly stated that they were determined to make the institutions in Stormont work.
 
That's exactly what the British want to hear.
 
The institutions have never worked for the people who elected the politicians who sit in them, nor will they ever work for the people.
 
They were only meant to give the impression that those self-serving politicians had a semblance of power.
 
Only recently Michelle O'Neill attended the 'Council of Nations' hosted by the British King Charles Windsor. The intended aim of which is to 'bring the leaders of the four nations' together to promote unity across the UK.

Why would any British government feel pressurised by those who serve their interests and theirs alone without fail?


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

Door Slammed

Packy Carty ✒ Whenever the mathematical reality of the Northern States demographic momentum and material inversion is laid bare, establishment commentators retreat to a single, comforting sanctuary: 

the growth of the Alliance Party. "People are moving beyond tribalism," the refrain goes. "The middle ground is taking over."

It is a convenient fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. The rise of the "neither" designation is not the birth of a new, post-constitutional identity. The party currently occupying that ground is Alliance, but what actually sits underneath it is a class alliance, not a resolved one — sections of the middle classes and the urban petite bourgeoisie on both sides of the sectarian divide, holding together for as long as their shared interests in stability, property, and professional advancement outweigh the pull of their separate national loyalties. It is not a homogeneous bloc waiting to be wooed wholesale by either side.

Start with the party's own voters. The University of Liverpool's 2024 general election survey found 68.1% of people who actually vote Alliance want to remain in the UK, against 31.2% who back Irish unity — on the electorate's face, a party that leans towards the status quo. But look past the voters to the people who've actually joined the party, and the picture changes completely. Research commissioned for the book The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland – Beyond Unionism and Nationalism found 38.1% of Alliance members support Irish unity, 27.6% want to remain in the UK, and 30.1% are undecided. Two surveys of the same party, pointing in different directions, is not evidence of a coherent political philosophy. It's evidence of a coalition of convenience — voters parking a decision they haven't made behind a party that isn't asking them to make it, and a membership already split three ways underneath. This piece isn't claiming that bloc will swing to a united Ireland on polling day. It's pointing out there is no "it" to swing at all — only a community raised, like every other, inside the sectarian structures of the northern state, whose eventual choice will follow the same two forces already at work everywhere else on this island: the community it was reared in, and which outcome actually serves it's material interests better.

Its growth has been built on a coalition of convenience, drawing middle-class professionals and younger voters who have temporarily parked the border question to focus on everyday governance. But when a border poll is triggered, the nature of material self-interest changes instantly. The question ceases to be "who fixes the potholes today?" and becomes "which state guarantees your healthcare, your real wages, your pension, and your children's access to the world's largest single market?" As established, the material balance of that calculation has already inverted toward the South.

The Alliance leadership knows this balance cannot hold. Naomi Long's shift toward suggesting the party might "step back" from a border poll campaign and treat it as a matter of individual conscience, with representatives free to vote as they wish, is a real retreat from her own 2022 position that Alliance would "undoubtedly" take a side eventually — an admission of structural vulnerability, not confident neutrality. Former Alliance leader John Alderdice put it more bluntly still: sitting on the fence is "not politically realistic," he argued, pointing to what he called an "almost inexorable trajectory towards a united Ireland." A party with genuinely no guidance to give on the single largest constitutional question in its country's history isn't rising above the divide. It's postponing the moment it has to pick a side of it.

The structural fault lines are already visible, and they run in both directions at once. When Carole Howard defected to the UUP, the word she reached for was "now" — she said she could "now openly and comfortably express" pro-Union views she evidently hadn't felt free to voice inside Alliance, a defection the party itself called "an act of bad faith." Months earlier, former councillor David Rossiter had walked the other way, resigning from the party in October 2024 because he could "no longer support a party that has not embraced the possibility of a new Ireland." Rossiter didn't just leave quietly. He pointed directly at the same membership poll cited above and accused his own former leadership of sitting on it deliberately, telling the Irish News he assumed the party "took a strategic decision not to engage further in order to protect their unionist leaning voter base" — happy, in his words, to take nationalist votes in swing seats without ever reciprocating by acknowledging what a third of its own members actually wanted. One defector leaving because the party wouldn't let her say she was pro-Union. Another leaving because it wouldn't act on how pro-unity a third of its own membership actually was. That's not a coherent centre. That's a fault line with people falling off both sides of it.

Perhaps the most tragic exposure of this internal contradiction was the experience of Anna Lo. From an Alliance perspective a progressive, pro-European, anti-sectarian figure who ought to have represented their permanent future of "civic" politics in the North, Lo was hounded out of political life by loyalist intimidation after daring to describe a united Ireland as economically logical. Her exit was the canary in the coal mine: it proved that when the constitutional pressure ratchets up, the polite veneer of "neither" vanishes, and the underlying state mechanics reassert themselves.

When the border poll is eventually called, that class alliance comes apart. Alliance will not navigate the referendum as a neutral mediator, nor will it successfully convince its own divided membership to look the other way. The party will splinter along the same fault line running through the rest of the North — its pro-Union wing drifting back to the UUP or DUP to defend the status quo, its progressive and younger cohorts moving toward the material logic already laid out in my second article.

The "middle ground" is not a new political tribe destined to anchor the 1921 settlement forever. It is a cross-sectarian arrangement of convenience among people who share a class position but not a nation, raised the same way as everyone else in this artificial statelet and watching the same clock. Anna Lo's departure was their warning. The actuarial and material numbers already established are what's still ticking. The only remaining question is whether Alliance breaks apart before the referendum begins or during the count.

⏩ Packy Carty is an East Tyrone Socialist Republican. 

The Non-Aligned Of Brigadoon

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin ✍ Before going any further, I think I should reiterate my own position.

I don't buy into the border poll mania that has infected the discussion about the journey to an Irish Republic. I don't believe a border poll offers a solution to the more pressing political, social and economic problems we face. It will never bring the Republic. I don't believe the British government will call one in the foreseeable future and, even if it did, I don't believe we are remotely close to a majority capable of winning it.

That does not mean the questions raised by Louth Forever should be dismissed. Quite the opposite. The discussions being generated in TPQ are the discussions that those who claim ownership of the New Ireland debate should be having. They cannot and will not.

The Vice 🪶 Everyone Can Name The Problem 🪶 Nobody Will Pay For The Answer is another challenging and insightful contribution to that discussion, and, even for those of us sceptical of the current obsession with border polls, it poses a question that goes considerably beyond the mechanics of calling one.

What are those who advocate constitutional change actually prepared to give in order to achieve it?

I found the distinction between an “ask” and a “remedy” particularly pertinent. It is relatively easy to identify what Britain should do, what unionism should concede, what Dublin should prepare for or what the Secretary of State should clarify. It is considerably more difficult to identify what those advocating constitutional change are themselves prepared to concede, surrender or pay in order to achieve it.

There is, however, another question which perhaps precedes even that one.

Who has been paying the cost until now?

Louth Forever's reference to Michelle O'Neill and the prospect of nurses taking industrial action is perhaps the perfect example. Nurses in the North are once again demanding pay parity with their colleagues in Britain. There is a particular irony in O'Neill now blaming the British and warning of the consequences of decisions she herself took as Minister for Health.

