For decades the US Dollar has dominated financial transactions across the world – backed not only by the USA’s industrial and agricultural output but by its imperialist domination of many economies and its military power.
But perhaps no longer, for now there is a serious competitor in the field, one with the acronym BRICS, from the first letter of the states that created it (in order of no significance): Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa.
Apart from the backing of powerful economies with more applying to join, this currency standard is based on the price of precious and semi-precious metals. The UK’s Sterling (and the Irish state’s, for a while) was based on silver but the Dollar has for many years been backed by … debt.
A currency is based on the assumption that every unit will be payable and backed by a unit (e.g. gold) of the declared value. But if the value unit markers of the US Dollar, in coins, notes, cheques and credit transfers were to be presented to the US Treasury, it could never pay them.1
In fact, it could not even pay a significant percentage of them and has been running a national defaulting on debt currency for many years, this year once again deciding to continue doing so to the tune of $31.5 trillion.
But is it really “redeemable” if all are presented? (Image sourced: Internet)
The USA has been able to continue doing this to date because so many of the world’s economies have been dominated by US Imperialism or in alliance with it; they fear that calling in the debt would lead to the collapse of the USA system and to their own interlinked financial structures.
BRICS consists of a financial alliance of economies of which their leaders for one reason or another feel in their interests to end the world dominance of the Dollar.
Previously, South Africa’s Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor said that there are 12 countries interested in joining the initiative.
Of the 12, she mentioned seven countries specifically, namely Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Algeria, Argentina, Mexico and Nigeria. In March this year Russia announced its support for Algeria’s bid to join BRICS.
In April the expansion of that list interested in joining to 19 states was announced with formal applications from Algeria, Argentina, Bahrain, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.
And with expressions of interest from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.
(Image sourced: Internet)
COMMUNICATIONS, COMMON CURRENCY & LENDING BANK
Plans for an optical fibre submarine communications cable between BRIC members – partly motivated to avoid US National Security Agency spying on telecommunications in and out of the USA – have not advanced far since first discussed in 2012 but have not been abandoned.
Likewise, discussions of a common currency have not come to fruition yet either. However that may be more imminent.
As challengers to Western-led international currency, BRICS “in the order of the scale of GDP, now collectively outweigh not only the reigning hegemon, the United States, but the entire G-7 weight class put together” (former White House senior advisor Joseph W. Sullivan).2
The same commentator believes that such a common currency has a much greater chance of stability than the Eurozone, because of the geographic diversity of its members, which enables a broader range of goods and services.
(Image sourced: Internet)
The biggest attraction for applicants to join is probably access to loans from the New Development Bank to members for infrastructure projects, which is the NDB’s main advertised purpose. Heretofore, the IMF and the World Bank have been the main external lenders.
Both the latter institutions have imposed harmful changes on borrowing economies, often driving them further and deeper into debt and into greater dependency on western imperialism. Those lending institutions have also supported corrupt and oppressive regimes.
The NDB has authorised lending up to $34 billion annually, with South Africa the HQ for the African continent with a starting capital of $50 billion ($10 billion from each of the five founders) and so far has 53 projects underway worth around $15 billion total.
Should the NDB prove its ability to issue loans to nationally-desired projects without the penurious and destructive conditions currently attached to IMF and World Bank funding, many, many regimes in the underdeveloped world are likely to apply to BRICS for membership.
And should client regimes currently dependent on western imperialism refuse to jump across to BRICS, they may well face coups from more nationally-ambitious sections of their elites or insurrections from below.
IS BRICS A GOOD OR A BAD THING?
Some anti-imperialists, including some socialists, have been celebrating the creation of BRICS, some even proclaiming it as the financial reflection of a new anti-imperialist order.
Of the five founding economies, only one claims to be socialist. Capitalist economies, we know, tend to develop into imperialist ones, sometimes but not always invading the countries of other economies but always exporting surplus capital there to exploit labour and natural resources.
So some or all of the capitalist economies in BRICS currently are likely to become imperialist also.
That apart, having much or even all of the world’s economies divided between two blocs may give weak economies opportunities they would not otherwise have or at least a choice and perhaps the opportunity to bargain for the conditions of their relationship to world finance.
In other words, a return in many fundamental ways to the division of the world before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
A breakthrough the current financial structure to a new one?
THREAT OF WAR?
But does this bring the threat of world war, arms race, etc, as seemed to be always present between the USA and the USSR?
Possibly but the threat of world war is already very much with us, as US/NATO uses the Ukrainian regime as a proxy in its decades-long threatening encirclement of Russia, and also in its posture (not unrelated) towards Iran and the USA’s world competitor China.
The working class in countries that are part of BRICS will still be exploited and will need to overthrow their respective national ruling classes if they are to end that exploitation and also save the environment from destruction.
Imperialism always means war whether direct or by proxy, small or large, against competing economies or people resisting domination and exploitation. Since the end of WW2 alone the USA has been involved in 201 military interventions in 51 regions.3
In the same period, the UK has carried out 28 military interventions in Asia, Africa, Middle East, Caribbean and Europe4 and France 32 in similar regions.5 Competition for world resources between Germany and the UK and with France led to WW1 and again to WW26.
BRICS has been created anyway, whatever our opinion and is set to grow significantly, causing some big changes in the world as a result. In the short term this development is likely to be to the advantage of the smaller economies and even nations struggling for independence.
6. Other states were of course involved, including the imperial competition for the Pacific and Asia between the USA/ UK and Japan in WW2 with the SE Asian peoples, in particular communist-led Chinese fighting Japanese imperialism and of course in Europe the mighty contribution and sacrifice of the USSR against the fascist powers. But the initiation of both world wars was competition and contention between Germany, France and the UK.
Pat Reynolds gave this oration in East London Cemetery on Sunday 21st May 2023 for Michael Barrett, the last man publicly hanged in Britain
A cháirde agus a chomrádaíthe,
Tá fáilte go leor romhaibh chun chruinnithe i gcuimhne Michael Barrett inniu. Welcome friends and comrades to this commemoration today for Michael Barret and Patrick O’Donnell. I have been asked to speak of Michael Barret and the movement he represented.
Michael was born in Ederney in the Maguire County of Fermanagh in 1841 and was judicially hanged though innocent by the British Government in 1868 at Newgate Prison, where the Old Bailey now stands.
Newgate prison was closed in 1903 and his remains with others were interred here in this cemetery. He was the last person to be publicly hanged in Britain.
A Fenian bombing took place on 13th December 1867 to try and rescue O’Sullivan Burke the Fenian who planned the successful prison van escape in Manchester.
The bombing blew a huge hole in the wall and demolished nearby tenement buildings, killing 12 people and injuring many others. It led to a huge State-engineered backlash in Britain against the Fenians and put their cause back some 10 years.
Michael Barret, who had gone to Glasgow to work was an innocent man and was in Glasgow at the time of the incident.
False evidence given by a police informer Patrick Mullaly who was given a free passage to Australia implicated Barrett, but he had compelling evidence that he was in Glasgow at that time. After two hours the jury declared him guilty.
One of the trial lawyers Montagu Williams stated of Barrett:
‘On looking at the dock, one’s attention was attracted by the appearance of Barrett, for whom I must confess I felt great commiseration. He was a square built fellow, scarcely five feet eight in height and dressed like a well-to-do farmer.
This resemblance was increased by the frank, open, expression on his face. A less murderous countenance than Barrett’s I have not seen. Good humour was latent in his every feature and he took the greatest interest in the proceedings’.
Barrett ended his speech from the dock thus:
‘I am far from denying, nor will the force of circumstances compel me to deny my love of my native land. I love my country and if it is murderous to love Ireland dearer than I love my life, then it is true, I am a murderer.
If my life were ten times dearer than it is and if I could by any means, redress the wrongs of that persecuted land by the sacrifice of my life, I would willingly and gladly do so.’
The Daily Telegraph the next day stated that Barrett had:
‘Delivered a most remarkable speech, criticising with great acuteness evidence against him, protesting that he had been condemned on insufficient grounds, and eloquently asserting his innocence.’
Michael Barrett monument detail, Co. Fermanagh (Sourced: Internet)
In Fermanagh his aged mother had walked many miles to appeal to the local Tory MP Captain Archdale, a noted Orangemen, who rejected her. Barrett was hanged in front of 2,000 jeering people singing Rule Britannia. The following day Reynolds’ News recorded that;
‘Millions will continue to doubt that a guilty man had been hanged at all; and the future historian of the Fenian panic may declare that Michael Barrett was sacrificed to the exigencies of the police, and the vindication of the good Tory principle, that there is nothing like blood.’
His hangman was the notorious Calcraft who had botched the hanging of the Manchester Martyrs, Allen, Larkin and O’Brien.
There is a huge difference between an accident leading to deaths by patriots fighting tyranny and the deliberate actions of the imperialists, which is why patriots have to be always careful to avoid civilian deaths.
