The last person of the 10 Republican prisoners to die in the 1981 Hunger strikes died on August 20th but hunger strikes continued for a while until relatives began instructing the doctors to give the strikers alimentation.
What can be said about those strikes? Clearly, a tremendous sacrifice requiring immense courage and determination in a non-violent protest by national liberation fighters in jail in a struggle against British colonialism.
Certainly we lost individuals of great worth in that struggle. It may be asked whether the gain was worth the sacrifice or whether the prison struggle might have been fought in some other way.
The medieval Irish society practice of fasting as a means of protest may or may not have been original but it was an important part of the people of India’s struggle against English colonial rule. Palestinian prisoners have used mass and individual hunger strikes on a number of occasions.
The effects of the Irish 1981 hunger strikes were many and wide, most probably far beyond the intentions or expectations of the prisoners. The news went around the world, bringing expressions of solidarity from many regions, including actions by parliaments of various states.
The Islamic Republic of Iran sent delegates to Bobby Sands’ funeral and renamed the street in which stood the British Embassy in Teheran ‘Bobby Sands Street’. The British Embassy to Iran had to give that as their address until they moved their main entrance around the corner.
Bobby Sands Street in Teheran, Islamic Republic of Iran (Photo sourced: Internet)
Hunger strikers stood in parliamentary elections in Ireland on both sides of the British Border, winning some seats and coming very close to winning some others. One result was that the British changed their electoral laws so that convicted prisoners could no longer stand in elections.
In the Irish state there has not been an outright majority government since that year – every single Irish government since then has been a coalition of one kind or another.
In Britain, the hunger strikes made a huge difference amongst the Irish community there. The 1974 Birmingham Pub Bombings massacre had been jumped on by the British Labour Government to pass the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1974 (now the Terrorism Act 2000).
Probably already drafted, it was brought before Parliament and passed within days, giving the police power to hold suspects for seven days without charge, wide-scale powers of stop and search and interrogation, usually without legal representation for the victim.
Within the year a score of people from the community had been framed on serious charges, convicted and jailed: Birmingham Six, Guildford Four, Maguire Seven, Judith Ward. Subsequently many Irish people stayed away from Irish solidarity marches and meetings – just in case.
The hunger strikes of 1981 blew away much of that fear and the Irish community came out in their thousands in an attempt to save the lives of the hunger-strikers — and have never been cowed down to the previous degree since.
The Irish in Britain Representation Group was formed in 1981 after the refusal of the Federation of Irish Societies to even pass a motion of sympathy for the family of Bobby Sands, who had died only days earlier; the IBRG provided radical and resolute leadership for the next 20 years.
One of a number of songs arising from the 1981 hunger strikes was the Ballad of Joe McDonnell, by Derek Warfield. It is a good song in general but what is most excellent is its chorus, where it turns the accusation of terrorism away from the Resistance and back to British Imperialism.
And you dare to call me a terrorist, While you look down your guns! When I think of all the things that you have done: You have plundered many nations, Divided many lands, You terrorised their people, Ruled with an iron hand … And you brought the stain of terror to my land.
And it could just as well apply to US Imperialism, EU imperialism and their NATO military alliance.
I have sung the song many times over the years and did so again recently at the weekly Dubs For Palestine gathering outside Leinster House. And more recently still outside the British Embassy. I changed only a couple of words to provide a more optimistic line at the end.
End.
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Gearóid Ó Loinsigh (Republished from author’s substack with permission, reformatted for Rebel Breeze)
(Reading time: 8 mins.)
The Jason Arday affair has left few standing, least of all those who think they are not only standing but standing tall.
Lots of people came out of it very badly. Nathan Cofnas is one, as is Jason Arday himself as well as the media, Cambridge University and academia in general and also the Left.
Jason Arday in Cambridge University (Photo arrangement credit: The Herald)
Before the story broke Nathan Cofnas was even by academic standards an obscure figure. He is now a household name, not just in Britain, but globally. He describes himself as a “race realist” something the media and others are treating as something respectable or new.
It is neither. Race Realism and the search to find a biological link to intelligence is not new.
Biological Determinism goes back a long way and enjoyed social and even scientific support in the 19th Century through the work of Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin), the father of eugenics who unsurprisingly had studied at Cambridge.
It reached ridiculous levels assigning all sorts of non-sensical biological criteria by which to measure intelligence. Farcically at one point the size of certain bones was seen as a biological (racial) sign of intelligence: the ratio of the radius to the humerus to be precise.
This rubbish never went away and resurfaced time and again. The genetic discussion is just a modern version of it, which found its expression in The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in 1994.[1]
At the time many liberal and left wing scientists demolished the arguments and Stephen Jay Gould even debated Murray, something most on the Left would be now ill-prepared to do after years of cancel culture and “winning” arguments by saying they are offended.
Cofnas has added nothing new to the debate, not even from a right-wing perspective, though as Gould pointed out in his updated edition of The Mismeasure of Man, Murray too had only regurgitated old arguments with lots of charts and stats to accompany them.
Which is something Cofnas also does: style over substance. But he has exposed the shallowness of what is considered intellectually worthy in academia, both in terms of his own contributions and also Arday’s.
I am all in favour of free inquiry at universities and in life in general, but Biological Determinism or its modern synonym Race Realism is nothing short of quackery.
It belongs in the same category as Flat Earth Science or even Creationism, though Cambridge actually has a Faculty of Divinity i.e. quackery. That Cambridge and Ghent took it seriously is a damning indictment of both places.
All education is political, what is taught, what courses are offered, the range of opinions etc. Education is a battleground for ideas, some of which seem obscure and irrelevant but which end up shaping our society, albeit indirectly in some cases.
Given the level of moralistic hysteria doing the rounds on this topic it has been impossible to ask certain sectors to step back and take a look at the facts and then proceed on that basis. Cambridge has belatedly set up an independent review of how it handled the Arday affair and also how it came to appoint him in the first place.[2]
Was racism a factor in what happened to Arday? Almost certainly. The question is to what degree and none of that takes away from the fact the racists had the goods on him. When I say racists I mean the right wingers like Cofnas. Though I could mean the racists who hired him.
It is clear that Cambridge is institutionally racist. It could not be any other way given its history, current links to the arms trade, the low number of black academics etc.
So they hired Arday, as a poster boy, as Jason Okundaye put it “Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot, one who was particularly expedient for an institution that had been regularly embarrassed by its historic record on race”.[3]
They were saying look at what we have done. It is the academic equivalent of “I am not racist, some of my friends are black”. It is clear that Cambridge sought to deflect criticism by hiring someone regardless of whether they met the requirements.
Maybe they thought this offset having “race realists” like Cofnas, or right wingers like Reform UK’s James Orr on the payroll and even inviting people like Murray to give talks at the university.
But Cofnas was not the first academic to question Arday’s record.
Another academic, David Harris, whilst researching a book he was writing on race tried to raise questions the way academics do, gently, politely through the system and was accused of harassment and reported to the police by Arday.
He had been told that he should read Arday’s work for his own research and he did and found some problems with it.[4]
Had his questions received the consideration they deserved, the whole affair might not have played out the way it did and Arday might not have a job, or he may have received some disciplinary sanction, but he might still be alive.
It was the reaction to Harris, a mild-mannered academic who unlike Cofnas has no agenda in the matter, that increased the pressure in the pot and helped set the scene.
There was also the police persecution of Times Higher Education journalist Jack Grove, where the police acted like a private security firm for Arday putting him under investigation for four months.[5]
As a result of the affair, other issues have come to light, or rather have gained wider traction than they otherwise would. Academia is hardly an enthralling newsworthy issue at the best of times.