Those inside the room still make the decisions. Those outside it still pay the cost.

And perhaps that is where any serious discussion about cost has to begin. Before asking what republicans, nationalists or unionists might have to concede in some hypothetical future settlement, we should acknowledge that the political arrangements of the past three decades have already carried a price. We need to acknowledge that those who have benefited most from those arrangements have not been the people who paid for it.

The Fleadh meant different things to different people

I don't wish to get into semantics about the Fleadh itself. The return of the northern Assembly this week saw both the DUP and Sinn Féin claim its success as vindication of their respective political positions. Both are wrong. It was a magnificent victory for all the people who call Ireland home.

I deliberately pitched my original comments on the Fleadh in constitutional terms. Any line of reasoning which assumes that Irish nationalists somehow have ownership of Irish culture in all its manifestations makes me uncomfortable. Likewise, the contention that allowing “others” access to that culture constitutes inclusion. It does not.

Irish traditional music, song, dance and culture do not belong to nationalist Ireland. Culture is multidimensional and complex, and Protestant Ireland and unionist Ireland have shaped our shared culture to the same extent as Catholic or nationalist Ireland.

A Protestant playing Irish traditional music is therefore not being generously admitted into somebody else's culture. It is his culture too. The very suggestion that nationalist Ireland somehow owns Irish culture and can then demonstrate its inclusivity by allowing others to participate in it perpetuates the division we claim to be trying to overcome.

Isn't that part of how we ended up in this mess in the first place?

For me, that was the real significance of the Fleadh. It wasn't nationalist Ireland demonstrating that it could accommodate British or unionist identity. It was people from multiple traditions participating in a culture that belongs to all of them equally. They are not being included. They are already part of it.

As Louth Forever argues, that becomes a much more difficult proposition when we move from culture to constitutional politics. The fact remains that the Fleadh was held in the United Kingdom. I deliberately made that point in my original piece because my argument was constitutional, not cultural.

My contention is that, in the post-GFA North, most of the grievances which fuelled the civil rights movement have been addressed. The northern state in which Irishness was once regarded with suspicion, and its outward expression routinely met with hostility, has changed considerably. Irish language, music, sport and culture can now be expressed openly in this part of the United Kingdom in ways that would have been almost unimaginable to earlier generations.

That was precisely my point about the Fleadh. Its success does not demonstrate that the constitutional question has been resolved in favour of Irish unity. If anything, it demonstrates something rather more uncomfortable for republicans, and that is the North has become considerably better at accommodating Irishness.

None of that makes the North less Irish. Nor does it make the Union desirable. But it does remove many of the everyday cultural and political grievances which once made the northern state intolerable to a substantial section of its population.

And that matters enormously when we move from culture to constitutional politics. If people can live openly as Irish, speak Irish, play Irish music, attend the Fleadh, follow the GAA and carry an Irish passport while remaining constitutionally within the United Kingdom, then cultural Irishness cannot itself provide the argument for constitutional change.

Something more has to be offered, and that, I think, is where Louth Forever's challenge really begins to bite.

If a different constitutional future is ever to be constructed, people from the Protestant and unionist tradition cannot simply be invited into a project designed by nationalists and republicans and presented with a list of guarantees about how generously they will be treated. They have to co-design the project.

They are not guests in Ireland. They are not planters. They are the co-owners of Ireland.

And that brings us back to Louth Forever's question about cost.

A guarantee which costs us nothing is not much of a guarantee. Would republicans, for example, be prepared to defend the right of an Orange parade to walk along the Garvaghy Road?

I have previously questioned, in Remembering, how the issue of remembrance might be dealt with in a new Ireland. Whose dead would be remembered, how would they be remembered, and would we be prepared to accord legitimacy to forms of remembrance which make us deeply uncomfortable?

These are not peripheral questions. They go directly to Louth Forever's argument about cost.

Is there an appetite to pay these costs to secure a new Ireland? More fundamentally, are these discussions even taking place?

I choose these examples precisely because they are uncomfortable. There is little value in demonstrating our tolerance by promising to protect only those things with which we already agree.

If the guarantees offered to unionists require nothing of nationalists and republicans beyond accepting things they already find acceptable, then very little has actually been guaranteed. The real test comes when protecting somebody else's identity, tradition or rights requires us to accept something we would rather not.

That is when a new Ireland begins to carry a cost.

But there is another potential cost, and for Sinn Féin it may be considerably greater.

It may have to give up ownership of the unity project.

In The 2% Club, I hypothesise on the early writings of Gerry Adams and, in particular, The Politics of Irish Freedom. The political strategy articulated by Adams in the 1980s was not simply about making Sinn Féin sufficiently large that it could deliver Irish unity on everybody else's behalf. The objective was to help create a mass political and social movement that extended far beyond Sinn Féin itself.

The objective was not to build a mass Sinn Féin. It was to build a mass movement for radical change.

Almost forty years later, for those who remain predisposed to building the Republic, perhaps the remedy remains that original objective. It simply needs to be rediscovered.

Personally, these days, I am more predisposed to gardening, but the point remains.

Sinn Féin has built Sinn Féin. What it has not built is that mass movement.

A genuine mass movement for radical change cannot simply be Sinn Féin with a few extra chairs around the table. It must not be “Irelands Future” mark two.

That is why I fundamentally disagree with Declan Kearney's proposal for a forum bringing together what he describes as “Irish national democratic opinion”.

I understand the thinking behind it, but his language draws me back to the Free State/Brit isolationist policies of the 1970s and 1980s. It begins by defining who is entitled to participate and, by implication, who is not.

Not only does his proposal exclude republicans who fall outside his definition of acceptable “national democratic opinion”, it excludes a significant section of the population who do not consider themselves Irish at all.

Declan, it appears, has already decided what constitutes acceptable “national democratic opinion”.

Democrats and nice people are welcome.

People like me, presumably, need not apply.

But neither, presumably, need many of the people whose participation would actually be essential if constitutional change is ever to command majority support in the North.

That seems to me precisely the wrong starting point. You cannot build a genuinely national movement by first deciding which parts of the nation are entitled to participate in it.

It would necessarily have to include constitutional nationalists, republicans who rejected the Provisional settlement, socialists, social democrats, conservatives, independents and people with no particular party allegiance at all.

More importantly, it would have to include people from the Protestant and unionist tradition who are prepared to contemplate a discussion about constitutional change without first being required to become nationalists or republicans. Unionism cannot simply be invited into somebody else's project. They have to co-design it.

And that means Sinn Féin giving up something considerably more difficult than another political concession. Control.

Such a movement would therefore have to be independent of Sinn Féin. It would have to be capable of disagreeing with Sinn Féin and, when necessary, telling Sinn Féin no.

If the objective is radical constitutional change rather than the continued electoral advancement of Sinn Féin, there may come a point at which the interests of the party and the interests of the wider project diverge. At that point, Sinn Féin would then have to decide which matters more.

Border Poll Mania

As I have already said, I don't share the faux enthusiasm for a Border Poll. But Sinn Féin does, and it has accepted the constitutional mechanism through which such a poll would be triggered by signing up to the GFA in 1998. It therefore seems reasonable to examine the argument on Sinn Féin's own terms.

