[This article is part of a series called Answering Ireland’s Call: Thoughts for a new republic (Freagairt ar Ghlaoch na hÉireann: Smaointe ar phoblacht nua). The series will publish articles discussing the reunification of Ireland but within the context of early 21st Century ills such as the climate crisis, capitalism and fascism. If you like what you read, please share the articles far and wide. If you have insights and ideas on the subject and want to make a contribution, the project team would love to hear from you via [email protected].]

On Saturday 3 August 2024, I attended an anti-racist rally outside Belfast City Hall. Across the police line, howling fascist yahoos flew Union Jacks, Israel flags and the Irish Tricolour. This organised mob then went on to attack mostly Muslim-owned businesses across the city. In the aftermath, the media made a great deal of the images showing British and Irish flags flying side-by-side. Many commented that this represented a contradiction in terms, that you can’t be an Irish nationalist and simultaneously cosy up to loyalists, or indeed espouse fascism. There was certainly a degree of novelty to the mob’s constituent elements, but the notion that you cannot be Irish and racist represents a fallacy. Indeed, some media reports even called the fascist protesters from Dublin ‘republicans.’ The Sunday World reported Shankill sectarian killer, Glen Kane, giving Nazi salutes, while he ‘stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Irish flag-waving republicans.’ In fact, across the last century, many far-right Irish nationalists have claimed the tricolour, none more prominent than Eoin O’Duffy, the founder of the Blueshirts and first president of Fine Gael, the current party of government in Dublin. Indeed, lamentably, in the late 1930s right-wingers within Sinn Féin, such as the party chair, J.J. O’Kelly (Sceilg), preached anti-Semitism and sought a rapprochement with O’Duffy and, while not fascist in their politics, militarists within the IRA such as Seán Russell sought Nazi cooperation during the Second World War(Hanley, 2005). 

The perversity of this position rested on the established historical fact that, in the early 1930s, the republican movement had a history of anti-fascism and radical left-wing politics, fighting O’Duffy’s acolytes on the streets and condemning Nazi racism and anti-Semitism in print. The IRA position echoes to this day in Moss Twomey’s famous remark that if it was communism to undo the conquest, destroy landlordism, restore the heritage of the dispossessed, end robbery and exploitation by a privileged minority, then the IRA is a Communist organisation (Hanley, 2001:53). Therefore, the fascist scum who waved the tricolour beside the Butcher’s apron can plausibly claim to be Irish nationalists. Their alleged republicanism holds a less secure basis in historical fact, however. The novelty of their espousal of fascism, however, is that perhaps for the first time, they have chosen to ally themselves with the British far-right as opposed to a continental and typically Catholic variety be it Mussolini, Franco or Hitler – apparently, the lingering whiff of incense has been overcome by the waft of gammon nonsense. 

Those who point to a coming together of the two communities in this hate march exhibit a level of historical ignorance partially created by a half-century of mainstream misrepresentation of the northern conflict. The loyalist and Ireland First mob are united in their national chauvinism and white supremacism. Despite the contradictions outlined earlier, Irish republicanism (particularly socialist republicanism) is the only mainstream anti-sectarian tradition in Irish political history. It also represents the principal anti-imperialist and alsoanti-racist tradition, despite laudable exceptions on the liberal side in highly problematic figures like Daniel O’Connell. To understand this and to map out the Ireland we seek in the future, it is necessary to move from the specific to the general and to view history as a process. For instance, the heirs to the proto-fascist Sinn Féin of the late 1930s were not the Provisionals but rather what became the Official movement, which by the late 1960s espoused an overtly Marxist position before performing a profound ideological somersault over the course of the Troubles, eventually adopting a partitionist and pro-British outlook. 