It has been pointed out that other white people at Cambridge had been found guilty by Cambridge itself of plagiarism and nothing happened to them just mild disciplinary sanctions in the best of cases. One of them even plagiarised his own student!
Cambridge protects its own. Arday, despite being their poster boy was not and when it came time to cut him loose they let him resign, something which seems to have genuinely shocked many on the Left.
It has other problems with sexism. Coming just days before Arday’s suicide the courts found in favour of Professor Wyn Evans, a lecturer in astrophysics, who fought a long battle against Cambridge over the treatment of a female colleague, Dr Tausch-Pebody.
The case revolved around a complaint made against Dr McMahon who had held up the disbursement of funding to her by 37 weeks refusing to sign the appropriate release form and had bizarrely used her IP address and that of other colleagues.
The university used its insurance funds to fight the case, and was nasty about it, with Wyn Evans saying “At one point the university’s barrister accused me of crying crocodile tears about an employee who committed suicide”[6] which is a bit rich given the howls around Arday’s suicide.
Following the tribunal report, other academics posted a picture of Judas on his door and Cambridge announced it was reviewing its HR procedures, following its bullying of this whistleblower.[7]
This judgement came in the midst of the furore surrounding Arday’s appointment clearly showing that Cambridge is not the type of employer which facilitates internal criticism of its decisions.
The Left responded by defending Arday and when backed into an indefensible corner said “Well lots of people plagiarise and embellish their CV”. To be clear he didn’t embellish his CV, he fabricated it.
Embellishing it would mean exaggerating accomplishments, not completely inventing them. But on the plagiarism issue they have also pointed to various academics found guilty of plagiarism who were not sacked. Yes, those academics should be sacked.
Saying white upper class people got away with plagiarism is not a defence, it is an accusation levelled at the academic institution. Unwittingly they have exposed part of the corruption at the heart of academia.
The Left’s proposal was that if whites can commit crimes, or falsify records the solution is to demand equal rights for everyone to do so, rather than say this should be rooted out.
This is partly because the identity politics industry is not controlled by working-class blacks or Asians but by the white, black and Asian middle-class and they have no intention of upsetting the apple cart they are eating from.
However, it is disingenuous to believe that it was all about racism. Arday fell on his sword because he was not qualified for the job and his backstory was the work of a fantasist whose skills would have been better suited to writing sci-fi literature or something.
If it was just racism, why did the racists not manage to force the other black academics at Cambridge out of a job. The racists had a field day with Arday, but only because the patronising racists who employed him overlooked his qualifications and backstory.
Surprisingly, Liverpool John Moore’s university that awarded Arday his PhD has fared better than can be expected, but only because it has received less attention.
But at some point Cambridge will wash their hands entirely of Arday and pass the buck downstream to Liverpool John Moore’s and then perhaps they may not look so well.
This may happen at some point during the review when their defence will most certainly be that Arday and Liverpool John Moore’s conned them.
The media haven’t come out of it well either and I don’t say that because of the pile-on but because as I have pointed out lots of issues arose in the course of the discussion, which the media decided not to pursue.
Like the plagiarism of other academics, like Cofnas’ modern Flat Earth Science type of stuff on intelligence actually getting recognition, none of which was raised, nor will it be, by neither the Left nor the media.
The Left also don’t come out of it well. Their response to the media coverage was to deny the facts of the case. If Arday was treated unfairly by the media, then that argument can’t be made on the basis that he did no wrong. Even some identitarians have argued this.
One of the few left papers in Britain to examine the issue rationally, The Weekly Worker (CPGB) made the point.
He was undoubtedly the tragic victim of an openly racist attack dog and a baying mainstream media.
However, maintaining that Jason Arday was not guilty of plagiarism is worse than useless. We need the truth about him and, more importantly, the whole neoliberal university system.[8]
Instead of asking for that, the Left has now proposed a law limiting media coverage of individuals. The utter stupidity of the Left never ceases to amaze me.
Some of the repression of the Palestinian solidarity movement around the world is being carried out through just the type of measures the Left has called for around hate speech, personal offence etc. You would think they would learn about it coming back to bite them. But no.
Right now Tommy Robinson and other right wing activists are floating in Cypriot swimming pools laughing and thinking about the Left pushing for a law they will be able to use to restrict media coverage of their pool trips and other less than savoury activities.
Even the practicalities of the law have not been thought out. Would it be overall coverage? Could The Sun use up all the media quota, leaving others with no right to comment on an issue? Or will it be per media outlet? When an outlet used up its quota, could it talk about new developments?
The stupidity of it all is beyond comprehension.
Though many of the Left organisations say they stand by Arday, they don’t. They stand by Cambridge, first and foremost, along with its handling of Arday’s appointment and they are standing by academia and its identity politics tokenistic approach to inequality.
Many on the Left actually earn a living from the tokenism and some of the leaders are well ensconced in academia, so they were never going to say much in any case. They are standing by the identity politics industry, academic corruption and their own grifting.
The Arday affair has exposed academia and the Left as having little to really say about inequality or access to university for working-class people of any race, and not much to say about racism either.
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[1] For an in-depth analysis of the history of Biological Determinism see revised edition of Gould, S.J. (1996) The Mismeasure of Man. W.W. Norton & Co. New York.
It is well known that many Irish patriotic songs contain a figure metaphorically representing Ireland, usually a woman, very often young and beautiful though sometimes elderly.1 But unusually, in one such song the metaphor is a species of cow.
A woman is understandable, of course, after all the land and the nation are of feminine gender in Irish.2 But a cow? Well, perhaps, however strange, it reflects the values of a largely pastoral society as Ireland’s was during the early centuries of its invasion and gradual conquering by England?
Perhaps – but there is a strange modern story there too, of which more later.
Droimeann cattle, cow and probably calf (Source: Internet)
THE SONG
The song in question is An Droimeann Donn Dílis,3 thought to date from the early 1700s (i.e. early 18th Century). In the first of three short verses that have come down to us, the singer addresses the cow, asking where s/he goes at night and where remains during the day.
The Droimeann replies that s/he is in the woods with her/his boy (herder) but that he left her/him in tears. She seems to go on to speak in completely unbovine terms of lacking a domain, wines, music, educated company, drinking only water while her/his enemies enjoy whisky and wine.
The speaker has become a person. Were s/he free to do so and gain sight of the Crown, s/he says, s/he would thrash the English as one might an old shoe, through hill, through cliffs and dark foggy glens and that’s how s/he would woo or please his/her fair young Droimeann (i.e Ireland).
It is not difficult to decipher the meaning. The man4 has been deprived of his lifestyle and patrimony, physical and cultural, social interaction and is now living in primitive conditions, in hiding even in the woods. Who was he and what was his position? Who dislodged him?
The details of the song indicates he was victim of one of the English campaigns of occupation of Ireland and dispossession of the native Irish, while its assumed timing places it in the aftermath of the Williamite War (1689-1691) and the final defeat of the remains of the Gaelic Order.5
But it could just as easily refer to Oliver Cromwell’s military and land confiscation campaign of 1649-16536 for the English Parliament, or to English Queen Elizabeth I’s Plantation of Munster in 1586, confiscating roughly 300,000 to 500,000 acres of land to bring in English settlers.7
And in relation to the latter, there seems to be a Munster connection in the song also, of which more later also.
The Gaelic Order is often described as a ‘pre-feudal’ social and political organisation of Irish society, with a political and social elite in ownership of sections of land for their clan, along with the herds upon them, but an ownership that implied management, dispensation and allocation.8
The ‘freemen’9 were allocated cattle by the elite, to whom they were obliged to repay in kine and dairy products and to render military service when required. The ‘freemen’ in turn took on others to help manage the herds and milking, making cheeses etc.