I hold an unorthodox view on Sinn Féin's increasingly insistent demands for a border poll. My belief is that the demand owes rather more to the limitations of the Provisional strategy than to any serious expectation that a referendum is imminent.

There is nowhere else left for the Provos to go.

The IRA ended its campaign without achieving its stated objective, it decommissioned its weapons. Sinn Féin simultaneously accepted the consent principle and entered the institutions of the GFA.

Sinn Féin has become the largest party in the North, holds the office of First Minister and has achieved levels of electoral support across Ireland that would have been unimaginable when the strategy was first developed.

Yet none of that, in itself, has brought Irish unity any closer. Under the mechanism Sinn Féin accepted in 1998, the determining factor is not how large Sinn Féin becomes but whether a majority in the North can be persuaded to vote for constitutional change.

The border poll has become the final destination of a Sinn Féin strategy where all other options have been closed down.

Additionally, there is something remarkably cost-free about demanding a border poll when you are reasonably confident that the British government will say no. Sinn Féin demands one, the British refuse, and Sinn Féin can point to that refusal as further evidence of British obstruction. As Dixie would say, keeping the deluded happy.

But what if the British said yes?

Suddenly the cost to Sinn Féin becomes very real.

Sinn Féin would have to fight the referendum it has spent years demanding, and it would have to win it. A defeat would not simply postpone Irish unity for another few years. It would call into question the entire strategic trajectory through which the compromises of the past four decades have been justified.

The potential cost to Sinn Féin would be existential.

This makes the continuing argument about the criteria for calling a border poll even more perplexing.

The party repeatedly demands that the British government clarify the criteria by which a Secretary of State would determine that the threshold for calling a referendum had been reached.

Perhaps Sinn Féin and its proxies should answer the question itself. What evidence would persuade Sinn Féin that the criterion it signed up to in 1998 has actually been met?

Opinion polls? If so, what percentage and sustained for how long?

Election results? If so, which votes constitute votes for unity?

Demographic change? If so, why should religious or community background be assumed to determine constitutional preference?

Or some combination of these?

Before asking the British once more to tell us what evidence would persuade them that a majority exists, Comrade Kearney should tell us what evidence would persuade Sinn Féin.

But there is a cost attached to doing that also. Once Sinn Féin states its own benchmark, its rhetoric of momentum becomes publicly measurable.

And what happens if Sinn Féin's own reasonable test tells us what most numerate people already suspect: that the majority required to win a border poll simply does not exist?

Then the central strategic question is no longer why the British government will not call a referendum. It is much more difficult, and it is being played out in Scotland as we speak.

How do you create a majority for unity in the North?

To Conclude

This is where Louth Forever's argument ultimately takes me. Not towards another demand upon Britain. Not towards another timetable for a border poll. And certainly not towards another Sinn Féin initiative designed to demonstrate that Irish unity is just around the corner.

It takes me back to the question of cost.

Who has paid until now and who has benefited?

What are those who have benefited most prepared to surrender if achieving their stated objective requires it?

Republicans may have to surrender some old assumptions about ownership of Irishness. We may have to make guarantees which genuinely cost us something.

And Sinn Féin may ultimately have to surrender something it has spent forty years acquiring: ownership and leadership of the unity project.

If the mass movement envisaged all those years ago is ever to exist, it cannot belong to Sinn Féin. It should not even be a republican movement. Sinn Féin can participate in it. It can argue within it. It can contribute enormously to building it. But it cannot own it.

Sometimes leadership is about knowing when it is time to stop leading.

⏩Muiris Ó Súilleabháin was a member of the Republican Movement until he retired in 2006 after 20 years of service. Fiche bhliain ag fás.

The Remedy For Border Poll Fever

Caoimhin O’Muraile ☭ The US President as most people in the world will be acutely aware visited the twenty-six-counties on the weekend 12th -3th September for a round of golf and the ‘Irish Open’. 

He came as a private citizen but the Dail government still found it necessary to lick the maniac's arse in a bid to curry favour. A little bit like going to Vlad the Impaler’s diner party, those who could grovel the most did not get impaled on a spike and not turning up at all was not an option.

Donald Trump is a little like the beast Vlad in his desire and need for attention and having people, governments, grovel before him. Trump thinks very much along the lines of the school bully knowing full well who he can pick on the most, who desires to be well in with him, and who to leave alone. 

For once in their post Second World War existence the British government, and this is unusual, stood up to Trump. The last time a British Prime Minister stood up and faced down a US leader was Harold Wilson when he refused Lyndon Johnson's demand for British troops in Vietnam during the nineteen-sixties. Former British incumbent, Keir Starmer, told Trump he could not use British bases for aggressive attacks on Iran but they were available for defence! Whatever that means? By the standards of other government's Starmer, though probably crapping himself, did show a certain courage in refusing Trump. The US President is a vindictive man and new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is no doubt aware of that. This vindictive side of Trump will become a little more apparent shortly. As a school bully Trump sees other world governments as weaker pupils in the playground with the possible exception of the equally deranged Vladimir Putin in Russia. Trump toys around with other governments and the mini fightback by the British may well come back to haunt them.

As a private citizen visiting Ireland there was no need for the five-star treatment afforded him by the twenty-six-county government but they did so all the same. Anything Trump may have said does not carry the weight of an official visit, his purpose here was golf. Even so he decided to make an off the cuff comment suggesting he favours a United Ireland, “unification is gonna happen”, were one of his passing remarks. This was not a statement of official US policy it was Trump being, in my opinion, mischievous. He threw a ‘Sprat and caught a Mackerel’. His suggestion was probably said in jest and was taken much more seriously than the comedian intended. Not that it matters. Trump, if the shit hit the fan, would no doubt say he was visiting in a private capacity and can’t remember what he said.

Sinn Fein Leader, Mary Lou McDonald, appears to have taken the bait claiming the unification debate has the support of the US President, she said “the commentary from the President of the United States reflects burying heads in the sand is no longer an option” referring to Micheal Martin's unenthusiastic views on unification. The Taoiseach I believe does not really want Irish unity as he makes plain enough in his narratives. If called to task Trump may deny all this and as no minutes were taken, he could claim it was a joke to wind Andy Burnham up. On this an element of truth may be there, any talk of Irish unification by Trump would irk the British Prime Minister who has said, coming as no surprise, a border poll on Irish unity was “off the table”. Because of these few off the cuff lines by a narcissistic delusionist on Irish unification is taken as gospel it would appear by Sinn Fein who would have us believe movement on the subject is inevitable.

This mountain from a mole hill if they could only see it puts Sinn Fein potentially in a precarious position. Because the party leader and, no doubt all lower ranks, have taken Trump’s at best dubious word he could have them in his pocket. The next time Mary Lou is shouting from the away end in Dail Eireann attacking US, and Trump in particular, policies in the Middle East, essentially Gaza, perhaps all the US President would need to say is, along the lines:

Can I remind Sinn Fein of my support for their case regarding Irish unity? If they wish that support to continue, they’d better shut their critical mouths about our activities and policy in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Trump knows this support, if that is what it was, is not official or US policy. It was a meaningless remark and nothing more with no clout whatsoever! The fact Sinn Fein believe Trump to be pro-unity will be enough to send delusions through the ranks of the opposition benches (the away end) in Dail Eireann as the Sinn Fein leadership appear to believe Trump suddenly to be the best thing since sliced bread! From sinner to saint based on an off the cuff remark, Trump must be laughing his balls off. 