There are many similarities between the Clerkenwell bombing and the Birmingham bombing of 1974.
In both cases they set back the cause of Irish freedom for many years, deeply harmed the Irish community in Britain and was used by the State for repressive measures against the community and to divide off the Irish community from the English working classes.
Disraeli brought in the Habeas Corpus Act and created the Special Branch. Of interest is that their first definition of Irishness was ‘Persons who were born in Ireland or whose recent forebears came from Ireland.” Back in the 1980s the GLC adopted the same definition.
We also had the Birmingham Six case with the ‘appalling vista’ of Lord Denning the Appeal Judge, who later regretted that the six innocent men were not hanged. For Gladstone it set him on his mission ‘to pacify Ireland’.
I ask you two questions today, what kind of people and community gave rise to patriots like Michael Barrett and the Manchester Martyrs, and the second question, what kind of regime or government would hang knowingly innocent men.
To understand the Fenians we have to understand the colonisation of Ireland and in particular the Great Starvation of Ireland An Gorta Mór. Over one and a half million people were starved to death by British imperialism and another two million forced to emigrate to Britain and the USA.
There was no famine in Ireland at this time, and it is imperialistic propaganda to call it such. It was clearly genocide in a land overflowing with food.
The potato crop made up under 25% of the agricultural produce of Ireland, but at this time Ireland was part of the UK where the potato crop was about 5% of the total produce of the UK. I know of no country where there was famine because of a 5% failure of the crops.
Michael Davitt back in 1904 called the Great Starvation a ‘Holocaust’ as did others. Ken Livingstone drew some comparison between the Great Starvation and the experience of the Jewish community during the Second World War.
Hitler named his strategy ‘The Hunger Plan’ where he starved Poles and Jews and others groups of food, and these victims are included in the Holocaust figures including also his starvation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The shipment of food grown by the people of Ireland to Britain during the Great Starvation was a clear decision by the British government to starve the Irish people.
The Nazi Governor in Poland Hans Frank wrote of the starvation of Jews ‘that we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally’.
The economic theory of laissez-faire is a total invention, within years they could spend millions in Crimea, a place most English had never heard of.
I recall the great Irish writer Frank O’Connor stating ‘Famine is a useful word when you do not wish to use words like ‘genocide’ or ‘extermination’, and again ‘It was not that the people were too simple to realise the Dachau-like nightmare of their circumstances’.
He goes on ‘The word famine itself is a question begging for its meaning ‘an extreme and general shortage of food’, and to use it of a country with a vast surplus of food, cows, sheep, pigs, poultry, eggs and corn, is simply to debase a language’.
O’Connor went further: ‘Irish historians who are firmly convinced that the Famine was all a mistake in the office, explain it in terms of an economic theory called laissez-faire. This is another cock that won’t fight.
Anyone who can believe that the British government maintained a garrison of 100,00 men in Ireland for the purpose of not interfering in trade and industrial affairs attaches some meaning to the word history that escapes me’.
The Great Starvation of the Irish people was a daily planned strategic intervention by the English government which is borne out by the evictions and forced migrations which followed and by the white supremacist and racist beliefs held in England at that time, which has largely been ignored by the historians.
The failure of the Young Ireland movement in the 1848 rebellion led to the deportation of their leaders and a flight of others to France and the USA. From this came the Fenian movement and the Irish Republican Brotherhood set up in the USA and Ireland in 1858.
There was of course also the French Revolution of 1848 which inspired people all over the world and which also inspired the Fenians.
The American Civil War of 1861-65 was to inspire the Irish in the USA. Over 30,000 Irishmen were to lose their lives in War the vast majority fighting for the Union and for the abolition of Slavery.
Revisionists question whether the Irish were really fighting for the abolition of Slavery, yet the same historians in hindsight claim that the British and Irish who fought in the 2nd World war were fighting against fascism and the Nazis.
The Irish men who died firing against slavery are entitled to the same respect from history.
The 1867 rebellion in Ireland did not really take off. Frantz Fanon stated: ‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it’. The Fenians took a more measured road and passed it on to the next generation, but not without a fight.
In the USA they invaded the British Canadian Dominion twice in 1867 with about 700 Fenian soldiers, veterans of the American Civil War. They held a convention in in 1867 with 6,000 armed men present.
In Britain the Fenians massed near Chester Castle in an attempt to seize the guns there and get them to Ireland via Holyhead for the Fenian Rising. As in the USA they were betrayed by spies and with Chester Castle reinforced by soldiers, the raid was called off in February 1967.
In September Colonel Kelly was arrested in Manchester and was released when Fenians attacked the prison coach which later led to the Manchester Martyrs, Allen Larkin and O’Brien who were innocent men framed up by the English government.
The impact of the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland was huge with some 17 monuments put up in their honour and with the Catholic Church forced to backtrack on their anti-Fenian stance and allow masses and commemorations to be widely held in Ireland.
Michael Barrett is part of this sacrifice of the Irish abroad to Irish freedom made within a year of each other. My call is for Michael Barrett to be included within the Manchester Martyrs’ history and commemoration.
By the 1870s the Irish had moved to parliamentary means to move their fight for liberation onwards. You will notice that the fight for Irish freedom goes in flows, a rebellion often followed by political and parliamentary activity along with agitation. Both means were effective for their times.
In Ireland we had Michael Davitt and the Land League, again we have the huge contribution from Britain to this effort from Davitt. We also had the bombing campaign in Britain by O’Donovan Rossa and Tom Clarke from 1880-87, the Invincibles in Dublin and the execution of Lord Cavendish in 1882.
We have the great Irish Literary and Gaelic revival. Again, the Irish Literary Society was founded in Southwark, SE London in the 1880s which spread to Dublin, Belfast and Cork.
We had the Gaelic League and the GAA as part of this revival which led on to the 1916 Rising and the founding of the nation.
What kind of regime or government could knowingly judicially murder innocent men like Michael Barrett and the Manchester Martyrs? We know the history of British colonisation of Ireland and British Imperialism.
This is the same British Imperialism which would in 1919 lead to the Amritsar massacre in India. But let us stay in 1860s iwith this colonial Empire.
In 1865 the Jamaican people rose up against British colonial rule in Jamaica which left 400 dead in a colonial reign of state terrorism. They hung the leader Paul Bogle and 14 others and executed seven women and prosecuted George William Gordon who had nothing to do with the Rebellion.
They executed him. The Fenians at the time raised funds to help the survivors bring action against the English government. You see here a long history of hanging both Irish and Black people across their colonies.
Today I salute the Irish in Britain who marched in the 1980’s against apartheid in South Africa and who today march with the Palestinian people following a noble Fenian internationalist tradition.
British rule in Ireland was based on Imperialism, White Supremacy and Racism. This was first formulated by Gerald of Wales in 1187 some 700 years before they hanged Barrett and the Manchester Martyrs.
Gerald in his books Topography of Ireland and Conquest of Ireland used racism to justify the conquest of Ireland and portrayed the Irish as inferior, backward, inhuman, uncivilised, feckless and lazy.
This was a litany of manufactured racist lies when Ireland had been the ‘Island of Saints and Scholars’ and the seat of learning in Western Europe bringing enlightenment to Europe during the Dark Ages.
Gerald’s views were published across Europe and held sway until around 1650 for about 500 years. This first racialisation of the Irish did not require any religious framework.
When Henry 8th split with Rome in 1534 the racist code used for conquest in Ireland was then overlaid with a state-sponsored sectarian religious code.
Irish scholars were driven out of Oxford where they were a dominant force and Henry sought to build up his fleet to destroy Irish fleets on the south coast to control trading in Irish sea ports and towns.
There followed the Plantation of Elizabeth 1st who knighted Gilbert the mass murderer of Munster who later founded a British colony in Newfoundland.
Later on, we had the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland with large-scale massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, widespread smaller massacres and the forced transporting of Irish slaves to the Caribbean.
Revisionists deny this history and seem to wrongly believe that these people were on some kind of ‘Cromwell Tours of the Caribbean’. For the record these forced transported people were not indentured people.
It is of interest that Gerald of Wales’ views on the Irish were not held of African people from 1200 onwards but were lifted from the Irish situation and applied to African people on the advent of enslavement to justify what the European colonial powers were doing.
So now Africans can be perceived in the same way as the Irish, as backward, inferior, childlike and have their freedoms taken away.
Let us now look at racism and the White Supremacist views of British Imperialism in the 1800s which gave rise to the great Starvation, the Manchester and London hangings of innocent men.
Robert Knox in The Races in 1850 described the Celts as an inferior race which became part of the ‘scientific’ racism of the day, with Knox updating Gerald of Wales.
Even Engels came out with his racist views of the Irish ‘The race that live in these ruinous cottages in measureless filth, and stuck in this atmosphere penned in, as if on purpose, this race must have reached the lowest stages of humanity’, instead of seeing what British imperialism and racism had done to the Irish people at home and abroad.