Rule and social order was not arbitrary but was regulated not only by custom but by the codified Brehon Laws and in more ancient and pre-Christian times in Ireland interpreted by a branch of the Druidic Order.
The removal of the Gaelic Order elite by death, imprisonment, banishment or exile meant the removal of Irish society’s political and cultural leadership, for it was they who organised the economy, made alliances, gave leadership and also patronised poets, musicians and scholars.
The human narrator in An Droimeann Donn Dílis is well aware of the source of his ills (the English conquest) and of the need to defeat it in arms throughout Ireland.
A Dhruimfhionn Donn Dílis, a shíoda na mbó Cá ngabhann tú san oíche, is cá mbíonn tú sa ló? Ó bím-se ar na coillte is mo bhuachaill im’ chomhair Agus d’fhág sé siúd mise ag sileadh na ndeor.
Níl fearann, níl tígheas agam, níl fíonta na ceol; Níl flathaibh im’ choimhdeacht, níl saoithe ná sló; Ach ag síor-ól an uisce go minic sa ló, Agus beathuisce is fíonta ag mo naimhde ar bord.
Dá bhfaighinn-se cead aighnis nó radharc ar an gcoróin, Sasanaigh do leidhbfinn mar a leidhbfinn sean-bhróg Tré chnocaibh, tré fhaillte, tré ghleannta dubh-cheo, Agus siúd mar a bhréagfainn-se mo Dhroimfhionn Donn Óg.
… AND THE COW
But what of the cow? It turns out that the adoption of an Droimeann as a metaphor for Ireland is much more appropriate than we might have imagined, for it is an ancient native Irish breed, though that was not formally recognised until 8 January 2020 following DNA profiling.
A Droimeann with men beside it to indicate its height. (Source: Irish Rare Breeds)
The tests showed that it was genetically distinct from other breeds, whether Irish or imported. “Animals may be black, red or roan, but most have a white stripe along the back. In 2020, there were 243 breeding females and 23 breeding males registered.”10
The ‘white stripe’ is indicated in its name, Droimeann, i.e Drom Fhionn: “Fair/ Light-coloured back.” And there are many references to the breed in surviving ancient literature. Today the pronunciation varies from ‘drimunn’ to ‘dromeen’ (approximately).
As for the Munster connection, the breed is particularly associated with the south-west of Ireland. It produces both meat and milk and, being a native breed, it is hardy and thrives on poor quality forage even in winter when most other breeds in Ireland require food brought to them.
Droimeann cattle are know for maturing early and being prolific breeders.
I do not know how the song survived the centuries unless it was orally, in the main, which testifies to the power of its imagery and the retention of the Irish language in the Irish population, the majority of which did not become English-speaking until some time between 1850 and 1870.11
And even then, persisted in being retained as a first language in the Gaeltacht12 areas (despite their continual shrinking) for the following two centuries and undergoing ‘revival’ at least three times during that period. We may be witnessing currently her fourth revival period.
End.
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Footnotes
1The use of young woman to represent Ireland could of course be used to disguise a patriotic song as one about romantic love but also meant that the latter could morph into patriotic song, with perhaps the addition of some lines or verses. We may consider however that there is more than convenience at play here in this interchangeability, some emotional attachment to the land in the poet and presumably among their supportive audience.
2And in a great many parts of the world represented by a goddess. The very name Éire (and Éire-land = Ireland) is thought to derive from a goddess Éiriú, while the goddess Banba (sometimes her sister) also represents Ireland, with her (sometimes sister) Fódla. In poetry and song Ireland has also been represented by female figures Róisín Dubh (in a love song), Caitlín Ní hUallacháin (in a patriotic play) and Gráinne (in myth, legend and song).
3Also spelled Druimfhionn in Irish – The Faithful Brown Droimeann.
5The Gaelic Order describes an Irish-speaking society of custom and law enduring centuries prior to the English invasion and also in consecutively smaller regions of Ireland for a little over five centuries afterwards.
6Though the native Irish could go ‘to Hell or to Connaught’ accurately reflects the policy it is uncertain whether Cromwell or his officers actually said those words.
8Clan leaders, petty kings and even ‘High Kings’ were elected, albeit from and by an elite group.
9‘Freemen’ is not a very accurate term, since women could own land under the Gaelic Order and, upon marriage, retained that ownership and, if divorcing, removed what they owned with them.
10The Droimeann Cattle Society was established on 11 September 2016 at a meeting of breeders and others interested in the preservation of the breed. A Droimeann Cattle Herdbook was launched on 22 August 2018. To be eligible for inclusion in the herdbook, all animals will have to be genetically tested, and newborn calves will need to be tested before being eligible for inclusion. By January 2020 there were 243 breeding females and 23 breeding males included in the herdbook.
11The Irish elite after a century of occupation were perforce English-speaking (but most bilingual with Irish too), since the legal system was in French first, then in English. In 1366 the ruling class of England, considering themselves English after three centuries of Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England, called their Norman-Irish relatives, ‘the degenerate English’ who had ‘become more Irish than the Irish themselves’ and enacted the Statutes of Kilkenny to halt and reverse their integration into Irish society. By comparison, the Norman English rulers and nobility considered themselves English by 1366, though their culture and language had evolved from a mix of French and Anglo-Saxon roots. King Edward III, who ruled in 1366, spoke English, promoted it in law courts, and identified fully as an English monarch engaged in the Hundred Years’ War against France. The Irish did not become mainly English-speaking until over two centuries of occupation and only then by the incremental use of wars and English-speaking plantations.
12Areas of Ireland where Irish is the first language of the home may be found in, Cos. Meath (Rath Chairn and Baile Ghib), Galway (Conemara), Mayo (various pockets), Donegal (various), Waterford (Rinn), Cork (various), Kerry (Dingle and Iveragh Peninsulas). In addition some families in other areas raise their children with Irish being the language between at least one parent and the children.
Reprinted from author’s substack 26 July 2026 and reformatted for Rebel Breeze
(Reading time: 9 mins.)
The history of societies is the history of their ruling classes. So it comes as no surprise that we are told that Lord X built a palace, Lady Y built a garden and so forth.
The history of society is the history of great men (and the occasional woman, when she’s allowed) with those who actually do anything written out of history.
Take a tour of any stately home and you will be told that the Earl built the west wing in a given year, an incredible chippie, brickie and plumber all in one with some artistic flair to boot.
The workers who actually carried out the work are not mentioned and if it was slave labour, well let’s not go there at all.
It is the type of situation that led the great German poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht to ask the question
Who built Thebes of the 7 gates? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ?
And Babylon, many times demolished, Who raised it up so many times ?
In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live ? Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?
Great Rome is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them ?
Over whom did the Caesars triumph ? Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ?
Of course it is not just the obvious contribution of workers to the construction of buildings no fat cat could ever build, their contribution to the world of literature and art is also deliberately ignored.
The aforementioned poem of Brecht is titled Questions From a Worker Who Reads. Brecht was well aware that in order to overthrow capitalism you have to be able to question it and reading is part of the process.
His famous quote from his poem In Praise of Learning is “Hungry man reach for the book, it is a weapon”.
It is indeed and the weapon is mightier if you think that people like you wrote it. It is partly why the history of literature is a bit like the history of stately homes, the Lords and the Ladies did everything.
No workers, no peasants, no one putting down the hammer for a minute wrote a poem or pausing the plough either.
Literature belongs to the rich, so working class writers or even just opposition writers are routinely written out of history and their literature is reserved for small literary circles and revolutionaries who have retired to the café.
Under no circumstances should it ever be read by other workers, lest the reader get the idea that they too can produce it. Of course there are lots of writers from a working class background, but they are a minority in comparison to the middle and upper classes.
Or least they are in terms of contracts with commercial publishers and libraries tend not to organise catalogues of their works, as they are not worthy of merit in the eyes of the middle class pedants who populate literary studies.