By taking this line, instead of ignoring what could turn out to be nothing more than Trump's mischievous behaviour, making one of the bullied believe the bully is on their side against the British, Sinn Fein have possibly compromised their position and support for the Palestinians. I think strategically Sinn Fein should have continued to push, if that is what they are doing, for a poll on unification without referencing Trump unless somebody else, the Taoiseach for example, decides to invoke Trump's comments. Instead they have reacted to the cattle prodders prod and now the herd is moving, but moving where to? They will follow Mary Lou all the way until the party are possibly made to look foolish by Donald Trump. With one off the cuff comment favouring Irish unification Donald Trump has potentially silenced one of his greatest critics over treatment of the Palestinians and general Middle-Eastern policies. He has thrown down a gauntlet, indirectly, to Sinn Fein along the lines of Irish Unity or support for Palestine, which one is it to be? What if he demands Sinn Fein choose between the two? 

Stop referencing Trump on Irish unity and stop now. You are doing the cause no favours whatsoever. The only interest Trump has in Ireland is that fucking golf course of his in Doonbeg, County Clare. He is not interested in the fabled ‘Good Friday Agreement’ or Irish unity no matter what he might say when making pleasantries! If he were to play golf in England and met Andy Burnham Trump would probably agree with the British PM that a border poll is “off the table” and Irish unity is neither preferred or on the horizon. The man cannot be trusted. He is not consistent even in official policy let alone when having no more than a chat. However his comments appear enough to send Sinn Fein onto cloud nine or the Twilight Zone.

Another potential quid pro quo Trump left us with was his promise to ease tariffs on Irish Whiskey exports to the US. Should he be believed? Well, no sane person would give such a promise house room, but Micheal Martin appears as excited over this promise as Mary Lou is over his comments on Irish unity. Again Trump has potentially, if he chooses, silenced a critic. The recognition of Palestine by the twenty-six-county administration, rightly so, could be compromised if Trump decides so. Imagine if his, again unofficial, promises to reduce tariffs is at the price the government drop this recognition of Palestine? This is one of the problems with getting too friendly with a malignant narcissist like Donald Trump. They are not and never can be trustworthy and if it suits them they will stab anybody in the back to further their own interests. 

Will Trump lower or even drop completely the tariffs on Irish Whiskey exports to the USA? Is it in his gift to do so even if he said it officially? Remember the man who came here for the golf was in civies meaning he was a private citizen in his, not presidential, time. Anything said in this capacity should be taken with a huge pinch of salt and watch out for the pitfalls. 

The offer of tariff reductions should have been accepted with mild appreciation not ringing the bells of permanent prosperity courtesy of Donald Trump. Micheal Martin, Simon Harris, Mary Lou McDonald and uncle Tom Cobley and all were taking soup with Trump. Not one of them had a very long spoon. If the intentions were to buy this rubbish from the off duty Trump the purchasers should perhaps remember, ‘caveat emptor’!!!

 
Caoimhin O’Muraile is Independent Socialist Republican and Marxist.

Trump Visit 🪶 The Legacy

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

The gate is shut from outside and the door is held from inside. Everything else is commentary, including this.

Photo by Paul Harris on Unsplash


The Gate and the Door: 2 Jaws

On Thursday 27th August, five weeks after taking office, Andy Burnham visited Belfast for the first time as Prime Minister. Before he came, Michelle O’Neill told journalists what she intended to prioritise. Not the constitutional issue. The budget. She said they needed Burnham to secure a fair deal that would support public services. Nurses, she noted, were already speaking about strike action. They had been starved of funding for years. If he wanted to leave any mark, he could do it by altering the funding model. What existed now was not sufficient. She would put that to him.

He then arrived and dismissed the prospect of a border poll. When asked whether he would be the Prime Minister to trigger one, he said he was there to listen and work with others, but certain matters would not be open for discussion, and that was one of them. According to him, referendums make people turn inward and create divisions that take years to mend, while politicians ought to focus on the cost of living and on reaching agreement on a budget. He repeated the same wording to three different outlets that day, something Claire Hanna observed and interpreted as the obvious conclusion suggested: this was no accidental remark. It had been scripted beforehand.

O’Neill described the comments as anti-democratic, said that night that she had challenged him directly, and insisted that the right to a referendum was protected by the Good Friday Agreement and had to be respected. On that point, she is correct. A few days afterward, at a hunger strike commemoration in Ballina, she went further, saying that a unity referendum is not a favour to be bestowed on the people of Ireland by any English politician, and she made clear that Sinn Féin would not abandon Stormont, because leaving would simply hand the departments to British ministers.

Lay the sequence out and its structure becomes plain. For the meeting, the First Minister said the main issue was money. The Prime Minister came with a prepared refusal on the constitutional question, declined to offer money as well, and went back off home to England. The First Minister then asserted an actual right, and reaffirmed that she would not use the one lever available to her, which is also true. She secured neither the settlement nor the referendum, and she surrendered nothing and obtained nothing. By Wednesday, the position was unchanged.

The gate is locked from the outside. The door is being held from within. Between those two refusals lies the whole northern nationalist position, which over the past month has produced some of the sharpest political analysis written on this island in years, and not a single proposal that would require anything of the people making it.

That is the bind. That is the vice. Sinn Féin is not the only instance of it, though it is the main one. It governs the commentariat, the left, and the people who write essays about it, myself included.

The Free Thing and the Costly Thing

I have argued previously that clarity in Irish politics follows the trail of cost. Politicians become precise when precision is free and drift into vagueness as the price increases. You can locate a person within a structure by watching where their language starts to lose its nouns.

Extend that from an individual to a position and you get the subject of this essay.

Diagnosis costs nothing. A columnist pays nothing to write that Stormont cannot function. A party chair pays nothing to catalogue the DUP’s obstruction. A socialist pays nothing to note that the Irish left has failed to come together. The analysis is strong because analysis is cheap, the demand for it is vast, and nobody producing it has to surrender anything they already possess.

Remedy is another matter. Any course of action that would genuinely alter the position requires someone to pay: to give up an option, to cement an adversary, to state a policy that fractures their own coalition, to pass a project they control to people they do not. As a result, predictably, the remedies never arrive. In their place comes the ask: a request that someone else behave differently. The other side should stop destroying things. The British government should notice. The left should take the lead. The Secretary of State should sort it out.

An ask is not a remedy. It is diagnosis with a profession or vocation attached.

There is also a smaller version of the same pattern, worth noting because it shows how far the free thing can spread. When Stormont collapsed in 2017, nationalist Ireland came to believe that the alternative to devolution was not direct rule but some version of joint authority between London and Dublin. It proved seductive enough that a third of Sinn Féin voters told pollsters that it was their preferred constitutional outcome. It cost nothing to believe it. No negotiation, no concession, no price was required, which is exactly why it spread.

