Diarmuid Breatnach
(Reading time: 5 mins.)
The Far-Right mobilised a large number1 of people for a national protest march in Dublin on Saturday 26th April, pretending the main target was the Irish Government and the housing and health service crises but was purely racist, anti-immigration.
A counter-rally was organised from the Left in front of the GPO, past which the far-Right demonstration was scheduled to pass. They were kettled on three sides by crowd barriers with two Garda vans and Gardaí on foot in front of them.
A number of far-right elements gathered on the sides of the confined mass to throw insults at the anti-racist there, policed very lightly and gently by Gardaí, in stark contrast to how the latter have treated some anti-fascist and anti-racist activists in the recent past.
Among the anti-racist crowd there were many flags of the People Before Profit and Labour parties, an Irish Tricolour or two, two Starry Plough flags and a couple of Palestine flags.
When the Far-Right march came down O’Connell Street, as might be expected from past experience, they carried a flood of Irish Tricolours and some ‘Irish Republic’ flags.
It was not the first time the Left – and these are for the most part the electoral Left – had acted so stupidly from a visual point of view. Because they claim to represent the workers, they pretend to scorn nationalist flags – well then why not at least fly the Plough,2 flag of the Irish workers?
But no, flying red and pink party flags and leaving the national stage to be represented by the Far-Right. And why not fly the flags of national rebellion anyway, are they not honoured for their anti-colonialism and revolutionary spirit? Why neglect to confront the Far-Right with the contradiction?
I have been pointing that out over years without any seeming effect on the Left (or indeed on the Republican movement). However the Mála Spíosraí (Spice Bag) artist group posted a similar objection, making many of the same points and they may have better luck with it.3
The Far-Right when they arrived were met with jeers but the marchers were jeering the anti-racists also. It was interesting to hear the anti-racist crowd switch from shouting that “refugees are welcome here” to baiting the Far-Right with: “Where’s your Union Jack?”4
Confronting the pretend patriotism of the Far-Right with their leaders’ connections to British fascists and Loyalists is much more effective than some of the slogans that are regularly shouted by the Left on these occasions. Reminding people of McGregor’s wearing a Poppy5 might be useful.
Creating slogans to expose their role in distracting attention from property speculators, big landlords, bankers and foreign multinationals on to migrants, who don’t cause any of the problems, would be very useful but expecting creativity and initiative in the electoral Left …!
At least one of the FR leaders, Malachy Steenson and some marchers were seen wearing caps in Trump imitation with “Make Ireland Great Again” printed across them. Unless pre-invasion 1169, there was no hint as to when the ‘great’ period in Ireland’s history might have been.
The country was under total occupation by the 1800s. The Irish State was set up in 1922 on a partitioned land with continuing high emigration. Steenson is an ex-Republican so presumably he knows this. Can he be hearkening to the days of the Church domination of the neo-colony?
Among the banners and flags seen among the marchers were those of Irish fascist organisations, the National Party and Irish Freedom Party. Slogans of “Ireland for the Irish” and “Get them out” were frequently to be heard and “Ireland is full” was seen on a number of placards.
The first two slogans are shouted by people many of whom have no interest in freeing the Six Counties from British Occupation nor the whole country from foreign multinational companies; in fact these are issues which the fake “Patriots” of the Far-Right never address.
On population statistics alone it can be shown that Ireland is far from “full”, given that the population of the country now is lower than the 8 million plus which was recorded in 1845. But lies of the sinister repeated by the ignorant and credulous have long been the stock of fascism.
Homelessness is due to affordable housing shortage, in turn is due to construction, sale and rental being for profit alone. We’ve had a housing shortage for centuries and expelling immigrants will not cure it – a social housing construction program can but the Far-Right never agitate for that.
Expelling immigrants might seem to shorten health service queues but in fact would lengthen them as those members of staff in paramedical services, nursing, surgery, cleaning and security left the country. But none of the anti-immigrant propaganda is about logic – quite the contrary.