The working class writer Kit de Vaal asked where were all the working class authors and published an anthology of such authors.[1] There is no anthology of middle class or rich authors, as they are the norm, they are everywhere, ubiquitous, ever present.
Pick a book at random on a library shelf or in a book shop and you will invariably pick one written by someone who is not working class, even with non-fiction.
One thing is writing about the working class, which can be financially rewarding and lead to career advancement especially if you are already not of the working class.
But there have been many writers, written out of literary history, or relegated to specialist circles in some academic institute where increasingly the working class can be studied, but not study.
There is one Japanese author, Tajiki Kobayashi who had been on my must-read list for a long time before I eventually got around to him. His most famous novel is The Crab Cannery Ship (also translated as The Factory Ship) which is based on a real incident.
In Japan in the 1920s workers revolted on the ships where they were kept in almost slave like conditions harvesting crabs and then canning them on the ships themselves (hence the title).
The novel is a searing indictment of Japanese capitalism, nationalism and the emperor, who was in Japanese law a divinity.
Takiji Kobayashi (Photo source: Wikipedia)
We often think, in fact we are told that Japan is a land of hard working obedient workers who never question authority and this is the key to its success. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Japan experienced waves of social unrest as it industrialised along with brutal repression from the state and following the end of WWII trade union membership boomed reaching 5 million by 1947.
This movement was repressed with the US military occupation playing a key role in the Red Purge with thousands of workers hounded out of their jobs, the Communist Party was effectively banned and freedom of speech was suppressed.
The Japanese consensus is the result of oppression, not of some quaint cultural quirk.[2] But if you are to buy into this consensus myth then not only has history to be ignored, but so too must the literature that talks of it.
Kobayashi didn’t just write about the working class, he wrote for them as part of his political militancy. He paid dearly for his commitment. In 1933, at the age of thirty, the Japanese police tortured him to death, leaving two of his novels incomplete.
The Crab Cannery Ship had been serialised in a magazine, Senki, and was not available as a novel in Japan until 1948, though its English translation was available in the year of his murder.
It is a strange consensus that requires torturing poets and writers to death, but not so strange that we would be asked to forget them.
Not that Takiji’s novel had ever been entirely forgotten.
It occupied a secure position in Japan’s modern history as the best-known literary product of the proletarian movement, a major cultural and political current of the 1920s and early 1930s—a time when labor activism, socialism, feminism, and antimilitarism were briefly in the ascendant, while paintings, posters, prose narratives, poetry, and plays depicting the lives and struggles of the dispossessed enjoyed a considerable degree of popular interest and critical esteem.
By the mid-thirties, however, as the country’s elites led the nation ever closer to an all-out war on the Asian continent, this progressive groundswell had been largely obliterated through a combination of internal dissension, government propaganda, and intensified repression: arrests, beatings, imprisonment, and censorship.[3]
He was part of a movement of proletarian literature and president of the Proletarian Writer’s Guild of Japan.
Proletarian literature was not just written by working class authors (and also middle class authors who had turned their backs on their own class), nor was it just stories about the working class for middle class audiences.
It was for the working class with no middle class filters applied to make it suitable for chats over coffee, and it talked of socialism. His novels are political, in an overtly Marxist sense, class struggle is a key part of the plot.
The clandestine nature of political work in Japan is dealt with in the unfinished novel Life of a Party Member, and would be familiar to anyone who has lived under repressive regimes. Kobayashi himself engaged in clandestine work and was arrested numerous times and tortured.
The use of the term Proletarian rather than working class tells you all you need to know.
He was a fighter, he may well have liked coffee but his life was not that of the quaint coffee shop, arcane academic discussions where the middle class engage in their favourite pastime, talking and writing about the working class, earning royalties and accolades in the process.
His most famous novel The Crab Cannery Ship went through a huge revival in 2008, following the financial crash, selling hundreds of thousands of copies.
In 2008—the year Takiji’s novel skyrocketed to fame—over thirty thousand Japanese people killed themselves, tens of thousands were homeless, some three million were unemployed, twenty million were living in poverty, and more than a third of the active labor force comprised irregular workers who were poorly paid and could easily be fired.[4]
Reading it, it is easy to see why. I am neither Japanese nor a fisherman, yet much of what happens on the ship speaks to me, it speaks to everyone, abusive bosses, people trapped in low income, insecure work with little security, poor safety.
What Kobayashi describes is something that never went away in the third world and has made a comeback now everywhere due to the defeat of the trade union movement and, let’s be honest, the constant sell outs by the bureaucracy.
But that novel and his other writings are not about the plight of the working class or the proletariat to use the more accurate term that the middle class so loathe and despise. It is about the fight of the working class against those conditions.
He argues through his characters for a struggle for socialism, against the Japanese ruling class, nationalism, empire and also for the liberation of women.
In his novel Yasuko, two of the main protagonists are women who as the plot develops become independent forceful characters, through their participation in the class struggle and their fight against the repression of the state.
One of them, Yasuko lends her name to the title. It is obvious why the Japanese literati would not have promoted him so much. There are equivalents all around the world of proletarian writers or other oppositionists who have been relegated to a dusty corner.
The proletarian wave did not just happen in Japan, but throughout the East, Russia and also the United States.
There of course exceptions who became worldwide phenomena within their own lifetime.
One such author is Bertold Brecht who coincides in time with various proletarian literature movements around the world and then there is also the Italian artist Dario Fo, the author of many works such as Accidental Death of an AnarchistandCan’t Pay! Won’t Pay!
The title of this particular play became a catchphrase and slogan in the English speaking world.
Both were products of their time and achieved international fame, making them hard to relegate to dusty corners and though there are always attempts to relativise writers, soften the sharp edges of their plume it is not easy with either.
Brecht was unrepentant till his death and Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame were lifelong activists and enemies of the Italian state, so much so that fascists under orders from the Italian police kidnapped tortured and raped her in an unsuccessful attempt to silence her.
Franca Rama and Dario Fo in performance. (Photo sourced: Internet)
There was more at stake for her and her husband than artistic awards. Their work was political in all senses of the word and they were participants in the class struggle.[5]
In oppressed countries around the world various writers such as the El Salvadoran Roque Dalton, or the Palestinian Ghassem Kanafani are still remembered and celebrated amongst their people.
But they fought against foreign empires, Kobayashi was from the empire he fought against. It is harder to reinterpret him as anything other than what he was, a proletarian writer who gave his life not so much for a literature that was forgotten but for a revolution that never came.
What literature is remembered and celebrated is a question of power and politics. There is literature that must be remembered and there is that which must be forgotten or in rare exceptions begrudgingly acknowledged.
Kobayashi, however, is now acknowledged so much so that there are now Kobayashi tours, which is itself worrying, but there is no escaping who or what he was, though Sabu, the director of a remake of the film version did make an attempt at this depoliticising the novel.
There is also no escaping that the current Japanese inbred royal family murdered him. All of the post war institutions are the direct heirs of those who murdered him.
That his novel could speak to the Japanese working class 79 years after it was written, is testament to the lasting value of his writing.
Darkness never lasts and despite the best efforts of the media, the cultural gatekeepers in publishing, academia and galleries, it is as Brecht remarked in his poem Literature will be scrutinised.
But at that time will be praised
Those who sat on the bare ground to write
Those who sat among the lowly
Those who reported the deeds of the fighters
With art. In the noble words
Formerly reserved
For the adulation of kings…
Yes, a time will come when
These clever and friendly men
These angry and hopeful men
Who sat on the bare ground to write
Who were surrounded by the lowly and the fighters
Will be publicly praised.
And so literature once forgotten or relegated to a lowly category comes forth in all its glory and as Rosa Luxembourg put it, when talking about revolution, proclaims, I was, I am, I shall be.