But it was never actually available, and in January 2024 the British government said so in writing. The command paper that secured the DUP’s return to Stormont, Safeguarding the Union, says the Agreement allows only two constitutional possibilities, continued membership of the United Kingdom or a united Ireland, and that the British government does not regard any other model, including any form of joint authority between the United Kingdom and Ireland, as compatible with the Agreement. The same paper says that a prosperous Northern Ireland with stable devolved government is the surest way to persuade the majority that its best future lies within the Union, and it commits the government to making the case for the Union and to creating a foundation to promote it.

That is worth dwelling on. The institutions Sinn Féin now leads were restored on terms in which the British government committed itself, in a paper laid before Parliament, to campaigning against the party’s founding goal and to rejecting the intermediate arrangement that much of its base thought was imminent. All of this is public. It has been public for two years.

Two Indictments and Two Asks

Consider the two most substantial interventions from the party-and-commentariat world over the past month, each made by a serious figure and each presented here in its full force.

Declan Kearney, Sinn Féin’s national chairperson, issued a detailed indictment of the DUP: arrogance, sectarianism, economic illiteracy, obstruction of the Good Jobs Bill, refusal of the Irish language strategy, the entire record. He then called for a new initiative on Irish unity, a single forum where all strands of what he called Irish national democratic opinion would gather, deliberate, agree and speak together. The indictment is sound. The ask is that the DUP change its direction, and that nationalism assemble itself. Neither request costs Sinn Féin anything. The forum, in particular, asks nationalism to do what it finds easiest: speak to itself.

Brian Feeney, writing in the Irish News, said the new Secretary of State is a decent man being fed rubbish by his officials, that the budget arithmetic is impossible and cannot be made workable, that unionism has shifted sharply rightward and elevated culture wars, and that partition is and always has been the problem here. Most of that is defensible, and much of it is plainly true. The final operative sentence of the column is: he should then tell Burnham.

Feeney is the most revealing example, and I want to treat him fairly, because he got farther than anyone. Weeks earlier he had suggested something genuinely costly: that after next year’s election Sinn Féin should renew its mandate and then refuse to form an executive until the British government published the criteria for calling a referendum. That is a real remedy. It has a price, identifies who pays it, and does not rely on anyone else’s goodwill. Yet within a few weeks the same writer had returned to hoping the proconsul would sort it out and say so upstairs. That is not a lapse of nerve on his part. It is gravity. When you let go, the cost-free ask is where the argument settles.

Two of the sharpest people working in this area, in one month, and between them not one proposal that would cost their own side anything.

I should be careful here, though, because there is a version of this that is too tidy, and the past week has produced its clearest exception.

This argument does sometimes name prices. Writing at the end of August, Siobhán Fenton proposed one and then did what almost nobody does with a proposal: she worked out who would have to bear it. Her proposal is the Feeney-boycott: after the May 2027 election, the parties should refuse to form an executive until the British government publishes the criteria for calling a referendum, with Sinn Féin able to say it has upheld its side of the Agreement and it is now Britain’s turn to uphold its own. She then constructs the coalition. The SDLP, because its authorship of the Agreement makes this the one boycott it might tolerate. Alliance, awkwardly positioned because Naomi Long has already called for the criteria to be published and a boycott seeking only clarity is difficult to portray as tribal. The smaller parties, if they return members. And then, unprompted, she argues against herself: that it may be too confrontational, that it could alienate the centre ground that will decide the referendum, and, most importantly, that publication might weaken the pro-unity case in the short term, because whatever the threshold turns out to be it is almost certainly not met yet, and saying that openly would stall the momentum the campaign currently has.

That final point is a cost voluntarily assigned to her own side, and it is the rarest thing in the whole discussion.

Still, note where she stands. Fenton is a journalist. She once worked for the party and no longer does. Feeney, who proposed the same boycott some weeks earlier and had already returned to appeals within another few weeks, is a columnist. Neither of them will be in a room in May 2027 deciding whether to form an executive. However well designed the proposal is, the price would still be paid by somebody else’s leadership.

That is the more truthful version of the finding. The issue is not that nobody can imagine a cost. It is that the ability to name one is inversely related to the chance of having to bear it. The farther you are from the thing that must be surrendered, the more clearly you can see that it ought to be. That describes a critic, and I will return to that.

What the Fleadh Actually Showed

The strongest objection to everything I am arguing was published on The Pensive Quill a week ago by Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, and it should be answered rather than folded away.

His argument is about the Fleadh in Belfast, which nationalist Ireland has spent August reading as evidence that the north has changed beyond recognition. It did change, and the celebration was real. But, he points out, the Fleadh took place in the United Kingdom. Irish identity can now flourish in Belfast much as Scottish and Welsh identity flourish within the same state. Culture is not sovereignty. And the uncomfortable possibility is that the Good Friday Agreement, rather than opening a path out of the Union, may have made the Union much better at accommodating Irishness.

I think he is right, and I think the reason is the mechanism of this essay. The Union grants what is free and withholds what is costly. Irish-language signage, a fleadh in the city centre, an Irish name on a public building: none of these reduce British sovereignty, and a confident state can afford them. Sovereignty itself is the expensive item, and it is not available at any price. So cultural flourishing is not evidence of constitutional movement. It may be the opposite: the sign of a settlement that has learned precisely how much it can concede without conceding anything.

That should disturb anyone who took the Fleadh as a milestone. It certainly disturbs the argument I made two weeks ago.

But it is only half the story, and the other half matters more, because it is the only thing in this whole month that looks like a price being paid rather than merely named.

Read the Fleadh as Ó Súilleabháin does and it is a story about the British state, about what a confident Union can afford to permit. Read it the other way and it is a story about what nationalist Ireland is prepared to offer, in practice, on a street, over eight days, to people who do not share its constitutional goal and will not. Protestants were central to organising it. The deputy First Minister of a unionist party spoke at the opening and was heard. A loyalist flute band played at City Hall. A former UDA man, Davy Adams, wrote afterward in the Irish News that he had finally seen the New Ireland he had spent years failing to describe, and what he described was not a place where his tradition was merely tolerated but one where nobody much cared which foot he kicked with.

That is not a cultural festival being granted by a state. That is a guarantee being rehearsed by a community, and it was rehearsed without a British minister’s permission and at nobody’s invitation but its own.

The distinction matters because it separates accommodation from inclusion, and the whole argument of this essay turns on that. Accommodation is offered from outside by a power that keeps what it values. Inclusion is done from within, at cost, by people who could have chosen otherwise. The first is what the Union extends to Irishness. The second is what happened in Belfast in August, and it is the one thing that answers Ó Súilleabháin’s objection rather than simply absorbing it. If the concern is that the Union has become better at holding Irish identity, the answer is not to deny it. It is that Irish nationalism, for eight days, showed it can hold British identity too, and did so publicly, and nothing collapsed.

None of that is minor, and none of it is new. It is the oldest proposition in the tradition. Tone’s entire formulation was to replace the common name of Irishman for the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, which is not a plea for tolerance but an argument that the categories should stop being the issue. McCracken was a Presbyterian who died at the end of a rope for a republic he understood in exactly those terms. The reason South Africa works as a comparison is the same reason: the Congress tradition was non-racial from within its own ranks, so the voice that eventually spoke already contained the people it would need to reassure. That is not a concession to unionism added to republicanism from the outside. It is republicanism’s founding sentence, and the Fleadh was eight days of it in action.