John Bedoe in his Races of Britain in 1862 views the Irish as Africanoid and having African roots, and again as ‘European Negroes’. Punch portrayed the Irish as apes and monsters, even Parnell, and the Irish as Aboriginals and on the same level as gorillas.
Charles Kingsley on visits to Ireland in the 1860’s states ‘I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw’ and ‘to see white chimpanzees is dreadful’. A new Gorilla at London Zoo is called ‘Paddy’ and the ‘Irish Yahoo’ is seen as the missing link between man and gorilla.
The Irish are described ‘as half naked savages who retain a vast amount of their primitive savagery to this day’.
We can see how scientific racism is now applied equally to Black and Irish for the purpose of colonisation and oppression.
In this context we can see the mindset of the British establishment who committed genocide against the Irish people, and who over centuries had murdered Irish people at random. We can see how the same regime of government can hang innocent people at home and abroad.
Michael Barrett, a self-educated man emerges from this dunghill of White Supremacy and pure racism as a heroic figure, like the Manchester Martyrs a true patriot as shown in his speech from the dock. He should be remembered with the Manchester Martyrs and not separated from their heroic end.
Barrett, a Christlike figure and a Cúchulainn who died on behalf of his people and for his political beliefs.
He was part of an Irish tradition in Britain of being in the forefront of democratic rights for liberty justice and freedom, not just for the Irish but also the British people.
We see in the Chartist movement of the 1840s being led by Irishmen Fergal O’Connor and Bronterre O’Brien that fight for liberty and the rights of man.
Also the leadership of Donegal man Doherty leading the workers of Lancashire and the ongoing links in the trade union movement to today from leaders like Mick Lynch inspired by James Connolly to Pat Cullen of the RCN.
We see it in the gift of The Red Flag song from a County Meath man and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists novel by Noonan to the British working class.
In honouring Michael Barrett today, we stand full square for a United Ireland as proclaimed in the Fenian and 1916 Proclamations and for working class liberty in Britain.
I will finish today by reading the Fenian Proclamation of 10th February 1867 from the Irish People to the World. In it we can see what the 1916 Proclamation borrowed and built on. It is also what Michael Barrett lived and in the end died for.
Fenian Proclamation, 1867
Proclamation of the Irish Republic, issued February 10th, 1867, by the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
I.R. — PROCLAMATION! —
THE IRISH PEOPLE TO THE WORLD
We have suffered centuries ofoutrage, enforced poverty, and bitter misery. Our rights and liberties have been trampled on by an alien aristocracy, who, treating us as foes, usurped our lands and drew away from our unfortunate country all material riches.
The real owners of the soil were removed to make room for cattle, and driven across the ocean to seek the means of living, and the political rights denied to them at home, while our men of thought and action were condemned to loss of life and liberty.
But we never lost the memory and hope of a national existence. We appealed in vain to the reason and sense of justice of the dominant powers. Our mildest remonstrances were met with sneers and contempt. Our appeals to arms were always unsuccessful.
Today, having no honourable alternative left, we again appeal to force as our last resource. We accept the conditions of appeal, manfully deeming it better to die in the struggle for freedom than to continue an existence of utter serfdom.
All men are born with equal rights, and in associating together to protect one another and share public burthens, justice demands that such associations should rest upon a basis which maintains equality instead of destroying it.
We therefore declare that, unable longer to endure the curse of Monarchical Government, we aim at founding a Republic based on universal suffrage, which shall secure to all the intrinsic value of their labour.
The soil of Ireland, at present in the possession of an oligarchy, belongs to us, the Irish people, and to us it must be restored.
We declare also in favour of absolute liberty of conscience, and the complete separation of Church and State.
We appeal to the Highest Tribunal for evidence of the justice of our cause. History bears testimony to the intensity of our sufferings, and we declare, in the face of our brethren, that we intend no war against the people of England —
our war is against the aristocratic locusts, whether English or Irish, who have eaten the verdure of our fields — against the aristocratic leeches who drain alike our blood and theirs.
Republicans of the entire world, our cause is your cause. Our enemy is your enemy. Let your hearts be with us. As for you, workmen of England, it is not only your hearts we wish, but your arms. Remember the starvation and degradation brought to your firesides by the oppression of labour.
Remember the past, look well to the future, and avenge yourselves by giving liberty to your children in the coming struggle for human freedom.
The Irish State recently commemorated the end of the Irish Civil War but what it was really doing was celebrating its victory over the democratic national liberation forces.
The Irish national bourgeoisie, the Gombeen ruling class, armed and supplied by British Imperialism and colonialism, in 1922 launched a war against the forces that had brought the British Occupiers to the negotiation table.
In that short war or counterrevolution, the Irish State formally executed over 80 Irish Republican Volunteers – many more than had the British during the War of Independence 1919-1921. It also shot dead and blew up surrendered Volunteers and kidnapped, tortured and murdered others.
The Irish government of the day put the financial cost of the Civil War at 50 million sterling which today would be near to 3 billion euro.
A curtain of repression settled over Ireland, in the Irish state and in the colony in the Six Counties (in particular from the RIC re-baptised as RUC and the State-armed Loyalists of the B-Specials). Many Republicans were in jail and if not, could not find work and so emigrated.
The political party allegedly representing the Republicans, Fianna Fáil, led by a former leader of the forces attacked by the State, joined the Gombeen system and became in fact the preferred party of the Irish ruling class.
Though the Republican forces recovered and returned to the struggle in the 1930s (with the Communists against the fascist Blackshirts), again in the 1940s and onwards, they never again came close to winning control over the State.
What the Irish State has given us since its inception, even after the Civil War, has been generations of underdevelopment; unemployment and emigration; a huge decline in the Irish-speaking areas; inequality and social repression of women and LGBT people.
The latter was due to Catholic Church domination in every sphere of life, resulting in institutional physical, mental and sexual abuse, along with censorship in printed, audio and visual media and in banning of contraception.
The ruling class of the Irish State, the Gombeens, tolerated the foreign occupation and control of more than one-fifth of the island’s land mass and abandoned the large Catholic minority in the colony to discrimination and pogroms.
It tolerated also institutional and media racism against the Irish diaspora in Britain, the repressive legislation of the Prevention of Terrorism Act and the jailing for long sentences of a score of innocent Irish people in five different cases in the 1970s.
The Irish State tolerated Loyalist/ British Intelligence bombing inside its territory, failed to protect its citizens from terrorist bombing in the 1970s and covered up its complicity, for example with regard to the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings.
In addition, it used a Loyalist bombing to disarm the opposition to repressive legislation, not against Loyalists but against Irish Republicans, sending Republican activists to jail on the unsupported word of a senior police officer.
More recently this Irish State that we inherited has given us a housing crisis while it makes the territory a rich hunting ground for property speculators, bankers, landlords and vulture funds and also sells off/ gives away our natural resources, public transport and other infrastructures.
The selling-off includes our health service which is also in crisis while the private companies chop off parts of it and sell service back to the State at a profit. And a country that was able to feed 8.5 million prior to 1845 (and export foodstuffs) cannot now feed 5 million without huge imports.
They have given us nothing to celebrate but as always, there is a choice. We can bemoan the situation or we can “take back the nation they’ve sold” (Soldiers of Twenty-Two). And that cannot be done through electing any party or parties into the system.
The May issue of this newspaper has been out for some weeks and the organisers did well to manage that in the midst of disruptive arrests of their housing activists and raids and arrests following their Easter Rising Commemoration1.
As before, this issue consists of sixteen A4 sides, therefore easy enough to handle and contains what seems the right mixture between short event reports and news items, along with a couple of analytical pieces, one on ‘workerism’ and a thought-provoking other on peat-cutting and energy.
A two-page spread on James Connolly and the Irish Republic quotes extensively from Connolly but without giving any references. This can be an issue since a number of statements commonly attributed to both Connolly and Lenin are lacking in substantial (or even any) verification2.
This edition discusses issues and events in Ireland but also internationally. Reports from the agrarian revolutionary movements in parts of India and in the Phillipines are featured – a list of attacks and casualties inflicted upon the oppressors’ forces.
Another piece marks the death of Palestinian activist Adnan Khader on the 76th day of his hunger strike protest against Israeli ‘administrative detention’ – internment in fact. The mass struggles in France against the raising of the retirement age are also featured.
For Ireland there are reports on the housing struggle, against police repression in the Six Counties, historical commemorations, poster and graffiti campaigns, a sectarian attack in Lurgan and another article deals with mental health issues and the shortage of services in Tipperary.
As commented in an earlier review of this newspaper, the Irish revolutionary movement has long needed a hard-copy revolutionary newspaper. As Lenin commented3, the revolutionary newspaper is an organiser as it requires production and distribution.
Of course, distribution networks for a newspaper can become action-organising networks also but in any case meeting a person to give them a newspaper is a personal contact, when questions and criticisms can be discussed and other information from the community collected to act upon.