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[2] For an overview of class struggle in Japan in the post war period see Ichiyo, M (1987) Class Struggle and Technological Innovation in Japan since 1945. IIRE. Amsterdam. https://fileserver.iire.org/nsr/nsr5.pdf
[3] Translator’s Preface to Kobayashi, T. (2013) The Crab Cannery Ship and other novels of struggle. University of Hawai’i Press. Pp ix & x.
It was an Irish Argentinian who erected the “Irish Republic” flag over Dublin’s General Post Office during the 1916 Easter rising: Eamon Bulfin, born in Buenos Aires on 22 September 1892.
The flag in question was painted by Theobald Wolfe Tone Fitzgerald in the home of Constance Markievicz (1868-1927)1 with the words “Irish Republic” in gold or yellow, edged with white on material of a green curtain or bed-covering.
This was the flag later triumphantly displayed upside down by the British in front of the Parnell Monument (of which photographs may be found by search of the Internet).
Eamon BulfinColourised photo of Constance Markievicz in Irish Citizen Army uniform. The ‘Irish Republic’ flag was painted on material in her house and delivered by her to the GPO. The words declared to the world that the national liberation forces were fighting for an independent Republic. (Photo sourced: Internet)
Eamon was the son of William Bulfin (1864-1910) from Birr, King’s County (now Co. Offaly), who emigrated to Argentina at the age of 20 and was a writer and journalist who became editor and proprietor of ‘The Southern Cross’ newspaper. William also helped finance Pádraig Pearse’s Scoil Éanna (St. Enda’s School) which opened in September, 1908.
Bulfin returned to Ireland in 1909 with his wife, Anne O’Rourke, and their children Eamon and Catalina. William’s death in 1910 was a blow to his friend Arthur Griffith and the efforts to launch a Sinn Féin2 daily newspaper.
Eamon was enrolled in St Thomas Aquinas College, Newbridge, before attending St Enda’s School (Scoil Éanna) in Cullenswood, Rathmines, from September 1908 at the age of 17.
He impressed the headmaster and school founder, Patrick Pearse, who noted his aptitude for Irish, French and English,3 though also that he was weak at mathematics.
Bulfin enthusiastically engaged with the ethos of the school, acting in dramas, contributing short stories to the school review, An Macaomh, and captaining the St Enda’s football team in 1909–10.
He was enrolled as a student at St Enda’s until 1910 but remained as a boarder at its new location in Rathfarnham; he became close to the Pearse family. Eamon enrolled in the National University of Ireland in 1911 to study for a science degree.
While at university Bulfin won both Sigerson and Fitzgibbon cups (in football and hurling respectively) on a number of occasions, captaining the National University of Ireland (NUI) football team that won the Sigerson Cup in 1915.
In his 20th year Eamon joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, being sworn in by Arthur O’Connor and, a year later, in 1913 joined E Company, Fourth Battalion (Rathfarnham) of the newly-formed Irish Volunteers
By 1915 he was involved in organising the volunteers in Dublin and Co. Meath, and in manufacturing munitions and explosives in St Enda’s, which activities continued up to the Easter rising, just prior to which he helped Kathleen Lynn transport these weapons to Liberty Hall.
Bulfin was promoted to the headquarters staff of the volunteers and, mobilised for the 1916 Rising, was under Pearse’s personal command and stationed at the GPO, where he hoisted the “Irish Republic” flag on the roof at the corner with Princes Street.
1916 Artwork in pastels by Edmond Delrenne, a Belgian refugee who had arrived in Ireland in 1914, he drew and coloured the ‘Irish Republic’ flag on the GPO (centre picture). The painting also shows Nelson’s Column, which was blown up in 1966. (Artwork source: Whyte’s)
After the surrender in Moore Street, Eamon Bulfin, as with nearly 100 insurgents was sentenced to death by British military court martial but most sentences (excepting the 15 shot by firing squads in the following days)4 were commuted to periods of prison incarceration in England and Wales.
On March 21, 1917, Eamon Bulfin was deported from jail under Britain’s Aliens Restriction Act of 1914.
The Argentine Government did not want to anger the British Empire, with whom they were already having problems, not the least with their long-standing argument over the sovereignty of Las Malvinas/Falklands.They therefore arrested Eamon Bulfin when he arrived in Buenos Aires and sentenced him to jail for leaving Argentina for the purpose of ‘deserting from military service’.
As Eamon had been a schoolboy when he and his family left for Ireland, the charge was an excuse for the authorities but suspicion of being a communist, which the British gave for his deportation might have been the real reason.
He was conscripted into the Argentine military and served in the army before transferring to the navy, being released after ten months as his mother was a widow, which qualified him for an exemption from military service.
One of two photos of the ‘Irish Republic’ flag being displayed upside down by British soldiers, symbolising the defeat of those who flew it. The site is the base of Parnell’s Monument in Parnell Street with the Rotunda in the background. (Source: Internet)
When Eamon Bulfin was released in 1919, the General Election in Ireland had resulted in an overwhelming victory for Sinn Féin5 which, in accordance with their manifesto, made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence declaring Ireland a republic and set up a parliament in Dublin.
The President of the Irish Republic, Eamon de Valéra wrote to Bulfin in May appointing him the official representative to Argentina. As Irish Consul, Bulfin was to “inaugurate direct trade between Ireland and the Argentine Republic… to co-ordinate Irish opinion in the Argentine, and to bring it into the Irish demand for a republic.”6
Bulfin began work, establishing close contacts with Argentine government officials, Irish Argentine leaders and he launched an Irish Fund to help the cause.
In 1920, during the county council elections, Eamon Bulfin was nominated in his absence for a seat on King’s County Council. He was not only elected but appointed Chairman of the council.
One of the first things the new Council did was to agree that the county’s name be returned to the region’s ancient Irish form of Co. Uí Fáille (anglicised as Offaly). Meetings were conducted with the Chairman’s seat in the council chamber left empty and with a Tricolour draped across it.
In 1922 Eamon Bulfin was finally allowed to return to Ireland where he set up home in his father’s native Derrinlough, Birr, Co. Offaly. He took the Anti-Treaty side in the Civil War and handed over 600 Stg from fund-raising in Argentina.
However the killing of Michael Collins affected him deeply and he stayed out of the Republican forces, telling them that he had refused an officer’s post in the Free State’s National (sic) Army.
On 16 February 1927 Eamon married Nora Brick (Nóra Ní Bríc) of Tralee, a former member of Cumann na mBan, in an Irish language ceremony in Drumcondra, Dublin (his occupation was recorded as a farmer). They had four children: Edward, Jeanne, Blanaid and Michael.
Eamon Bulfin died of a cerebral haemorrhage in the Meath Hospital, Dublin, on 24 December 1968, and was buried in Eglish Cemetery, Co. Offaly.
Remnant of the ‘Irish Republic’ flag in the National Museum of Ireland (Photo: NMI)
His sister, Catalina, also born in Buenos Aires in 1901, had become secretary to Austin Stack (1880-1929). Stack was elected to the Dáil (32-County Irish Parliament) in 1918 and became Minister for Home Affairs from 1920-22.Stack accompanied de Valéra to London for the initial Truce talks but became a leading opponent of the terms agreed by Collins.
Catalina Bulfin married Seán MacBride (1904-1988), born in Paris and his first language French. Sean was the son of John MacBride, executed by the British in 1916 and of Maude Gonne.
Seán McBride is the only Nobel Peace Laureate to have also won the Lenin Prize; he was former IRA Chief of Staff (1936-1937), Irish Minister for External Affairs (1948–‘52) and Secretary of the International Commission of Jurists.