The problem, and it is the problem with everything in this essay, is that eight days is not a settlement. What was shown on the street has not been written into a single document, offered at a single table, or costed in a single prospectus. It remains an instinct rather than a guarantee, and instincts are free.

The Asymmetry

It troubles the argument in a second way, which I did not recognise until Anthony McIntyre stated it plainly in response to that essay.

As he observed, unionism is divided at party level but remarkably unified on the constitutional question. Whatever else separates it, it holds together on the Union. Nationalism is close to the opposite: unified at party level, where Sinn Féin has dominated, and much more uncertain constitutionally. Nationalists are more willing to accept rule from London than unionists would ever be to accept rule from Dublin.

If that is correct, and I think it is, then something I wrote two weeks ago needs revision. I had argued that the one truly encouraging figure in northern polling was rising unionist consent, the increasing willingness among unionists to accept a referendum result they would lose. I still think that trend is real and that it is the variable that matters. But willingness to hold a vote is not the same as willingness to lose one, and a bloc that fractures over flags and parades while remaining firm on sovereignty is a bloc whose consent shifts within a much narrower range than I allowed. I moved too quickly. The mechanism is right, but the room for it is smaller than I said.

A New Ireland For Whom

Here is where the same mechanism creates the silence that should concern republicans most, and I am not the first to say it this month. Ó Súilleabháin said it more forcefully than I will, and Colin Gannon has been making a version of the point in Jacobin for years.

Ask what a united Ireland would actually be, and the discussion immediately thins. Who owns its wealth. Who can afford its housing. What kind of health service it would run. How, if at all, it would redistribute resources. What prevents a thirty-two-county state from reproducing the inequalities already present on both sides of the border. These are not questions for the day after unity. They determine whether unity offers anything worth voting for.

They remain unanswered for the same reason everything else here remains unanswered. To specify a cost. The moment you say what kind of Ireland you want, you split the coalition assembled to want an Ireland at all, and a movement that has spent thirty years building that coalition is not going to risk it for the sake of a policy platform. So working-class communities are asked whether they want a new state before being told what it would do for them, and the constitutional question is placed first while its social content is postponed without limit.

The oldest expression of this came from within, long before the current arguments. Brendan Hughes, speaking to Fourthwrite in 2000, said the facade had been cleaned but the bone structure was the same. He was talking about the north. He might just as well have been describing the offer.

The One Who Paid

Two weeks ago I wrote about the one movement that reached this goal and kept it, and I will not repeat the case, only the part that matters here. What made the South African transition succeed was not analysis. Everyone had analysis. What made it work was that Joe Slovo, the person with the most to lose by saying it, named a price his own side would pay and argued for it publicly, in the movement’s own journal, to the people who would bear it: guaranteed employment for the civil service of the state he had fought, a government of national unity with posts divided by share of the vote, and a front that dissolved itself into a table where the other side could say no. He was explicit that a leadership which hid the cost from its base would be accused of selling out, so he did not hide it.

Every one of those was expensive, and that is the whole point. They were not requests aimed at the National Party. They were prices the ANC paid, on its own, in advance, to make the other side’s consent possible. Nothing in current Irish nationalism resembles that, and the absence is not accidental.

What Would Have To Be Given

So, at the risk of doing the very thing I have spent seven sections describing, here is what a serious proposal would need to include. Not what Sinn Féin should do. What anyone serious would have to accept.

First, the recognition that this requires two strategies, not one, which is Fenton’s point and the most useful sentence written on this subject this month. Winning a referendum and getting one called are different problems that require different campaigns, and the movement has only ever built the first. What follows bears on both, but the second is the one that has never been attempted at all.

Preparation before the vote, not agitation for it, which means the costed prospectus nobody wants to write because writing it closes off arguments people would rather keep open.

Guarantees to unionism that unionism helps author, not guarantees presented to unionism by the party that opposed it. That means a table where the other side can say no, which is a real transfer of control and not a forum where one tradition speaks with one voice.

A movement broader than any single party or tendency, which means the people who presently own the unity question would have to give it away, and it is their most valuable asset.

And the social content set out in advance, which means telling people what sort of Ireland before asking them to vote for one, at the price of the coalition that vagueness protects.

Each of those costs somebody something. That is how you know they are remedies rather than asks. It is also exactly why none of them is on the table.

Including This

Which leads me to the part of this essay I would rather not write.

I have spent the spring & summer naming things. The party is constrained by the institutions it leads. The left will not shut the door that would create a bloc. The chairman’s forum is a front for one tradition. The commentariat produces indictments and asks. All of that, I think, is true, and some of it took real work to establish.

None of it cost me anything.

Naming is what this position rewards, and I have been collecting the reward. I have not proposed a single thing that would require the tradition I write from to surrender anything and truly mean it. I have described, with considerable precision, the price others would have to pay and paid none of it myself, and the essays have been better received the more accurately I have described it. The market for accurate diagnosis is excellent, and I am in it.

So the final movement is neither a demand nor a prophecy. It is an admission that the mechanism I have spent seven movements dissecting has its own author inside it, and that a body of work which only ever names things is not a way out of the bind. It is one of the more eloquent things happening within it.

And yet the essay’s own evidence contains its exception, and I have spent eight movements walking past it.

In August, over eight days, the costly act was carried out. It was neither merely suggested, nor priced, nor handed off to a commission for later. It was completed on a street by people with no office to defend and nothing personal to profit from the act. Inclusion came from inside instead of being an accommodation bestowed from outside, offered to a tradition under no duty to accept it, and nothing collapsed. Whatever remains uncertain, that no longer belongs to the realm of theory. It occurred in full view, and thousands witnessed it.

The gap between that and a settlement is genuine, and I have been straightforward about that: eight days do not make a document, and instincts cost nothing. Yet note how much narrower that gap is than the one outlined elsewhere in this essay. It does not call for Burnham to relocate, or for the Treasury to soften, or for a party to summon courage that its incentives discourage. What it does require is that someone put into writing what Belfast has already shown, and then place it on a table where the other side is free to refuse. The difficult part is the demonstration, and the demonstration has already taken place.

The gate is shut from outside, and Burnham has just shut it again. The door is held from inside, and O’Neill has just explained why she is holding it. Everything else, for now, including this, is commentary.

Further Reading

Everything below is worth your time, and most of it is better than the summary I have given it here. Read them in whatever order suits you, though the first two are what set this month’s argument going.

Declan Kearney, “Time for a new initiative on Irish unity”, An Phoblacht, 14th August 2026. The fullest statement of Sinn Féin’s current unity strategy, and the source of the proposal for a single forum of all strands of Irish national democratic opinion. Whatever you make of it, it is the party arguing its own case at length rather than through a press release.