A position that it’s patriotic to allow only the Irish-born to live and work in Ireland would have meant lost us four of the Seven Signatories of the 1916 Proclamation James Connolly, Tom Clark, the father of Patrick (and Willy) Pearse and the mother of Thomas Mac Donagh.
The racists flying the “Irish Republic” flag may be unaware that it was painted on one of her curtains in the house of London-born Constance Markievicz, delivered by her during the 1916 Rising to the GPO and installed on the roof by Eamon Bulfin, born and reared in Argentina.
The Irish Tricolour was presented to Irish Republicans by French Republican women during the Paris Revolution of 1848. The Harp on a green background was the flag of the United Irish, nearly all of whose leaders’ antecedents had come from other countries.
IT’S OUR FAULT
We can expose the ‘patriotism’ of those who ignore the foreign occupation of one-sixth of our land but organise against foreign workers; we can laugh at the ‘patriotism’ and ‘anti-globalism’ that thinks it fine to follow “Poppy” McGregor cosying up to a US imperialist president.
But in the end, those contradictory positions and don’t-compute beliefs won’t matter. The fascists are out to mobilise the ill-informed and gullible who have been hurt by the capitalist system and, it must be said, who have been largely ignored by the Irish Left and by Irish Republicans.
At the very least, the progressive forces could have fought for a wide public housing program. A campaign of occupations could have forced that though people would have gone to jail for it. Attempts were made by the Revolutionary Housing League but they were not supported.
The speculators, big landlords and bankers would hate it but in the end could afford to let it happen. They would still be in charge and still making money. It was not a revolutionary demand.
But the campaign was not pressed and now the Far-Right are there with a simplistic but completely wrong answer: stop immigration.
The electoral Left is not interested in fighting fascism but instead in anti-racist posturing. The Irish Republican movement is in general more interested in getting the British out of their 6-County Irish colony. Even on causes with which they agree, they can rarely stand on the same ground.
The advance of the Far-Right is the fault of the spaces left empty by the Left.
end.
FOOTNOTES
SOURCES
1The numbers quoted varied hugely. The first report on Breaking News had them at twice the number of the counter-protest, which they estimated at 2,000, an under-estimate to my opinion by almost a thousand. The next B News report put the anti-immigration numbers at “hundreds of thousands”, i.e at least 200,000! A more realistic guess would be around 10,000.
2The Starry Plough, flag of the Irish Citizen Army, the first workers’ army in the world, formed to defend the workers from police attacks in the employers’ attempt to break the Irish Transport & General Workers Union with a Lockout of union members.
3The Tricolour will be a right-wing symbol soon if it’s not front and centre at counters. Being allergic to your own flag is moronic and damages your legitimacy as a national movement. A sea of red and pink flags without the hard won symbols of Irish nationalism plays into the right-wing narrative that left is inherently anti-Irish. Fly the tricolour if you don’t want it to end up like the St George’s flag in England.
The left have a tendency to abandon things that are being co-opted by political opponents. In a country where nationalism, socialism and patriotism go hand-in-hand, this would be extremely damaging. Look no further than the Provo/Stickie split in the 1970’s for an example of the left losing legitimacy by putting the red before the green during a crisis.
You’re not just fighting the domestic right, you’re fighting US and UK conservative media and Zionism. Ireland is unique in Europe as a post-colonial state and we can be unique in how we fight our culture war. Nationalism should not be given away, the ‘left’ should not become the generic caricature pushed by right wing media. Our national flag should vastly outnumber all other symbols — it is a symbol of resistance.
4Increasingly the Far-Right leaderships have been exposed in alliance with British fascists and racists such as Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage and with British Loyalists such as James Dowson.
5In 2015 Conor McGregor wore the red Poppy, causing controversy in Ireland as the symbol is firmly associated with the British imperialist army. McGregor claimed it represented all soldiers in all wars, which is patently nonsense. The Poppy is trademarked and produced by the British Legion to commemorate the UK soldiers killed – not even those of the Commonwealth, to say nothing of the soldiers on the other side, nor the millions of civilians killed.
rebelbreeze 