MacBride was a founder member of Amnesty International and Assistant General Secretary of the United Nations. He survived Catalina MacBride by 12 years after she died in 1976, her remains being buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. Some descendant of Eamon Bulfin live in Offaly to this day.
2The Sinn Féin party at the time was an Irish nationalist one advocating a dual monarchy, Irish and British.
3And no doubt Spanish too, having been reared in Argentina, a language acquisition that probably helped with the acquisition of Irish and French, which have a great number of similarities in structure.
4And the sixteenth execution was of Roger Casement, by hanging in London.
5Then a reformed and much-expanded party with a Republican constitution.
6 Kennedy, Michael and Joseph Morrison Skelly (eds). Irish Foreign Policy: 1919-1966 From Independence to Internationalism. Four Courts Press: England 2000, p.45. (Quoted in the Wikipedia entry on Eamon Bulfin)
Alerted by a sibling to a short exhibition on the life of the Spice Man (Thom McGinty), a remarkable performance artist and character of Dublin streets particularly associated with Grafton Street, I was fortunate to view it on its final day.
The exhibition was part of the annual Phizzfest’s annual program and was staged in the Bohemians FC room above the Phibsborough shopping centre. The space was a moderately-sized room with a few installations, a film projector, panels of images and text displayed on the walls.
One of the panels at the exhibition.
Sadly the chatter of a number of people made it difficult – for me at least – to understand all the audio accompanying the film footage but some of the images were very interesting, in particular the reaction of Dublin adults and children to the Spice Man’s street performances.
When he spoke it was with a Scottish accent, having been born to a father from Donegal and mother from Wicklow and reared in a village outside Glasgow from where he recalled journeying on holidays to Baltinglass for family reunions.
He came to economically-depressed Ireland in 1976, trying his hand at a number of occupations before he found the one that both gave him success and defined him publicly.
Typically, his performance was silent, his movement stilled or gradual, slow but moving to avoid arrest.1 But his costume and makeup were something else. Though McGinty later initiated performances in social and political protest, his initial ones in Dublin were commercial promotions.
A gaming shop called The Dice Man was the first of these and the one that gave him the nickname by which he became known and found fame. It was one of the commercial promotions, ironically not a political one, that ended with his arrest.
The promoters of a run of The Rocky Horror show in Dublin hired Thom to promote their show which he did, walking the street in ‘horror’ facial makeup, a cerise basque, fishnet stockings and a thong. He was arrested.
McGinty was charged with acts contrary to public decency under Section 5 of the Summary Jurisdiction (Ireland) Amendment Act, 1871, and with breach of the peace. Thom protested that these were his working clothes and he had been contracted to wear them.
According to the arresting gardaí, complaints had been made that Thom’s buttocks were clearly visible, “and the only thing covering his genitals was a G-string.” He was bailed from Store Street Garda Station pending the trial but could not be released until he was given a raincoat to wear.
The Act, which is still on the statute books (according to the exhibition text) had sexual connotations and could be used against gay people. McGinty’s lawyer raised the ramifications of a conviction under this Act and the judge sentenced him to probation without recorded conviction.
The 1991 production of the Rocky Horror Show at the Bord Gáis Theatre could not have asked for better publicity and McGinty personally got exposure (!) internationally and offers of work abroad as a result, from which he always returned to Ireland.
Among social causes which Thom protested with performance was the financial penalty on the Union of Students in Ireland for breach of injunctions by publishing anti-pregnancy choice information in a case pursued by SPUC.2 Another was against restrictions on the sale of condoms.3
Thom’s performances and the causes espoused would have been of interest to me had I been living in Ireland at the time but they touched on my family in Dublin a number of times. Foremost was his support for the wrongly accused, framed and brutalised of the Sallins Mail Train robbery.
One of the panels at the exhibition.
It is nearly 50 years since three socialist Republicans were wrongly convicted and sentenced to nine and twelve years imprisonment. As a result of much campaigning, two of the accused, one of whom is a sibling of mine, were released with convictions revoked after 18 months in Portlaoise jail.
The third accused, who had absconded the day prior to the sentence, returned to Ireland and was immediately jailed, campaigners then switching to obtain his freedom, gained only ‘on humanitarian grounds’ after four years in jail and a hunger strike of 38 days.
Satirising the ‘sleeping judge’ in one of the Sallins trials (he was clearly seen sleeping but his co-judges and State denied it and then to embarrassment of State, he died days later). In suits, two of the framed, (l-r) Nicky Kelly and Osgur Breatnach.One of the panels at the exhibition.
A recent concert, packed both by audience and performers in the Vicar Street Dublin venue was organised by yet another sibling to promote a campaign for an inquiry into how that travesty of justice could be carried out by state police, Government and judiciary right up to the High Court.4
Thom was a strong supporter of liberal social rights such as the right to prevent pregnancy or birth and for gay and lesbian rights. His defence of framed Irish Socialist Republicans centred on their right to a fair trial and not to be brutalised, as did his support for the Birmingham Six.
One of the panels at the exhibition.
But he was far from being an Irish Republican. Dressed as the Grim Reaper with scythe, Thom also led a delegation of ‘Peace Train’5 people in protest to the offices of Provisional Sinn Féin where, in a twist of fate, it was another sibling of mine who had to receive him and to face the cameras there.
At the time, SF was the political party leading a struggle for Irish reunification and independence from British occupation and, though its leadership and much of the party’ base support was socially conservative, it was not that which focussed the attacks of two states and a statelet6 upon it.
And those armed and judicial attacks were backed by the imperialist and neocolonial-dominated liberal and social-democratic sector of society, the likes of the ‘Peace (sic) Train’ and ‘Peace Women’.7 I would have argued strongly with Thom I’m sure but regret very much his passing.
Thom McGinty (1952-20/21 February 1995)
Thom McGinty’s funeral, from one of the panels at the exhibition.
end.
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2Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child. After a long struggle ending pregnancy became legal within the Irish state but regulated under the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018, allowing for termination on request up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. Following a 2018 referendum, abortion services began on 1 January 2019, providing free access for residents.
3Following campaigning and public defiance of the law, restrictions on the sale of condoms were only finally removed in 1993 in the Irish state.
5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Train_Organisation The issue is not whether bombing the railway line was a useful activity or not but rather that its condemnation took the place of condemning and drawing attention to the British occupation of a colony in Ireland and the brutal repression of resistance to that occupation.
6Although it has the trappings of a state, the Northern Ireland (sic) Assembly is a UK colonial administration.
Composed of Socialist Republican, Communist and Anarchist contingents, along with independent activists of various tendencies, a broad Revolutionary Bloc marched among other groups and individuals in the annual May Day march in Dublin on May 1st.
Eden Quay, as the march turns off O’Connell Street, heading for Beresford Square, by the tall Liberty Hall building in the left background. (Photo: R.Breeze)
At intervals the banners of the Communist Party of Ireland, the Independent Workers’ Union and flags of the Anti-Imperialist Action contingents could be seen and a number of flags denoting specific groups or campaigns were on show but the Bloc was mainly identifiable by its slogans.
Led in call-and-answer almost non-stop from departure point at the Garden of Remembrance to Beresford Place in front of Liberty Hall,1 slogans called on workers to strike work and fight, to oust imperialist states and NATO from Ireland, for resistance unity, revolution and a socialist republic.
Section of the Revolutionary Bloc, centre image. (Photo: R.Breeze)
It was notable that an Irish Tricolour and a number of Starry Plough flags were visible among the Bloc and indeed one of the chants was against the appropriation of the Tricolour by ‘traitors’. They also called for funding for education and not for big corporations and for a hotel-free city centre.
At least one of the flags was of the Revolutionary Housing League and the march passed an empty building appropriated three years earlier by the RHL who were then evicted by a Garda force of 100 with helicopter and armed unit as backup. The building remains empty to this day.