This form of contact for the individual is superior to those available on the Internet and also less easy for the State to monitor. A newspaper can also go from hand to hand in a way that only short pieces or videos can compare with in electronic distribution.
Though of course, the latter also has its strengths.
Future editions of APA are to be welcomed and in the fullness of time perhaps we can even graduate to a weekly revolutionary Irish socialist newspaper, not seen here for decades.
End.
An Phoblacht Abú is available from personal contact with AIA or by post from Isrmedia@protonmail.com
FOOTNOTES:
1. See https://rebelbreeze.com/2023/05/07/gardai-arrest-republican-denouncing-the-monarchy-british-occupation/ Although the raid may well have been intended to disrupt plans for protests against US Imperialism’s chief, Joe Biden’s visit to Ireland, a socialist Republican still faces concocted charges relating to membership of an imaginary “illegal organisation”. Under special repressive legislation such a charge without credible evidence has been sufficient, in the no-jury Special Criminal Courts, to jail Republicans for two years.
2 For example, I have searched diligently for the description of the Irish Citizen Army attributed to Lenin, viz. “the first Red Army in Europe” but have thus far failed to find verification.
Text from ONA FALCO@ONA_FALCO in Publico.es (translator D.Breatnach note: CUP = United People’s Candidature)
(Reading time: 4 mins.)
The head of the CUP-Alternativa candidate list for Barcelona, Basha Changue, declared this Saturday that, after “four years out of the City Council”, but “fighting from the streets”, they will return to the assembly on May 28.
They intend to “retake their place” and to “combat the lukewarm policies” developed, in her opinion, by the (regional Catalan) government of Colau.
Once inside, says Changue, anyone who seeks their support (trans. note: e.g for a coalition) will have to be in favour of “a Barcelona committed to national and linguistic rights”, for the “decrease in tourism” and the “radical defence of housing”.
“Gentlemen and Ladies Maragall, Trias, Colau and Collboni, there are no half measures: it is the capital or the neighboring ones”, she declared.
Her voice was heard by dozens of people in Barcelona’s Can Fabra square, in the Sant Andreu district, in the central act of the campaign for the municipal elections on the 28th.
Carles Riera, the Deputy in the Catalan Regional Parliament has indicated that “the only candidature for independence in the Catalan Countries is the CUP” and that “they will return to the Barcelona City Council to combat big capital and the bosses’ agenda”.
“Junts (trans. note: Puigdemont’s party) has renounced the independence movement in its program: it wants to go back to being Convergència i Unió” (Convergence and Unity,right-wing Catalan nationalist party preceding formation of Junts – trans. note) — Carles Riera.
Riera was combative, encouraging the public to mobilize for a “vote to confront the State, the vote that does them the most damage.”
He also accused the parties Junts per Catalunya and ERC, “which are the construction force”, those behind the “macro-projects that carve up the territory” – citing the Winter Olympic Games, the Quart Cinturó, the expansion of the airport and the tourist complex of the Hard Rock.
04/2023 – The leader of the CUP for Barcelona, Basha Changue.
Basha Changue: “Barcelona is designed to be projected as set for Instagram, not for those who live in it.”
She added that they already understood “why Junts has renounced the independence movement in its program: it wants to go back to being Convergència i Unió and wants to put the town halls at the service of big capital in exchange for power.”
28th MARCH AS A “TURNING POINT”
Deputy in Congress Mireia Vehí pointed out that they are “the alternative to the model that replaces the public with the private, that stands up to the Trias of the red carpet and the Collboni of the shop window”.
Referring to the voters who are dissatisfied with the pro-independence parties, she assured that “free Catalan Countries are also made from municipalism” and that “voting for the CUP is a vote of pride and revolt”.
The CUP wants to guarantee its presence in plenary session and reverse the results of most of the polls that leave them out of the assembly.
CUP ELECTORAL CAMPAIGN
The CUP candidate in Barcelona, Basha Changue; Member of Congress Mireia Vehí and Member of Parliament Carles Riera, Barcelona, 05/20/2023— Jordi Pujolar / Marta Vidal / ACN
Changue stated that the CUP are made “invisible” because those in power are “afraid”.
The candidate added that the transformation of Barcelona “will not be possible as long as those in power continue to open the doors of the institutions to fascism and whitewash their speeches in the town halls and in the parliaments”.
Along the same lines, the number two on the list in Barcelona, Jordi Estivill, has emphasised that there is “a strategy” to silence them, but that they will respond “with more determination and a vote of punishment, which will bring miseries to the centre”.
04/25/2023 – The Deputy in Catalan regional Parliament Laia Estrada and the mayor of Sant Boi, Jordi Barbero, in the presentation of the CUP campaign for the municipal elections.
The event in the Can Fabra square, where the number three in Barcelona, Adriana Llena, and the mayor of the CUP in Sant Cugat del Vallès, Marco Simarro, have also appeared, took place simultaneously to another act of the CUP in Palma.
Parliamentary Deputy Eulàlia Reguant made it clear: “We are at a turning point. We are going all out. We are in San Andreu and Palma because the CUP has faith and we are Països Catalans.” (the Catalan Countries’, which includes Valencia, Balearic Islands along with Pau in the French state – trans. note).
BACKGROUND
Translator: The nominally pro-independence Catalan parties in the regional part-autonomous Catalan Parliament include ERC (Republican Left of Catalonia) which is currently in government; Junts per Catalunya (Together for Catalonia), a varied coalition to which Puigdemont belongs, formerly more militant than the ERC); along with the CUP, a more left-wing coalition which has voted for independence motions but declined to join with ERC in coalition or with the previous Junts/ ERC ruling coalition.
After the vote for independence in the 2017 Referendum and Spanish police attack on the voters, it was Puigdemont as previous President of the Parliament that declared Catalan independence but almost immediately suspended it, to great Catalan confusion.
Apparently this was on a promise of support from within the EU which was reneged upon and Puigdemont has since declared his regret for the suspension.
Subsequently the Spanish State tried and jailed a number of ERC and Junts Members of Parliament and officials of the Catalan Government while others, including Puigdemont and a CUP leader, went into exile in the EU and UK.
The Spanish State unsuccessfully tried to extradite them to face charges of “rebellion and fraud”.
Hundreds of Catalans, including municipal officials, elected representatives and protesters face Spanish state charges and possible jail arising from those days of mobilising for independence and in protest at police repression.
An organisation by the name of Anti-Imperialist Action yesterday held an anti-monarchist march and rally in Dublin, including a mock execution of royalty, where their speaker was arrested by Gardaí.
The protesters met first at the James Connolly monument in Beresford Place and after some words marched up Abbey Street to Dublin’s main street and to the General Post Office building to hold their anti-monarchy rally.
Royalty and guillotine beside James Connolly monument at start of event (Photo: AIA)
At the GPO the gathering of socialist republicans, socialists and anarchists had grown. As the mock-up guillotine carried out mock execution of the dummy representing royalty, a large force of Gardaí arrested the speaker. Participants then went to Store Street Garda station to demand his release.
At Store Street the protesters were met by a line of Gardaí1 drawn up in front of the entrance to the police station. In speeches and slogans, the protestors denounced the police for the arrest of the speaker at the GPO, also denouncing the monarchy and the State.
Line of Gardaí barring entrance to Store Street Garda Station (Photo:Rebel Breeze)View of protesters outside Store Street Garda Station (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
Some speakers criticised also the national broadcaster RTÉ which was devoting four hours to the coronation.
The most frequent chants were: When Republicans are under attack – stand up, fight back!2 One, Two, Three, Four – Occupation no more; Five, Six, Seven Eight – Smash the Free State!3 Brit King – Guillotine! No democracy – under a monarchy! No democracy – in the Free State4!
One of the protesters, accompanying himself on guitar, sang the Republican ballad popularly known as “Come Out Yez Black ‘n Tans”, the attendance joining in on the chorus. They displayed a banner with a slogan from Liberty Hall5 in WW1: We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland.
Using a loudhailer, another protester read out James Connolly’s6 1911 denunciation of the monarchy. Yet another speaker quoted Garda Commissioner Drew Harris’ recent words saying the Gardaí were the “biggest gang”, the protester calling them “an MI5-directed gang”.
Eventually news of the release of the arrested man reached the protestors and they marched up Talbot Street with Starry Plough7 flags and a Basque Ikurrina flying, back to the GPO, outside of which they held an impromptu rally.
Along with portraits of Irish hunger-strike martyrs of 1981 there was a portrait of Palestinian martyr Khader Adnan carried also in recognition of the international role of British imperialism and its Head of State.
Many looked on in interest while some applauded them, both in Talbot Street, where a taxi driver enquired the reason for the protest and wished them well and also outside the GPO. Gardaí arrived and stood across from the building to watch the protesters but in smaller numbers than before.