Similarly, after 1970, the Provisional movement emerged as a working-class insurgency which promoted the concept of an all-Ireland socialist republic and expressed solidarity for anti-colonial movements across the global South (McKearney, 2011:106). The current Provisional movement has triangulated its way to an acceptance of US imperial hegemony, positioning itself as an establishment proxy for neo-liberal continuity. Its long-term participation in the sectarian carve-up at Stormont, recent positions on Gaza and lamentable attempts to appease the lumpen far-right on the issue of immigration suggest that, as an organisation, it has made considerable progress down the well-worn historical path taken by those who move from a revolutionary republican position to a reformist and assimilationist constitutional nationalist one. In a recent documentary, the veteran socialist republican, Tommy McKearney, outlined his decision to break with the Provisional movement in the late 1980s: ‘The commitment into having lived a life as I did… it was a huge emotional decision to break with the IRA, but my loyalty wasn’t to an organisation, it was to the cause.’ But what is that cause and can those who adhere to it chart a different more democratic and socially just path for our island?

Tone, the McCrackens and Russell stand as founders of an anti-sectarian and egalitarian tradition which applied the universalism of the radical Enlightenment or humanism to a colonial society. The constitutional tradition, which regularly condemns republican violence, emerged from the liberal Enlightenment and accepts the colonial conquest and, in utilitarian fashion, operates on an acceptance of the sectarian paradigm on which inequality and social reproduction within a colonial situation was based. Those who seek to establish a genuine democratic republic must leave nationalism to the nationalists and adopt an internationalist perspective grounded in Ireland’s revolutionary anti-colonial tradition. These are not reified polarities but represent a spectrum or dialectic and Irish nationalism clearly could encompass aspects of reactionary politics as well – Seán South may have been a violent nationalist intent on driving out the Brits, but he was no Fenian, nor was Eoin O’Duffy, Ernest Blythe or the other filthy reactionaries who rode in on the back of the southern counter revolution.

The current discourse around nationalism, therefore, occludes the real and qualitative distinction between constitutional nationalism and republicanism. Daniel O’Connell is a nationalist hero. Yet, from a republican perspective, he amounted to little more than a utilitarian opportunist and hypocrite, whose laudable anti-slavery and religious tolerance aside, cut his clothe to suit with the British establishment’s worldview, thus carving out a niche for propertied Irish Catholics and their brahmin class in the Roman Catholic Church. Irish republicans have more in common with the English Quaker radical, Tom Paine. Indeed, Paine wrote Common Sense the year after O’Connell’s birth, while his Rights of Man (1791) became the key text of nascent popular Irish republicanism. During the 1798 Rebellion, O’Connell, a supposed opponent of physical force, joined the pro-British yeomanry, later arguing that ‘the popular party was so completely crushed that the only chance of doing any good for the people was by affecting ultra loyalty’ (Woods, 2006:138).After reading Paine’s Age of Reason in London, O’Connell rejected religion and adopted a Deist outlook, which he quickly publicly abandoned on his return to politics in Ireland out of political expediency. When Paine died a pauper in 1809 New York, his bones famously returned to England before being lost. When O’Connell died on a lavish pilgrimage to Rome during Black ’47, while the nation of beggars he led, starved and fled, his heart was interned in a gold box in Rome while his body returned for a mass funeral in Dublin. Like their hero O’Connell, many of the Irish liberals who mock the far right for their lies might remove the plank from their own eye before they attend to the fascist splinter.

Colonialism, therefore, is a process not an event and loyalism, unionism and conservatism are reactionary and anti-humanist tendencies that reject the universalism of the radical enlightenment completely. In short, sectarianism is a manifestation of racism in the colonial context of Ireland. To claim that the northern conflict was a religious one is to occlude or deliberately ignore sectarianism’s centrality to social reproduction and inequality in a colonial context. In Ireland, sectarianism functioned as racism did for the diaspora across the Anglosphere. Ireland had the misfortune to be conquered and colonised in the early stages of modern capitalist formation. When asked to write this piece, the brief stated that the argument would have to be short and accessible. With Einstein’s imperative that ‘if you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself’ in my mind, I will now briefly explain capitalism and its relevance to Ireland’s future in several hundred words.  Capital is defined as a process, which is in continuous expansion, dedicated to endless accumulation. Yet, the market is meant to rest on an exchange of equivalents, price equilibriums, money in exchange for commodity etc. Marx explained capitalism’s growth through the theory of surplus-value, which focuses on production, not circulation in the market (Harvey, 2023:89). This growth, the basis of capitalism, rests on class exploitation. 