People in Dublin stopped in the early Friday evening to watch and in the northern reach of O’Connell Street an elderly man stepped off the pavement to march along with the Bloc, though in silence while further along, two teenage girls in school uniform joined the Bloc also.
The Priory Market, Tallaght, Dublin prior to opening (Photo: Supplied by supporter)
Led by a long piper, the various contingents marched into Beresford Place, where a stage had been set up in front of the SIPTU2 headquarters building but most of the Revolutionary Bloc marched past to congregate for a group photo around the nearby monument to James Connolly.
Using the Bloc’s megaphone, one of the group then sang the Be Moderate song (also known as We Only Want the Earth) composed by James Connolly3 and, as the singer informed his listeners, published in the Songs of Freedom songbook by Connolly in New York in 1907.
As most of the Bloc dispersed, speeches were being made from the nearby stage and a group of mostly younger people from Turkey were assembling at the Connolly Monument also for a group photo.
The May Day march and rally in Dublin is traditionally organised by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions. However the participation of union banners was low in numbers and those present mostly of the FÓRSA union.
Section of the march showing FORSA union flags being carried. (Photo: R.Breeze)
Distinct from other European states, the foremost struggle in Ireland for centuries has been on the national question which has entailed less development in the forces devoted to socialism, so that in general May Day does not bring out the numbers one can see in the capitals of the EU and UK.
However, Ireland’s long history of resistance to colonial occupation has entailed a greater history of insurrection than most European states and it has also produced a remarkable number of leaders of labour struggles among the Irish diaspora in Britain, the USA and Australia.
End.
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FOOTNOTES
1A highly-visible very tall building on the site of the original Liberty Hall, HQ of the IT&GWU, now of SIPTU.
2One of the largest (possibly the largest) trade unions in Ireland, formed by amalgamation of other unions on the base of the Irish Transport and General Workers union, of which James Connolly had been an officer and for a period, its overall leader.
3James Connolly (5 June 1868 – 12 May 1916), born and raised in the Cowgate area of Edinburgh, revolutionary socialist activist-theoretician and Irish Republican, author, journalist, historian, union organiser, executed by the British occupation along with another 15 prominent insurrectionists of the Easter Rising.
Last Saturday (26th April) in Dublin a march took place in support of Irish neutrality and in opposition to Irish Government attempts to remove an obstacle to joining some future imperialist military alliance.
The march was organised by the Irish Anti-War Movement, an organisation that flickers into life on occasion as desired by the leaders of the People Before Profit organisation, although some of its activists are not members of PBP. And not all marching by any means were members of either.
I have a regular commitment on Saturdays elsewhere until 1.30 and it’s at least 1.45 by the time I’m free. I caught up with the march as it began to wheel around Trinity College. At its destination1 I looked around to see how many flags were representative of the Irish nation.
I counted three Irish Tricolours and one other which was also combined with a Palestinian flag. I was carrying a Starry Plough flag (the original version of gold design on a green background).2 A total of four Irish national flags in a march of several hundred amidst lots of Palestinian flags.
The stupidity is almost beyond belief. The march was not organised primarily to express solidarity with Palestine but to call for Irish neutrality and for remaining outside NATO. However, one-sixth of the nation is inside NATO without even the pretence of democratic agreement.
The other five-sixths are what constitutes the Irish State, the one upon which the march was focused, to save the Triple Lock,3 to prevent the Gombeen Government from driving us into NATO or some other military alliance. But apparently to be done without symbolising the Irish nation.
Again, the stupidity stretches credulity. We have passed through a number of years in which the Far-Right and outright fascists, in order to disguise themselves as Irish nationalists, have appropriated primarily the Tricolour but also the Irish Republic flag which was created in 1916.
A situation was permitted to arise whereby to see many Irish Tricolours being carried was to suspect a far-Right event — and usually to have that suspicion confirmed as accurate. This occurred because the broad anti-fascist anti-racist movement in general allowed it to happen.4
The fault is primarily that of the Irish socialist Left and their dislike or distrust of nationalism and their association of the Tricolour with the Irish State. They fail to recognise it as a democratic, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist republican symbol of national sovereignty and resistance.
The design was presented to the Young Ireland movement by revolutionary women in Paris in 1848, the ‘Year of Revolutions’ in Europe. Its colours represent national revolutionary unity (White) between the indigenous Irish (Green) and the descendants of colonial settlers (Orange).
Unlike its presence among racist and homophobic gatherings, the Tricolour was completely appropriate for a march in support of Irish neutrality. But somehow this did not occur to the organisers of the march nor, apparently, to most of the participants.
There would be no need to exclude flags representing the socialist or anarchist movements nor indeed of struggles in other countries but on this march they should have been outnumbered by Irish Tricolour and Starry Plough flags.
The Republican movement, for all its faults, would not have failed in this representation. Sins of omission in politics can be as bad as those of commission and the almost absence of Tricolours on this march epitomises how badly some of the movement in defence of neutrality is being led.
The general absence of the Republican movement from this march, whatever their reasons, is to my mind another part of this problem.
End.
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1Molesworth Street, facing Leinster House, home of the parliament of the Irish State.
2Essentially the original design of the flag of the Irish Citizen Army, a workers’ defence militia during the 1913 Lockout which also fought in the 1916 Rising.
3A measure which does not permit the State to send more than 12 personnel abroad on a military mission unless with 1) a government decision, 2) a majority vote in the Irish Parliament and 3) a UN mandate. Recently leaders of the Coalition Goverment parties have been saying that a vote in the Parliament would not be necessary.
4This is not alone the fault of the PBP but also of the anarchists who did fight the fascists but also of the Republicans who, some notable attacks on the National Party aside, largely ignored the fascist and far-Right protests.
The recognised date known as International Working Women’s Day is March 8th and it was commemorated on that date with a march and revolutionary words and symbolism organised by Irish Socialist Republicans in Dublin.
The marchers gathered outside Wynn’s Hotel in Lower Abbey Street, to mark the founding there of the revolutionary Republican military women’s organisation, Cumann na mBan, on 2 April 1914. The organisation, with its own officers, was possibly the first of its kind for women in the world.1
From there the march set off into O’Connell Street, then marching southward to cross the Liffey into D’Olier Street before turning left into Townsend Street, continuing to the statue of Constance Markievicz where the colour party’s flags were lowered in respect.
The march near the start in O’Connell St (photo credit: An Pobal Abú FB page)
Throughout, chants of “Ní Saoirse go Saoirse na mBan”2 and “Britain out of Ireland” reverberated through the streets of Dublin as banners displayed the slogans “coinníonn na mná suas leath na spéire / women hold up half the sky” and “Queers Against Imperialism”.
Markievicz was an active member of Iníní na hÉireann, the Irish Citizen Army and of Cumann na mBan. She was part of the command of the Stephens Green/ College of Surgeons garrison in 1916 and elected MP on an abstentionist ticket in 1918 and Minister of Labour in the First Dáil in 1919.
Continuing along Townsend Street and ending at Elizabeth O’Farrell park where a commemoration was held outside in honour of the role of women in the struggle for national liberation while the colour party took up position inside the park.
(Photo credit: An Pobal Abú FB page)
A woman read a speech on behalf of the AIA, tracing founding of International Women’s Day from when women in Russia in 1917 had led strikes and marches against the Tsar and WW1, later becoming known as the February Revolution, leading later to the October Socialist Revolution.
The speaker went on to speak of the role of women in the Republican struggle, from Cumann na mBan, the Irish Citizen Army and Armagh Gaol Republican prisoners, followed by a woman reading the 1916 Proclamation of Independence and the burning of two green flares.