The protestors return to the GPO for an impromptu rally in place of the planned one interrupted by the Garda attack and arrest of speaker (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
Another speaker said the protesters were “health workers, working to rid Ireland of a dangerous disease affecting politicians, media and State forces, a disease that makes them go to their knees in front of royalty and a foreign state, extending their tongues to lick a certain part of the anatomy.”
Interest from the pedestrian reservation in O’Connell Street across from the GPO, including much smaller number of uniformed Gardaí (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
The speaker said they were working “to rid Ireland of this dangerous disease, to enable the people to stand up straight once more, to claim their Republic, celebrate their history and speak out against foreign domination and monarchy”.
He drew attention also to arrest of a Republican speaker outside the iconic GPO, headquarters of the 1916 Rising8 and which still bears the scars of British bullets9.
Reference was also made a number of times by protesters to the arrests of English Republicans in London who were prevented by from holding a protest against the monarchy.
The victim of the police attack returned from police custody and briefly spoke thanking those who had demanded his release; people who had stopped to listen applauded and the group dispersed without further arrest.
End.
Photo taken at GPO before police attack (Photo: AIA)
2This seems adapted from a slogan often chanted by Irish socialist groups.
3This too seems an adaptation but from the Palestine solidarity movement.
4The new state of 26 Counties (missing six, which are in the British colony) and which fought a Civil War against the Republicans was called “the Free State” and though the name was changed (and to a ‘republic’) Irish Republicans and many nationalists in the British colony call it the “Free State” in irony and in negation of its legitimacy.
5Liberty Hall is a very tall building housing SIPTU but the trade union’s ancestor, the ITGWU had purchased the previous building on the same site which was destroyed by the British during the 1916 Rising. The slogan “We serve neither …” etc had been displayed across the front earlier during WWI.
6Revolutionary socialist leader, trade union organiser, writer and historian who brought the Irish Citizen Army to participate in the Rising, during which he was made Dublin Commandant, afterwards being shot by British firing squad.
7Originally flag of the Irish Citizen Army, the first workers’ Army in the world, formed to defend the workers in 1913 Lockout against police attacks and which also took part in the 1916 Rising.
8The rising 24-29 April 1916 was the first against world war and contained many other ‘firsts’ – six different organisations played a prominent part in it, including women. The Rising is regarded as leading to the War of Independence 1919-1922.
9One of many buildings in Dublin that bear the scars of conflict, this one is an imposing building in the city’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street. With the building in flames from British artillery on Easter Friday, the garrison, including five of the Seven Signatories of the Proclamation of Independence (which was read out at the start of the Rising) relocated to nearby Moore Street, where the decision was taken to surrender.
Useful link and Reference:
"We confess to having more respect and honour for the raggedest child of the poorest labourer in Ireland today than for any, even the most virtuous, descendant of the long array of murderers, adulterers and madmen who have sat upon the throne of England." – James Connolly pic.twitter.com/o8inKRr5Fi
— Anti Imperialist Action Ireland (@AIAIreland) May 6, 2023
Kontxi Arana, code name “Rita”, was a fighter of the Basque armed organisation ETA and also of the Sandinista movement. A ceremony of homage to her memory on 22nd April was also the occasion of an antifascist conference with representatives from a number of European countries.
The event took place in Gernika, the SW Basque town infamously bombed by German and Italian Nazi and Fascist squadrons during the Spanish Civil/ Ant-Fascist War, the act which inspired the Catalan painter Picasso´s famous piece on the event (which he called by its Spanish name, “Guernica” (sic)). The venue was the disused Astra factory, formerly manufacturer of handguns.
The Origins and Nature of Fascism
The day-long anti-fascist conference began with a talk on the origins and basic nature of fascism by Iñaki Gil de San Vincente, Marxist theoretician and veteran of the Basque Left Patriotic Movement from which leadership of however he has broken for a number of years.
Speaking in Castillian, he declared the essential nature of fascism to be authoritarianism, deriving from the development of the bourgeois family. The central authority figure in that family, later reproduced in other social classes including the working class is the Father, represented in capitalist society by the employer and the Church.
It is an authority to which all are required to submit: patriarchical, homophobic and intolerant of criticism or deviation.
De San Vincente spoke at length about this development and about early descriptions of fascism, for example by Clara Zetkin and Lukacs and described it as a production of capitalism and imperialism and therefore represented today most clearly in the actions of US Imperialism and the NATO over which it exercises hegemony.
The speaker also highlighted the development of NATO and its recruitment of Nazis as well as the development of its Vatican route for Nazis to leave Europe and enter Latin American countries where they would form fascist centres.
This talk was followed by a representative of Ezkerraldea Antifaxistako (Antifascist Left) who, speaking mostly in Castilian, outlined the history of the development of fascism in the Spanish state following the military-fascist uprising and the four decades of dictatorship, and how the organisation he represented responded to that.
The final speaker of the morning session was from Mugimendu Socialistako (the Socialist Movement – organisation with a large membership, according to a participant) who spoke entirely in Euskera (Basque language). Although simultaneous translation was provided into Castilian (Spanish), the volume of such was too low to be understood by many.
Morning session of the anti-fascist conference in Gernika (Photo: DRAF)
According to a participant, the content of that speaker´s contribution was similar to that of the previous speaker, although he mentioned the existence of Frente Obrero (Workers´Front), a Basque organisation which, despite its name, is a fascist organisation. The existence of that latter group appeared to be news to many present.
These talks were followed by a break and, upon resumption, there were some contributions from the floor and some responses from the panel, after which all repaired to the green outside the Astra building to where the ceremony of respect to the memory of Kontxi “Rita” Arana was to take place.
Kontxi Arana: A leading Basque liberation fighter who also joined the Sandinistas in the liberation struggle of Nicaragua
A Basque woman of the independent Patriotic Left movement blew the traditional cow or bull horn to summon attention, while the speaker in the Basque language introduced the program and speakers along with a short history of this internationalist anti-imperialist and anti-fascist fighter.
Kontxi Arana was an active member of the Basque armed liberation organisation ETA who avoided capture while on operations in the Spanish State but was arrested in the French state and exiled to an island, from which she and others escaped. Sometime later she surfaced in Nicaragua, where she had joined the Sandinista armed liberation movement.
Around the end of the 1990s, the leadership of the Basque Patriotic Left asked some exiles to return to the Basque Country to help push the pacification process and release of prisoners but the Spanish State refused to play, though they did not arrest Kontxi (however according to reports arrangements were not well organised to support her).
Most of the crowd present at the Gernika commemoration and homage to Kontxi “Rita” Arana, with the Astra building in the background and the railway line fence just visible in the left background.
The homage to her memory
A man formerly of the official patriotic Left movement spoke in Spanish about the need for internationalist solidarity, through which however mistakes can be made (e.g. in supporting corrupt leadership) which however does not alter the importance of such solidarity, without which the revolution cannot advance.
This was followed by a man from Dublin Republicans Against Fascism who briefy explained in Castilian (Spanish) the history behind Christy Moore´s “Viva La Quince Brigada“, which the Dubliner then sang in its original English.
Dublin Republicans Against Fascism representative singing Christy Moore’s Viva La Quinze Brigada.
The homage event concluded with red carnations being laid by members of the audience in front of a portrait of Kontxi “Rita” Arana. Two ex-political prisoners played the ´txistu´ (Basque three-hole flute), one of them also beating a rhythm on a small drum (´tamborina´). A young woman stepped forward and danced the ´aurresku´, a traditional honour dance.
Crowd queuing to lay red carnations in front of a portrait of Kontxi Arana
This dance was traditionally danced by a male, then by male dancers, then by male and female dancers until today, when it may be performed by any of those combinations or by a lone female, as in this case, and often enough in ordinary clothing as was the case on this occasion, though she did wear dancing shoes laced to the ankles.
The young woman performing the honour Aurresku dance in one of the high kicks of the dance with, to the far right, the ex-political prisoner txistulari (players of the Basque flute). In the immediate background, participants and organisers. (Photo: DRAF)
The musicians then played the air of The Internationale, which most could be heard singing in Euskera, followed by Eusko Gudariak (“Basque Soldiers”), the Basque national resistance song, similar to the Soldiers’ Song/ Amhrán na bhFiann of Ireland in content. Many had raised clenched fists as the songs were sung.
Suddenly, a wild high-pitched yodelling cry rang out from a female throat, the Irrintzi, traditional Basque battle-cry which probably echoed around the mountains in olden days.
All the audience then repaired to the Astra building where a hot meal was served to all on long tables with a bottle of wine to share among each group of several people (those present had purchased tickets to the event either in advance or upon attendance).
Afternoon session: Presentations from Turkish, Irish and Catalan antifascists.
The afternoon session started a little late as people straggled in. The chairperson, speaking in Euskera, introduced the theme of the session which was for antifascists from Turkey, Ireland and Catalonia to describe the situation with regard to fascism in their countries and how it was being confronted.
Turkey
Two people from the Turkish-based revolutionary organisation Anti-Imperialist Front presented their contribution while using a video of images, some subtitled in Castilian but where not, spoken by the woman in English while her comrade translated simultaneously into Castilian.