Brian Feeney, Irish News, August 2026. Two columns worth reading together. The first proposes that Sinn Féin renew its mandate next May and then decline to form an executive until the British government publishes the criteria for calling a referendum. The second, “In case the proconsul hasn’t worked it out yet, the problem here is partition”, argues that the difficulty is partition and that the Secretary of State ought to say so to the Prime Minister. The distance between them is the subject of this essay. Feeney has been writing in that paper for thirty years and was an SDLP councillor before that, which is worth knowing when you read him on Sinn Féin.

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, “The Provo Paradox”, The Pensive Quill, August 2026. The strongest challenge to my own argument, written from inside the tradition by a man who gave it twenty years. His reading of the Fleadh is the part I have had to think hardest about, and his question about what kind of Ireland is being offered, and to whom, is one nobody has answered.

Siobhán Fenton, “Should nationalists boycott Stormont until the British government publishes the criteria for a border poll?”, 30th August 2026. The most practically useful piece written on this in a long time, because it works out who would actually have to carry the proposal and then argues honestly against its own case. Her point that winning a referendum and getting one called are two different campaigns is the one I keep returning to.

Colin Gannon, “Ireland’s Left Should Lead the Campaign for Irish Unity”, Jacobin, August 2026. Makes the case that a unity campaign built on material change in both jurisdictions could break the deadlock. Behind a free registration wall, which is a nuisance, but he has been asking the question about the social content of a new Ireland for years and deserves the credit for getting there early.

Safeguarding the Union, CP 1021, presented to Parliament January 2024. The command paper that bought the DUP’s return to Stormont. Read paragraph 64, which rules out joint authority as inconsistent with the Agreement, and paragraph 6, which states that making devolution work is the surest way to persuade people their future lies within the Union. It is a short read and it is more candid than anything said out loud since.

The ARINS / Irish Times North and South Survey. The most careful polling on constitutional attitudes on this island, and the source of most of the numbers people quote at each other without having looked at them. The material on unionist attitudes to holding a referendum, as distinct from winning one, is the part worth your attention.

Joe Slovo, “Negotiations: What room for compromise?”, The African Communist No.130, Third Quarter 1992. Available in full through the O’Malley archive at the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The document that made the South African settlement possible, written by the man with the most to lose by writing it. It is short, it is unsentimental, and it is the clearest example I know of a leadership telling its own side what a settlement would cost before asking them to accept one.

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

The Vice 🪶 Everyone Can Name The Problem 🪶 Nobody Will Pay For The Answer

Peadar O’Donnell Socialist Republican Forum ☭ Andy Burnham, the Border Poll and the Road Brendan Hughes Warned Us About.


Andy Burnham's comments that a border poll is "off the cards" should not be dismissed as careless words. They expose a fundamental truth: the British state determines the terms of any constitutional change in Ireland. Socialist republicans and the anti-imperialist movement in Ireland never had illusions about this reality.

The message is unmistakable. London is letting Sinn Féin know who sets the agenda. If Sinn Féin were genuinely caught off guard, it would demonstrate a remarkable lack of political awareness. But they were not shocked. They know 'Project Stormont' has failed badly, regarding the national question; even if it has financially served its participants well.

Under the Good Friday Pacification Agreement, the British Secretary of State holds the power to call a border poll—but only when the outcome is certain, and only when it serves capitalist-imperialist interests. The English ruling class retains this card, employing the age-old tactic of ruling by fooling. James Connolly rightly pointed this out over a century ago, and still, there are great Irish fools to practice on.

The constitutional arrangements are not based upon revolutionary acts of Irish self-determination outside the imperialist system. They are based upon an agreement between governments, designed to accommodate their interests. This gerrymandered process is not a simple all-Ireland question decided in a single vote. It envisages constitutional votes North and South, with outcomes requiring both governments to give effect to expressed wishes. Even if a majority in the North votes for change, the British state does not suddenly disappear from the process.

This brings us to Brendan 'The Dark' Hughes. His warnings are more relevant than ever. Hughes understood where constitutional nationalism would lead when devoid of revolutionary theory. He saw the danger long before others acknowledged it.

Hughes looked at the post-Good Friday Pacification Compromise and asked what had happened to the republican objective. He saw Stormont and recognised the British state was still there—the same structures, the same civil service, the same institutions, the same occupation. He asked whether the republican struggle had really been reduced to republicans taking ministerial positions inside that system. His warning was clear: the Stormont regime remained intact. The British still controlled it. Sinn Féin ministers sitting inside it did not magically transform it to meet republican ideals.

Hughes famously questioned whether thirty years of struggle had ultimately come down to "a big room at Stormont, ministerial cars, dark suits" and administering the British system. This was not a criticism from someone advocating a return to war. Hughes specifically rejected that argument, recognising the enormous human cost. His argument was political. What happened to the All-Ireland struggle? What happened to the objective of a 32 County Socialist Republic? What happened to the idea that working-class people of Ireland should control their own political and economic destiny?

Those questions remain vital. Look at where the Sinn Féin project has arrived. Instead of challenging the fundamental structures of capitalism and imperialism, Sinn Féin has become an important part of managing those structures. They sign off on cuts to public services. They operate within Stormont and the Dáil as servants to the status quo. They operate within the imperialist European Union and advocate for its survival.

The great political objective has become constitutional change through a process involving London, Dublin, Washington, and Brussels. But what kind of Ireland would that produce? The "United Ireland" being discussed by the establishment is not the 32-county Socialist Republic that Brendan Hughes fought for. It is an agreed Ireland between imperialist powers—an Ireland acceptable to London, Washington, the European Union, and native capitalism. An Ireland in which existing economic power structures remain intact.

A change in constitutional arrangement does not necessarily mean a change in the class system. The wealthy would remain wealthy. The powerful would remain powerful. Working-class people would still face unaffordable housing, a two-tier health system, poor wages, insecure employment, and deteriorating living standards. Those who create the wealth would still not control it. The British-imposed border might change, but the economic system would remain.

This is where Hughes's warnings become particularly important. He spoke about politics becoming tired, repetitive, and detached from revolutionary ideals. He warned that republicanism itself could become absorbed into a process creating a class of professional politicians. He said: "The republican leadership has always exploited our loyalty." Republican activists gave decades to a struggle based upon very different principles—national liberation and social transformation, an Ireland controlled by its people rather than elites. The revolutionary objective has been replaced by constitutional politics. The struggle was not about elections, ministerial offices, and budgets.

Now we are told to celebrate the possibility of a British government eventually allowing a border poll. That is quite a journey from the original objective.

If a British Prime Minister can say a border poll is "off the table," regardless of subsequent clarifications, it reveals the nature of the Good Friday Agreement. The British state remains central to determining the circumstances of constitutional change. That is precisely what Hughes warned about.

He wasn't saying republicans should return to armed struggle. He was asking a more fundamental question: Why are so-called republicans administering British rule instead of challenging the system that maintains it?

More than eight hundred years of English and British involvement in Ireland. Three hundred years of capitalism has demonstrated that the political system does not serve those who create society's wealth. If the British ruling class eventually decides that an all-Ireland arrangement serves its economic, strategic, or political interests, the British state will adapt accordingly. It has done so before. Unionist protests would not prevent it, nor would republican rhetoric.