(photo credit: An Pobal Abú FB page)
A new plaque of the Socialist Republican Mairéad Farrell was unveiled with the laying also of a commemorative wreath during a minute’s silence observed for all revolutionary women and gender oppressed people who gave their lives for national liberation and anti-imperialist struggle.
The Colour Party in Elizabeth O’Farrell Park (Photo: R.Breeze)
At the same time the colour party lowered their flags in respect, during which the command calls in Irish rang out in the area through the silence.
The area in which the Elizabeth O’Farrell and her life-long friend Julia Grenan3 grew up is a south Dublin docklands still largely working class area. It was in a yard in Lombard Street nearby, actually within sight of the park, that the IRB (Fenians) was founded on March 17th 1858.
Laying of the wreath (photo credit: An Pobal Abú FB page)
Elizabeth O’Farrell and Julia Grenan both participated in the 1916 Rising and, along with Winifred Carney, refused to join the earlier evacuation from the burning GPO building on the Friday, later participating in the final evacuation which ended in the central terrace in Moore Street.
When the leadership took the decision to surrender, O’Farrell went out to negotiate under a white flag even though a man had been killed under such a flag earlier in the very street. In 1922, along with almost the entirety of Cumann na mBan and the ICA, she rejected the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
(Photo: R.Breeze)
Many women were interned by the nascent neo-colonial Irish Government.
After the Elizabeth O’Farrell Park event, people gathered again at a recently-occupied social centre in Dublin, to view an exhibition of images in honour of the day and to watch an English-subtitled French-language film about women and the Omani Resistance, followed by a music session.4
Part of exhibition for International Working Women’s Day in the social centre (Photo: R.Breeze)
End.
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Footnotes
1In its early years the organisation worked mainly as an auxiliary to the Irish Volunteers but asserted greater independence at a later stage. It coincided in time with the women in the Irish Citizen Army who shared equal status with male members and indeed in the case of some of them, such as Markievicz and Lynn, actually commanded men. Wynne’s Hotel was also where the decision to found the Irish Volunteers had been taken in 1913.
2Translated as ‘There can be no freedom until women are free.’
3And life partner, many have speculated – certainly they lived together until the end.
4The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived by Heiny Srour
Translated by R. Breeze from Spanish-language post in Bultza, Basque Marxist-Leninist Telegram channel, 2 March 2026
(Reading time:4 mins.)
The armed resistance of the Palestinian people—the vast majority of whom are Muslim—has stirred up a kind of “neither-nor” sentiment. The “progressive” left refuses to take sides.
They labelled the acts of armed resistance on October 7, 2023, as terrorism and equated them with the genocidal policies of the State of Israel. Was terrorism that which the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto waged in their guerrilla operations against the Nazi occupation army?
This is not the first time we have heard the hackneyed rhetoric against the Muslim religion. A discourse cloaked in a “progressive” mantle, where they speak of human rights, freedoms, women’s rights, and so on.
Some even compare it to the Franco regime in a display of “intellectualism.” A comparison that cannot withstand the slightest scrutiny of logic. Did the Franco regime confront the greatest empire on the planet? Quite the contrary.
The fact that Francoism and its entire cultural and political apparatus existed was thanks, among other things, to the largest empire in the world today: the United States.
Trump has spoken, on several occasions, about how the Iranian government oppresses its people through Islam, that “the regime of the ayatollahs” must be overthrown, etc. This discourse has also been echoed by several European leaders, including the “progressive” Pedro Sánchez.
A few weeks ago, we heard Gabriel Rufián1—the future leader of the “re-establishment of the Left”—saying that the burka and the hijab should be banned. But there is one aspect they all have in common: they all say this from NATO countries.
Countries that exploit the wealth of every continent, including Muslim countries where religion is not conceived in the same way as it is in imperialist countries. Yet, they say absolutely nothing about the Atlanticist organization. They do not question its crimes.
In addition to discrimination based on religion, there are two more forms: discrimination based on belonging to a culture different from Western culture (imperialism and colonization) and class discrimination.
The “progressive” Left only mobilises when the oppressed are portrayed as victims, not when they gain strength and resist the assaults. In other words, if you are massacred by the empire, they will offer you alms. If you resist, you become the target of their criticism.
We’ve already seen this with the constant denunciations of the Palestinian armed resistance, or the scant impact the resistance of the Shiite armed movement Hezbollah, which has repeatedly halted Israeli Zionism, has had on the Spanish population.
We’ve also seen it when the Shiite movement Ansar Allah fired rockets at the US Sixth Fleet, cutting off the Red Sea and Israeli communications.
In other words, the “progressive” left supports you if you die, not when you fight.
It’s the practical application of putting money into the coffers of the missions. If you’re a sovereign country seeking liberation from imperialist yokes and you fight with all your might, you’re labelled a terrorist and an oppressor.
And the media plays a significant role in this, the same media on which progressives occasionally complain of not being given as much airtime as before.
In the words of the African American leader Malcolm X: Beware of the media; they will make you hate the oppressed and love the oppressor.
In the world of social media, we easily lose our memory. Therefore, it’s necessary to remember that the Algerian separatists of the National Liberation Front were Marxist-Leninists. And this didn’t prevent them from also being Muslim.
The People’s Republic of North Yemen—Muslim—along with the People’s Democratic Republic of Algeria, supported the anti-fascist armed movements in the Spanish state.
In other words, Islam and anti-imperialist (and anti-fascist) resistance are concepts that have gone hand in hand on numerous occasions.
The USSR itself not only maintained but also promoted madrasas, or Islamic schools, in Muslim-majority territories. Was the USSR—the world’s first secular state—the same as Francoist Spain? But perhaps this doesn’t mean much to the progressive, or the purist of the moment.
In the 1960s, there emerged in Latin America a concept called Liberation Theology. This movement led to the creation of armed groups of Catholic origin whose demands included socialism and social justice.
Movements like the Montoneros in Argentina and the Colombian National Liberation Army (ELN) emerged from this context. It is important to remember Father Carlos Mugica, the priest and guerrilla leader.
These armed movements caused considerable headaches for Washington’s Operation Condor and all the dictatorships imposed by the School of the Americas—dictatorships that, incidentally, sympathised with and admired Francoism.
Were these guerrilla priests the same as their enemies in the White House and their puppets?
These movements resonated in Spain. This theory spread throughout the Basque Country and the working-class neighbourhoods of major cities like Madrid and Barcelona, as well as regions like Andalusia.
The parishes of Vallecas, Carabanchel, Moratalazo, and Vicálvaro2 became meeting places for numerous anti-Francoist movements and groups, where these same worker-priests were active.
A very recent example is that of Father Diamantino García: one of the founders of the Andalusian Rural Workers’ Union (predecessor of the Andalusian Workers’ Union). Were these worker-priests the same as Francoism?
Fr. Diamentino Garcia Acosta (1943-1995) addressing a worker’s rally.
Let’s remove once and for all the veil that prevents us from seeing the reality of Third World countries. Who are we to tell oppressed countries what to do? Isn’t that just another form of imperialism? Do we fight in the same way they do?
We cannot view the processes of decolonization and liberation of those who are fighting with all their might against the West and its empire through Western eyes.
To paraphrase our Asturian comrades from La Clase Trabayadora:3 we must put an end to the left wing of imperialism and all that it entails. Even in the cultural sphere.
End.
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FOOTNOTES
1MP and spokesperson of the Ezquerra Republicana de Catalunya (Catalan Republican Left) in the Spanish Congress, also active in left-social democratic coalition Súmate and the grassroots National Assembly of Catalunya. (R.Breeze)
2Particularly working-class areas of Madrid (R.Breeze)
3Anti-NATO and anti-rearming organisation based in Asturies. (R.Breeze)