Overall, the presentation was about the development of state fascism in Turkey and the failed military coup of 2016. The DHKP/C organisation had resisted this on the streets but a major struggle with the Erdogan government took place in trials and in the jails.
Through hunger strikes and physical resistance in the jails, hundreds of martyrs had lost their lives, said the speaker but had remained undefeated. Also martyred had been members of the Group Yorum music group which has played revolutionary songs heard by millions.
Another struggle was carried out through public hunger strikes by elderly relatives seeking the uncovering of mass graves in the bodies of fighters, their sons, had been thrown by the Turkish military.
As a result two mass graves had been eventually disinterred, permitting the remains of fighters of the DHKP/C and of the PKK (Kurdish patriotic socialist organisation) to be returned to their families for respectful re-burial.
The Turkish speakers concluded by stating the necessity for anti-fascism to be anti-imperialist and calling for internationalist solidarity and victory to peoples’ struggles.
Section of audience at afternoon session of the anti-fascist conference in Gernika, Basque Country.
Ireland
The next speaker was from Dublin Republicans Against Fascism, explaining that eight centuries of occupation of his country by England has ensured that the dominant struggle had been one of national liberation and that all armed struggles since 1798 had been led by Republicans of various kinds: 1801, 1848, 1867, 1882 and 1916.
The Irish State that came into being after the War of Independence in 1921 had been a client of the UK, conceding over one-fifth of its national territory as a direct colony. The armed forces of the State had formally executed over 80 of the IRA and instituted a wave of repression including kidnappings, torture, murders including of prisoners.
In keeping with the rise of fascism across 1930s Europe, Ireland saw the Blueshirt movement, led by former police chief Eoin O’Duffy. The Republican movement and socialists fought these on the streets, the speaker said.
The Dubliner recounted briefly the history of Irish Republicans and socialists going to fight Franco in the Spanish state and the Irish diaspora fighting the British fascists, the Blackshirts, in British cities and in defence of Eastern European Jews in famous Battle of Capel Street in the East End of London against over 7,000 police.
He went on to recount some more recent successful physical attacks by joint Republican groups against fascist organisations, the Pegida group in 2016 and even more recently the National Party. Recently too, Republican ex-prisoners had released a video stating the opposition of Republicanism to fascism with a growing list of signatures.
In conclusion, the speaker said that Ireland’s history made it difficult for fascism to advance in Ireland (except in the Loyalist areas) but as long as capitalism exists so too does the danger of fascism, particularly if the progressive forces do not fight effectively against the attacks of Capital on working people.
Catalonia
The representative of the Anti-Repression Platform of Catalonia, speaking in Castilian (Spanish), explained their organisation had come into existence after the repression of the Independence Referendum in 2017 and the subsequent frame-ups and allegations of terrorism against the Committees for the Defence of the Republic.
The speaker alluded to the jailing of the revolutionary socialist rapper Pablo Hasel and comrades who were charged with terrorism merely for expressing and organising solidarity for those being repressed.
“Don’t try to frighten us with threats of a fascist party getting into government”, he said in a reference to the growth of the Spanish fascist party Vox, because we have had a fascist government in the Spanish state since 1939!” (The year that the military-fascist forces defeated the Second Republic and founded four decades of dictatorship).
The Catalan went on to denounce the social-democratic party PSOE (currently in coalition government with Podemos Unitas), pointing out that it has had more political prisoners in jail and fatal victims than any other party in Spanish government (he was probably including the sponsoring the GAL terrorists of the 1980s).
“There has not been a year in which there were no political prisoners in the Spanish state”, he went on to say but also denounced the current Catalan Government, led by the allegedly pro-independence and leftist ERC party and its repression of socialists and independence activists.
He pointed out that fascists would make no distinction between communists and anarchists and asked “so then why should we?” He declared that all who resist repression now, regardless of before, are welcome to take part in their organisation.
The panel at the afternoon session: from left to right: speakers from Catalonia and Ireland, Basque chairperson, Turkish speakers and translator.
Prisoners on hunger-strike
The chairperson of the panel thanked the speakers and drew together elements from each of their presentations.
He went on to announce the declared intention of a small group of Basque political prisoners to embark on a hunger strike and to outline solidarity events being organised. The prisoners concerned are in the non-compliance minority of Basque political prisoners with a regime that forbids them referring to themselves as political prisoners.
The prison authorities intended to make the prisoners share a cell with other political prisoners who are however in compliance, intending to undermine the resistance of the small group and also posing the danger of conflicts within the cell. (A few days later news came that the hunger-striking prisoners had won their demands).
Amnistia organisation solidarity poster announcing forthcoming hunger-strike of political prisoners, now over because they won their demand.
Summary
The conference in its organisation and content of contributions drew anti-fascism together with imperialism and internationalist solidarity, all from an anti-capitalist perspective. It also drew connections between solidarity with political prisoners and resistance to repression.
All of the Basque organisations represented are in opposition to the trajectory of the leadership of what had been the Basque Left Patriotic movement, now represented by the EH Bildu party led by Otegi (with daily newspaper GARA, its trade union organisation LAB) and many of the older people were ex-supporters of that leadership.
That included some prominent ones such as Inaki Gil de San Vincente and the speakers and organisers of the conference and of the homage to the memory of Kontxi “Rita” Arana. The younger participants might have included ex-members or had come into political consciousness in opposition to that leadership.
Taken together, they are what many call ‘dissidents’ though some reject that term, saying that they are in fact sticking to the original line of independence and socialism and that it is the official leadership and their followers who have deviated. Their numbers are comparatively small at the moment but they are growing.
On Sunday participants in a 1916 Rising Commemoration organised by the Irish organisation Anti-Imperialist Action were harassed by police as they gathered to march to the Irish Citizen Army Republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Six political police in plain clothes walked among those gathered beside Phibsborough shops demanding names and addresses of the participants, most of whom were fairly young. Four uniformed Gardaí also stood nearby and a Public Order Unit van parked at the cemetery entrance.
The participants declined to be intimidated and set off on their march, led by a lone piper playing Irish marching airs, followed by a colour party with different banners interspersed among the marchers, among which fluttered many flags.
Organisers had learned that the coach carrying members of the Republican Flute Band from Scotland that was to lead the parade had been prevented by police there from taking the ferry to Ireland.
Centre photo: Four of the six plainclothes political police violating the civil rights of the peaceful people commemorating the Easter Rising. (Photo: D.Breatnach)Centre photo, another two plainclothes political police. The bald man joked while he harassed people. (Photo: D.Breatnach) (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Historical background
In 1916 a broad alliance the Irish Volunteers, Irish Citizen Army, Cumann na mBan, na Fianna Éireann and Hibernian Rifles1 took part in a Rising organised by the Irish Republican Brotherhood against British rule in Ireland and against world war.
Due to a number of unfortunate circumstances, the leader of the Volunteers cancelled the Rising which however went ahead a day later than planned and was for the most part confined to Dublin, where a third of the numbers in the original plan took part and fought for a week.
The occupying British Army shelled the city centre from a gunship in the river Liffey and also from artillery on land. Explosions and resulting fires destroyed much of the city centre including the General Post Office in the main street, which had been the headquarters of the insurrection.2
After a week with the city centre including the GPO in flames, the rebel garrison evacuated to Moore Street where the following day, surrounded and vastly outnumbered, the decision was taken to surrender.3 A British military court passed death sentences on nearly a hundred prisoners.
All but fifteen of those sentences were commuted to long jail periods but the seven Signatories of the 1916 Proclamation4 and another seven were shot by British firing squad in Dublin, a fifteenth in Cork and after trial months later a sixteenth was hanged in Pentonville Jail, London.
At Easter 1917 Irish Republican and Socialist women commemorated the 1916 Rising; ever since then Irish Republicans and sometimes Socialists in Ireland and in many parts of the diaspora have commemorated the Rising, whether legally5 or otherwise, in jail or at liberty.
The War of Independence began in 1919 with many of the Rising’s survivors participating6.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
The Parade on Sunday – local and national historical memory marked
At Cross Guns Bridge over the Royal Canal the parade halted and flares were lit in memory of events there in 1916.
Marching along the Cabra Road, the wall and a watchtower of the north side of Glasnevin Cemetery on the left of photo. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
On Easter Monday 1916 a small group of Irish Volunteers had marched from Maynooth along the canal bank to join the Rising in Dublin and found guarding the bridge two Irish Volunteers who advised them to wait until the following day to go into the city centre.
The Maynooth group spent the night in Glasnevin and the following day marched into the GPO, passing an empty Cross Guns Bridge on the way. Back towards Phibsborough, British artillery had blown a barricade and killed Seán Healy, a Fianna member at the Nth. Circular Road crossroads.
Later, the Dublin Fusiliers unit of the British Army blockaded the bridge, preventing people from crossing it in either direction. They shot dead a deaf local man who failed to heed their challenge because he did not hear it.