The question is not simply whether there will eventually be a United Ireland. The question is: whose United Ireland? A United Ireland designed and negotiated by governments, political parties, big business, and international interests? Or an Ireland fundamentally transformed in the interests of the people who live and work here? The former can be achieved while leaving capitalism, inequality, and elite power untouched. The latter requires a much deeper political and social transformation.

That was the Ireland Brendan Hughes was talking about. He could see the danger of republicans becoming administrators rather than revolutionaries. He could see the danger of confusing political participation with political power.

Today, when a British Prime Minister can effectively tell Sinn Féin that the border poll is not on the agenda, perhaps people should remember exactly what the Dark was warning us about. The Dark was right. The road of constitutional nationalism always leads towards administering the existing system rather than replacing it.

If the final destination is an agreed United Ireland that leaves capitalism, imperialism, and elite power intact, then changing the constitutional border will not deliver the Ireland that generations of working-class republicans fought for. The real question is: "Who will own it, who will control it, and who will benefit from it?"

If the answer remains the same powerful and wealthy minority, the working class will have gained nothing. That is why Burnham's words matter—not because he said a border poll is off the cards, but because they expose the limits of the constitutional road. A road Brendan Hughes warned us about years ago. The Dark was right.

Time to bring politics back into our working-class communities, for only then can we meaningfully begin to build for the Workers' Republic and, in doing so, prepare the ground to demand a democratic 32-county referendum for national liberation.

The Dark Was Right

Dixie Elliot ✊So we have to believe that Mary Lou McDonald and Michelle O'Neill put the case forcefully to the British PM that not he nor anyone else 'has the authority to high-handedly remove any provision of the GFA, including and especially the provision for a referendum.'


And that he backed down.
 
That right there is yet an another example of how Sinn Féin can stand and brazenly lie. We all know that didn't happen at all but it keeps the desperately deluded happy.

Their earliest election posters carrying the slogan, ' Vote Sinn Féin - Smash Stormont' were of course lies.
 
One of the biggest lies came from Martin McGuinness during the 1986 Ard Fhéis.

They tell you that it is inevitable certainty that the war against British rule will be run down. These suggestions deliberately infer that the leadership of Sinn Fein and the leadership of the Irish Republican Army are intent on edging the republican movement on to a constitutional path . . .  Shame, shame, shame . . . 
 
The 'Victory Parade' following the announcement of the 1994 Ceasefire.
 
The list is endless and it will continue to grow.
 
The British PM has the authority to do whatever he wants because the North remains under British rule. And because Sinn Féin are happy to keep the British institutions up and running for them.
 
What is going to stop any British Prime Minister or Secretary of State from removing any part of the GFA?
 
International law? The US and the EU, as some are claiming in desperation.
 
International Law can only make statements that fall on the deaf ears of those carrying out the genocide in Gaza, the US and Israel.
 
So at best we will only get a statement from them criticising Perfidious Albion for doing what anyone with an ounce of sense knew they'd eventually do anyway.

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

Keeping The Desperately Deluded Happy

The Fenian Way ✍ “Many's the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing."

The predictable howls from all quarters, bar a very conspicuous one, greeted the pronouncement from British direct ruler Andrew Burnham that a border poll is ‘off the table’. Like a theatrical cue card all the players in this political farce saw these remarks as their moment to take centre stage and deliver their shibboleths with suitable indignation or glee, only to realise that once they had done so, a cold reality dawned that they have zero control over the British script.

What was equally exposed was the vacuous nature of slogan politics, tribal politics, sectarian politics, partitionist politics and the greatest whore of them all, electoral politics. And all of that before we delve into the ignorant abyss of the implications of not studying in detail what you have irreversibly subscribed to.

In a carefully crafted and impeccably timed intervention Burnham was actually telling us what is on the table, only, and what is required of the principal actors (who have absolutely nowhere else to go) if the British and Irish governments are to treat them like grown ups. And the endorsement of this British position was confirmed by Dublin due to their strategic silence amidst the rhetoric and din.

The lynchpin of the Good Friday Agreement is the complete control ceded to the British government regarding issues of sovereignty and constitutional change. The British direct ruler has just exercised that control. What is left to domestic politics is the responsibility of administering devolved issues within the Stormont Assembly.

Their ability, and suitability, to do so will not be measured by their posturing on issues outside of their remit and control. And this is why Burnham’s remarks were as much aimed at unionists as it was nationalists. Some of the more astute unionist commentators recognised this fact and urged moderation over the usual triumphalism.

Both Provisional Sinn Féin and the DUP face the same conundrum posed by Burnham’s intervention; Stormont not working will no more usher in a border poll than it will secure the union in a post-Brexit and Scottish Referendum environment. The only way they can be relevant to their electorate is to make Stormont work and that is wholly dependent on British funding, who simply cannot contemplate funding a failed entity.

Both parties stepped into the shoes of their respective predecessors, UUP and SDLP, and both now realise the shoes do not fit as comfortably as they thought they would. You can’t play opposition whilst in government. Stormont, regardless of its status, is an instrument serving British interests. And that is the trap closed.

But republicans were also caught short, the broad nature of the response falling into the ‘we told you so’ category. Like most others, republicans reacted to what they wanted to hear rather than sit back and listen to what the British and Irish governments intended everyone to hear.

It can be no coincidence that a former British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar should weigh in on the heels of Burnham with talk of the inevitability of Irish unity once agreement can be reached over a protracted period of time. That agreement is not confined simply between Unionist and Nationalist, it must also find agreement with the British establishment.

We can no longer entertain outdated notions of why the British remain in Ireland. The Six Counties are not as British as Finchley. The right to walk the Queen’s Highway was deemed silly by that very same Queen. The sacrifices and sufferings of Irish generations under their occupation mean nothing to a people who learn more about their history from Netflix than they do from their schools and universities.

The waltzing choreography of British long-term interests in our country are being played out in unison with Dublin’s incremental compliance. The political reasoning behind partition alters and adapts to the differing needs of the British establishment to preserve it. Those contemporary needs have a definitive international and security dimension to them as the world enters yet another cold war scenario.

Almost every day we see an assault on the neutrality of the Southern state, the primary weapon for which is ridicule. Its latest manifestation concerned the recent EU Defence Ministers meeting in Wicklow. Much was made of the fact that the security apparatus surrounding the gathering was dependant on a Royal Navy ship hovering outside of territorial waters.

Prominent Statist commentators call Ireland the ‘weak link’ in the European defence system and that we live a ‘charmed existence’ due to the benevolence of other EU countries who spend more on their defence budgets to ensure Ireland remains safe from the ‘threat of Russian aggression’.

This is the type of lens through which Westminster views her interests in Ireland. And what republicans need to urgently recognise is that the core issue of our national sovereignty may well find more strategic value in issues like neutrality to promote that sovereignty as a pragmatic and practical solution.

We cannot allow our position on national sovereignty to be constrained by simply defining it as an historic right and position ourselves as the gatekeeper of that stance but rather promote it aggressively as a solution to a range of issues that continually capture our people’s attention.

The kingdom of heaven comes in a way not foreseen by man: perhaps the same can be said for a sovereign republic.

⏩ The Fenian Way was a full time activist during the IRA's war against the British. 

On The Table

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