Therefore, capitalism can be characterised ‘as a self-expanding circle, a spiral’ (Marx, 1993:746). This spiral form of endless cumulative growth is based on exploitation, often facilitated by mass violence in its early stages, which ultimately threatens human survival either through war or environmental catastrophe. Colonisation became an imperative as this ‘organic system’ subordinated ‘all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality… This society then seizes hold of a new territory, as e.g. the colonies …” (Marx, 1993:278). As David Harvey rightly outlines, the contradictions within capitalism are manifest within long-term cycles of boom and bust. Capitalism (or the incessant drive for growth through profits) necessitated geographical expansion or ‘spatial fixes,’ but ‘the world market is approaching saturation’, with perhaps only the African continent left as an army of reserve labour for capital to feed upon(2023:478) This Marxist or materialist conception of history insists that we ‘identify where we are at now and where we might go in the context of capital’s penchant for endless accumulation, exponential growth (the dreaded spiral), uneven geographical development and intense competition between states or power blocs for economic and political hegemony’ (Harvey, 2023:494). The rise of the contemporary extreme right must be understood in the context of a near two-decade long crisis in capitalism and the gradual decline of the US and its ‘western’ and ‘developed’ satellites, orbiting the EU and NATO. Racism is as old as capitalism itself, indeed, the modern notion of racism emerged as an ideological product of capital’s early global expansion. 

Furthermore, racism ‘is inextricable from, articulated by, and articulates class.’ Ireland acted as the laboratory of English racism in the period of conquest and colonisation. Similarly, in the Victorian period, Marx and Engels identified how ‘the English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.’ The next year, Marx wrote that racism against the Irish meant the ‘ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor … In relation to the Irish worker, he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation, and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening this domination over himself’ (Miéville, 2022: 143-4). This anti-Irish racism formed the material bedrock of the Orange state after partition. Those who attempt to appease or as Connolly put it ‘truckle’ to loyalism to expose its progressive kernel are pissing into the wind. The most pernicious aspect of the Belfast fascist alliance represented the loyalist welcoming of Irish chauvinists into their white supremacist citadel. The novelty of our current position on the historical spiral is that Ireland is now ensconced in the ‘developed’ and ‘liberal’ camp and No Blacks, No Dogs and No Irish has been replaced by a novel lexicon of the hated ‘other’, encompassing BAME, particularly Muslims, refugees and asylum seekers, LGBT+ and other vulnerable minorities. Yet the ideological mechanics of the elite’s manipulation of race remain recognisable from previous cycles. 

As I stood in the line facing the fascists that Saturday, I noted the courageous presence of Paul Doherty, a local SDLP councillor who has consistently stood on the front line against bigotry. I also saw the local Sinn Fein minister, Deirdre Hargey, who later took a stand that day with residents of the Lower Ormeau, facing down the mob. This then is not some reductionist diatribe which condemns anyone not of a similar mind as a social fascist or any similar nonsense. Rather it is a corrective to those ‘nice’ people who think that you can reason with fascism or that the ‘nice’ liberal establishment will protect minorities. Bertrand Russell, perhaps one of the few genuine liberal philosophers, hit the nail on the head when he argued that ‘to be a nice person it is necessary to be protected from crude contact with reality, and those who do the protecting cannot be expected to share the niceness that they preserve.’ As such, ‘nice people leave the policing of the world to hirelings because they feel the work to be not such as a person who is quite nice would wish to undertake’ (Russell, 1967: 103). 