We Serve Neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland declared one banner carried last Sunday, Britain/NATO Out of Ireland another, This Is Our Mandate7, Our Republic and Collusion Is No Illusion, It Is State-Sponsored Murder were another two.
A large banner also declared alongside the image of James Connolly that Only Socialism Can Be the Solution for Ireland. Some organisations also carried their own banners, such as those of Dublin Independent Republicans, Ireland Anti-Internment Campaign and Irish Socialist Republicans.
Flags fluttering included those bearing the logo of the organising group Anti-Imperialist Action and others bearing the slogan “Always Anti-Fascist”, green-and-gold Starry Ploughs, a couple of Ikurrinak (Basque flags) and another two of Red with Hammer & Sickle in yellow.
Basque and antifascist flags (Photo: D.Breatnach)
At the Monument: speeches and songs
At the monument (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Glasnevin Cemetery (ReiligGhlas Naíonn) covers over 120 acres in North Dublin city and is in two parts, each with Republican Plots separated by the Cabra Road and contains the graves of both famous and ordinary people.
On the north side there is also access to the Botanic Gardens, both on the south banks of the Tolka river. The imposing Monument to numerous Republican uprisings and the Irish Citizen Army Republican plot is on the south side, across the pedestrian bridge over the railway line.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
A man chaired the event for Anti-Imperialist Action and spoke briefly, introducing people for readings (all of which were from James Connolly) and for orations. The presentations of these were evenly divided between men and women, three of those being of young people.
Three songs were sung: a woman sang The Foggy Dew (by Charles O’Neill) and Erin Go Bragh (by Peadar Kearney), while a man sang Patrick Galvin’s Where Is Our James Connolly? Two women read out pieces by James Connolly and another read out the 1916 Proclamation.
Person chairing the event (Photo: D.Breatnach)
The words of the chairperson and of those giving orations were different but there were common themes: upholding the historic Irish spirit of resistance, the importance of the working class in history and the objective of a socialist Republic encompassing the whole of the Irish nation.
These words were balanced by denunciation of US and British imperialism and the colonial/ NATO occupation of the Six Counties by the latter; the Irish client regime; the special no-jury courts8 of both administrations in Ireland and repression by police forces and occupation army.
One of the singers (Photo: D.Breatnach)
One of the readers (Photo: D.Breatnach)
One of the readers (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Also denounced were those political parties that had abandoned the struggle for the Republic and instead had become part of the colonial and neo-colonial administrations or, in the latter case, were on their way to becoming so.9
Floral tributes were laid by representatives of a number of announced organisations and then others came forward to lay floral tributes also. The colour party lowered flags for a minute’s silence in homage and salute before slowly raising them again and the piper played Amhrán na bhFiann.
The other singer Lowering of the colour party flags in homage to the fallen in the struggle (Photo: D.Breatnach)Colour party raises flags again in symbolism of the struggle continuing (Photo: D.Breatnach)
The chairperson thanked all for attendance, listing organisations by name and cautioning all to stay close together as they left, due to the threatening presence of Gardaí and in particular the Public Order Unit. In the event, the celebrants exited the cemetery and dispersed without incident.
1A small unit, an armed wing of a split from the more socially conservative USA version of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, their participation in the Rising was notable.
2Photos of much of the destruction are available on the Internet and accessible by search browser.
3The terrace they occupied still stands and is the object of a historical memory and conservation struggle against property speculator plans approved by the municipal city managers and Government political parties (see smsfd.ie).
4A remarkable document, the text of which is available from many postings on the Internet.
5Irish women commemorated it in public in contravention of British WWI martial legislation in 1917 and 1918 and for decades the public commemoration of the 1916 Rising (and even the flying of the Irish Tricolour) was forbidden in the British colony of the Six Counties with attendant colonial police attacks on any attempt to do so.
6Sometimes inaccurately called “the Tan War” (reference to a special colonial police auxiliary force that became known as the “Black n’ Tans”), the war saw the birth of the IRA and lasted from 1919-1921. A British “peace” proposal opened deep divisions in the nationalist coalition and was followed by a Civil War 1922-1923, in which the pro-Treaty government and armed forces were armed and supplied by the British to defeat the Republicans in a campaign of repression and jailing, military actions, kidnapping and torture, murder of prisoners, assassinations and over 80 formal executions.
7Also displaying text referring to the First Dáil’s Democratic Program of 1919.
8The Diplock court in the colony and the Special Criminal Courts in the Irish State, political special courts in all but name, with low proof bar and abnormally high conviction rate and refusal of bail while awaiting trial.
9References to 1) the 1930s split from the Sinn Féin party, the Fianna Fáil political party that became a preferred Government party of the foreign-dependent Irish ruling bourgeoisie and 2) to the Provisional Sinn Féin party who endorsed the British pacification plan in 1998 and embarked on the road to becoming a party of reformist nationalism in the colony and is heading for neo-colonial (and neo liberal capitalist) coalition government at the moment.
Palestinian flags waved as people gathered on the pedestrian reservation in Dublin’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street, to mark Palestinian Land Day March 30th, anniversary of the 1976 confiscation of Palestinian land by the Israeli Zionist State.
Naturally, the event also addresses the continual threat to additional Palestinian land by Zionist settler occupation, Israeli judicial and army demolition of Palestinian housing and intimidation, harassment and terrorism against Palestinians in Jerusalem.
Palestine supporters gathering for Land Day (Photo: D.Breatnach)
The Dublin event was organised by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, a broad organisation that receives broad support not only across the Irish Left and Republican spectrum but also from a great many non-aligned Irish people and even many among voters for mainstream political parties.
This support was emphasised by frequent drivers in passing traffic, both public, taxis and entirely private, blowing their horns in approval of the rally. The population of the Irish state has gone from being in general support of the Israeli State to being generally hostile to its behaviour.1
Zionists tend to depict anti-Israeli Zionism as being anti-Jewish and therefore, according to them, “anti-semitic”2. Quite apart from the wide inapplicability of the term and some isolated historical examples dredged up3, it fails to account for the change in public attitudes over recent decades.
The iconic GPO in the background (Photo: D.Breatnach)
It has been years of viewing even media-sanitised coverage of massacres of Palestinians by the Israeli armed forces with international impunity that has radically altered the opinion of the public in Ireland, in all probability drawing on their own historical experience of foreign occupation.
An elderly Irishman voicing anti-Jewish views did in fact approach the rally but was confronted by other Irish people who emphasised that they were against the Zionist state and not against Jews, soon causing the first man to depart unhappily.
The continual occupation of Palestinian land by Zionist settlers has invalidated even the “two-state solution” (sic) beloved of liberals, making it a practical impossibility, undermining the main ‘concession’ of the supposed solution of the USA-mediated “Palestinian peace process” of 1991.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
The refusal of the Israeli authorities to permit the return of Palestinian exiles while welcoming Jewish settlers, most of whom had no even ancestral connection to Palestine, means that the future for Palestinians in the Israeli state can be at best as an oppressed minority.4
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
Other Palestine news
Even as preparations for the Dublin rally took place, Israeli police shot dead a Palestinian they claimed had tried to wrest a gun from them at the Al Haq Mosque but whom Palestinian eye-witnesses said had merely been protesting the police harassment of a woman.
Since the rally, another two Palestinians have been killed in an by Israeli armed forces raid on Nablus. This brings the total number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces this year alone to over 90, with a high proportion of them children.
Mass protests and even mini-riots by Israeli Jews are currently expressing opposition to the current government’s plans to ‘reform’ the judiciary, to bring it under the greater control of the Executive.
While Israeli Jews are deeply divided on this question the vast majority are agreed on the need to suppress Palestinians, to enforce apartheid and to keep the State as ‘Jewish’ one.
Meanwhile an April 1st Fool’s Day hoax depicting an executive of the sports shoe manufacturer company Puma declaring a boycott of the Zionist state was widely shared on the Twitter social media to overwhelmingly welcoming comment.
Exposure of the hoax received mixed responses, with wide condemnation from pro-Israeli and even some pro-Palestinian sources but others claiming it helped to widely publicise the manufacturer Puma’s close links to the Zionist State and that would enhance its boycott by many.
End.
(Image accessed: Internet)
Footnotes
1Dublin City has had Jewish municipal Councillors and the sixth President of Israel, Chaim Herzog (Hebrew: חיים הרצוג; 17 September 1918 – 17 April 1997) was an Irish-born Israeli politician, general, lawyer and author who served as the 6th President of Israel between 1983 and 1993. He was born in Belfast and raised primarily in Dublin; his father was Ireland’s Chief rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, who immigrated to the British protectorate of Palestine in 1935 and served in the Haganah Zionist paramilitary group, later the Israeli Army where he reached the rank of Major-General. As recently as 1967 the prevailing Irish public opinion seemed sympathetic to the Israeli State and the fictional propaganda and wildly inaccurate historical Hollywood films Exodus (1960) and Cast a Giant Shadow (1966) were widely viewed sympathetically in Ireland.
2The term originally included hatred or fear of all Semitic people, including Arabs and Jews but has come to be understood as exclusively meaning a racist attitudes towards Jews. By no means all Jews are Zionist though Zionists have worked long and hard to make both descriptions interchangeable with a great deal of success among the world Jewish population with possible unfortunate consequences for Jewish populations outside Israel. However many Jews have criticised the behaviour of the Zionist State towards Palestinians, earning the hatred of the Zionists, who cannot label them as anti-semitic and therefore call them “self-hating Jews”.
An event was held on a busy Saturday afternoon in Dublin’s city centre to commemorate IRA volunteer Patrick O’Brien, killed by soldiers of the Irish State.
The event included bagpipe airs, a colour party, speeches and a resistance song.
A colour party with Irish Tricolour and the flags of the four provinces, led by a lone piper marched into and a short distance westward up Talbot Street towards where a crowd waited beside a memorial sign that had been erected shortly earlier. The colour party took up station on the opposite side of the road.
Led by a piper playing Irish airs, the colour party (i.e carrying the flags – the Irish Tricolour and those of the four provinces of Ireland) approaches as the start of the commemoration. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Among the airs being played on the short march were Thomas Moore’s Let Erin Remember and The Wearing of the Green or The Rising of the Moon, the same traditional air to both different songs referring to the 1798 Rising.
THE SHORT LIFE OF A LOYAL REPUBLICAN
Framed portrait photo of Vol. Patrick O’Brien on display at the commemoration (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Gina Nicoletti, chairing the event, recounted to the crowd a short history of Volunteer Patrick O’Brien who was born on 17 August 1898 in the townland of Woodlands near Castledermot in County Kildare to a local agricultural working couple.
The O’Brien family had 16 children, all of whom survived and ten of whom lived with Patrick and his parents in a three-room house at the time of the 1911 Census.
An obituary published in a Republican newspaper on the anniversary of his death suggests that Patrick moved to Dublin in 1915, joining the Irish Volunteers in December of that year aged 17. He took part in the 1916 Easter Rising under the command of Edward Daly.
Evading capture in 1916 and returning home, O’Brien joined the local Irish Volunteers company in Castledermot but returned to Dublin in May 1917 and became attached to E Company, 3 Battalion, Dublin Brigade, Irish Volunteers, which was based on the south side of the city.
Sean Óg sings The Foggy Dew while accompanying himself on guitar and centre of photo is Gina Nicoletti, who chaired the event. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
An active IRA member during the War of Independence, Vol. O’Brien took the anti-Treaty side in the IRA split in March 1922.
In a response to a renewal of executions of IRA men by the Free State government, Liam Lynch (IRA Chief of Staff) issued the ‘Amusements Order’ on 13 March 1923 banning all cinema, theatre and sports events “at a time of national mourning” with action threatened against non-compliance.
At midnight on 23 March 1923, Patrick took part in an operation to blow up the Carleton Picture House, O’Connell Street (then near the Parnell Monument opposite the Savoy Cinema). The cinema had closed an hour before a landmine at the front entrance shattered the glass of several windows.
There were no injuries but newspaper articles reported that the sound of the explosion was heard several miles away. Accounts of what happened afterwards were gathered from one of the IRA unit, Volunteer Joseph Doody in his pension application.
The unit unexpectedly encountered Free State soldiers coming from the Parnell Monument who opened fire on them and another patrol was approaching from the southern end of O’Connell Street and the unit retreated through Findlater Place and out to Marlborough Street.
In the running firefight in Talbot Street, O’Brien was hit by at least four bullets (three in his left leg and one in his right leg). He fell wounded on the pavement between Speidel’s pork butchers and the Masterpiece Picture Palace at 99 Talbot Street and died about 30 minutes after arrival at hospital.
The colour party lowers the flags in honour of a martyr as the piper plays a lament (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Patrick O’Brien was 24 and his death certificate listed his occupation as an employee of a railway company. His address was 28 Cadogan Road, Fairview which is a cul de sac of Victorian redbrick houses close to Annesley Bridge and opposite the Sean Russell statue.
Only three weeks before Patrick’s death, the Free State CID1 had raided no. 43 Cadogan Road and captured the press used to print the Sinn Féin2 paper An Phoblacht along with eight people who were on site. A number of prominent IRA families lived in the vicinity, including the Brughas.
Patrick O’Brien was buried in the Republican Plot, Glasnevin Cemetery and a volley was fired over his grave, presumably following the funeral in the cover of darkness as the IRA could not have risked such a public display during the burial, in a time of martial law.
The colour party raise the flags again in symbolism of the struggle carrying on after honouring a martyr (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Despite the hard repression by the Irish State on combatants, their relatives and friends, O’Brien’s family were proud of Patrick as displayed in an anniversary notice placed in The Nationalist & Leinster Times.
The Irish Independent reported on 27 March 1923 that at the inquest of Patrick’s death, his brother James told those present:
“[My brother] … belonged to the IRA since 1915 being then about 15 years of age. He had never changed his principles since then. He always intended to die as he did … rather than change his principles as he swore allegiance to the Republic in 1916.”
FLORAL WREATH, SONG AND SPEECH
A representative of Anti-Imperialist Action was called upon and stepped forward to attach a green, white and orange floral wreath to the pole beneath the commemorative sign.
The plaque/ placard commemorating Vol. Patrick O’Brien attached in Talbot Street by Independent Republicans with the floral wreath from Anti-Imperialist Action attached below it (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Seán Óg accompanied himself on guitar singing The Foggy Dew, a popular Republican ballad about the 1916 Rising composed by Fr. Charles O’Neill.
Dublin City Councillor Cieran Perry gave a fairly short speech stressing the importance of these acts of remembrance upholding traditions of resistance in the Dublin working class, also denouncing the fake patriots who stir up racist divisions and hostility in the community.
Perry’s speech also listed some of the crimes of the Irish state, facts underlined when Joe Mooney read out the list of 70 IRA Volunteers formally executed by the Irish state along with those killed in battle or after they surrendered, or were abducted, tortured and murdered in Dublin 1922-’23.
Cnclr. Cieran Perry speaking at the commemoration. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
TRAFFIC AND PEOPLE
Traffic was light along the narrow Talbot Street during the event and slowed down to ease past the crowd that had spilled from the pedestrian pavement into the street. A few minutes’ eastward of the spot is the plaque commemorating the killing of Sean Treacy by the British in November 1920.
There was a substantial number of people in support of the event on both pavements of the one-way street but others gathered too, whether out of curiosity or in sympathy. Some of those present consisted of visitors from other countries, whether as students, tourists or workers.
The crowd grew and spilled on to Talbot Street. [The plaque to Vol. Sean Treacy killed by British soldiers in 1920 is high on the front of a building just beyond the tree on the right of photo] (Photo: D.Breatnach).
Not for the first time I thought that having leaflets to distribute summarising the event and the reason for it would be useful. I spent a little time explaining some aspects of the event and its history to a couple of visitors from Sweden who seemed very interested.
The uniformed Gardaí kept away from the event, though no doubt the plain-clothed political Special Branch had a few of their own in the vicinity to collect faces and try to match names.
THE ORGANISERS: INDEPENDENT REPUBLICANS
The commemorative event was organised by a group by the name Independent Republicans which has been doing great work in conserving and promoting historical memory associated with events such as the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War.
The Irish Free State came to power as an instrument of British imperialism which clothed, armed and otherwise supplied the state’s National (sic) Army. Independent Republicans have collected the names of 70 Irish Republicans killed in Dublin by that Army.
The group has also devoted time and effort to researching the backgrounds and circumstances of death of many on that list, a substantial undertaking for which we owe them a great debt. Their erection of ‘plaque’ signs around the city at the spot where the fighters fell is also great work.
The commemorative plaque/ placard to Vol. Patrick O’Brien’s memory being erected shortly before the start of the event (Photo: D.Breatnach)
On Easter Saturday (8 April) Independent Republicans will be holding a 1916 Rising commemoration in Dublin city centre, details below.
Anti-Imperialist Action will be holding theirs on Easter Sunday (9 April), details below.
End.
FOOTNOTES:
1Criminal Investigation Department, based at Oriel House, where police detectives and some soldiers of the Free State organised operations against Republicans including raids, assassinations, abductions and torture.
2This is not the party of the same name today. Sinn Féin began as a dual-monarchy Irish nationalist party, adopting Republicanism later in 1918. Those who later supported the anti-Republican status of the country and partition by England left the party and another large number left to join the Fianna Fáil party upon the latter’s founding. Briefly in the 1960s the party espoused socialism but split at the end of the decade and Sinn Féin under the Provisionals briefly adopted socialism again during the 1970s. The party of that name today is neither socialist nor even Republican.
rebelbreeze 