Nice liberal Joe Biden has bankrolled and excused genocide in Gaza, while nice liberal Keir Starmer has done much the same while Sinn Fein fawned over the former in the White House and the SDLP took their seats on the government’s green benches with the latter. Without a materialist conception of history and class-based position, we become blind to the symbiotic relationship between the liberal establishment and the extreme right. From Liberal Democrats in the US to the ‘philanthropic’ billionaires who fund them, nice people are responsible for the terrible state of the modern world. When push comes to shove, they will deploy fascism and hatred to protect their interests because no matter what Bill Gates or Bono will tell you about their good intentions, at the fundamental level, the drive for accumulation will trump any other tendency, including human survival. One need only recognise how the imperative of capital accumulation drives the engine of war yesterday, today and tomorrow. 

Those who struggle towards a human future for Ireland and the world must cut through the miasma of liberal niceness and respectability.  Issues of race and gender are vital in this process, but they cannot be allowed to facilitate the elision of class power and the refusal to call for the end of capitalism as a social system.  Asad Haider argues that a logical extension of the liberal position of ‘political correctness’ suggests that ‘society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% Black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc’, leaving ‘the very fact that there is a dominant 1% of the population … unquestioned’ (quoted in Miéville, 2022: 173). Naked class power has always paraded in the vestments of respectability and progress, but liberals are fair weather friends in the fight against fascism. The liberal establishment in Ireland, Britain, Europe and the US will practice colonial fascism abroad while they clutch their pearls about political violence at home. The same commentators who condemned the attack on Donald Trump will prevaricate on Israel’s genocide in Gazaand, when the time comes, they will embrace indigenous fascism for their own exigencies – a process unfolding before our eyes. Any new Ireland cannot to be controlled by a comprador Shoneen establishment whose social policies have provided the seed bed for the emergence of the Irish far-right and whose kid-glove approach to the same fascists has allowed well-funded foreign infiltrators to astro-turf large swathes of working-class communities, sowing misinformation and hate. 

This Shoneen constitutional tradition found perfect historical expression in John Redmond – who represented O’Connell’s fabricated tradition of ‘moral’ over ‘physical’ force nationalism by imploring thousands of Irishmen to die in the industrial slaughter of the imperialist First Word War while he condemned the Easter Rising. Redmondism genuflects before royalty, connives with imperialism and seeks a space at the master’s table – Fenians seeks to turn the tables! James Stephens established the Fenian movement by grafting French revolutionary socialism onto an inherent anti-colonial tradition of social resistance. In 1837, French socialists led by Auguste Blanqui swore an oath: ‘In the name of the Republic, I swear eternal hatred to all kings, aristocrats and all oppressors of humanity’ (Miéville, 2022: 187). The historical conditions have changed – the message hasn’t. 

Any new Ireland must confront and defeat fascism, but this can only be achieved by identifying and remedying the root causes of its attraction for growing numbers of Irish people. This will requite a revolutionary overhaul of Irish society north and south based on mass democratic mobilisation. The historical material to inform this constitutional demand is abundant from the United Irishmen, like John Kelly the Boy from Killane, who famously died ‘for the cause of long down-trodden man’, to the radical Fenian proclamation of 1867 through to the 1916 Proclamation and 1919 Democratic Programme. The cause of Ireland is the cause of Labour. The cause of Irish freedom is the cause of humanity and you cannot triangulate your way to smashing fascism and ending its ultimate root cause, the relentless accumulation of capital based on class exploitation, ever the herald of conquest, war, famine and death.

End notes

Hanley, Brian, 2001. ‘Moss Twomey, radicalism, and the IRA, 1931-33: a reassessment’ in Saothar Vol. 26 (2001).

Hanley, Brian, 2005. ‘“Oh, here’s to Adolph Hitler? the IRA and the Nazis’ in History Ireland, 3:13 (May/Jun 2005).

Harvey,David.2023. A Companion to Marx’s Grundrisse (Verso, 2023)

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse (Penguin, 1993).

McKearney, Tommy. 2011, The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament(Pluto, 2011). 

Miéville, China. 2022. A Spectre, Haunting(Bloomsbury, 2022). 

Russel, Bertrand. 1967. Why I am not a Christian (Unwin, 1967). Woods, C.J. 2006. “Historical Revision: Was O’Connell a United Irishman?” in Irish Historical Studies. 35: 17.

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