I’m twenty-seven. I wasn’t in any room where that trick first got played. But I grew up watching it land on the two people who raised me. My da was a blanket man. My ma was a republican prisoner. Both of them gave years of their lives to this, in conditions most of the people who now call them irrelevant couldn’t survive a week of, and when they said what they saw happening, out loud, in their own community, the answer was the same one every time. What’s your alternative. And when they had one anyway, when they kept asking, the label came next. Dissidents. Not from strangers. From people who’d shared a wing with them, or should have known better than most what that word was being used to bury.

I’ve heard it enough times now, secondhand and first, to know exactly what it’s doing. It isn’t a question. It’s a door closing. It’s the Provo leadership’s way of saying: you’ve forfeited the right to criticise the moment you stopped agreeing with us, so keep it, we have no use for it, and if you can’t hand us a better strategy on demand then sit down and let the adults talk. I watched that trick get played on two people who’d given more to this than most of the ones using it against them ever will, or have. I know the shape of it from the inside of my own house.

So today I’m handing it back.

Andy Burnham said what needed no translating. The referendum isn’t coming, not soon, not on any timeline anyone in London is obliged to name. And within a day, Michelle O’Neill and Mary Lou McDonald were telling the country they’d confronted him directly, forcefully, and that he’d backed down. No statement. No retraction from Downing Street. No policy shifted an inch. Just their war of words “victory”, repeated with enough conviction that the people who need it to be true stopped asking for anything more.

That’s not a new trick. That’s the only trick. Say you won something nobody witnessed. Let the ones who need to believe it, believe it. Wait for the news cycle to move past the point where anyone thinks to ask what actually changed.

Nothing changed. Nothing has changed in thirty years of this. “Vote Sinn Féin, Smash Stormont,” the posters said, back before Stormont was the thing they’d spend three decades keeping the lights on inside. Martin McGuinness stood up at an Ard Fheis and told a hall full of people that even suggesting the movement was edging toward a constitutional path was a slander worth shaming a man for. Shame, shame, shame, he said, a few short years before that’s exactly the road they walked down, with the same straight face.

I never stood in a hall and heard that said. But I grew up in a house where the people who did stand in those halls, believing every word of it at the time, spent the rest of their lives working out what it cost them to believe it. My parents paid that cost on the wing and on the blanket, and then paid it again, years later, when the same leadership that once demanded that loyalty turned around and called them irrelevant for questioning where it led. That’s the whole method. Not lying, exactly, managing. Managing what the base is allowed to expect. Managing how long people will wait before the waiting itself starts to look like the point. I watched it get managed on the people closest to me.

Listen to what O’Neill actually said to Cool FM, not what she’s usually paraphrased as saying. “If they keep doing it, how they’ve done it, they’re always gonna get the same outcome. Because the budget cannot stretch, the budget does not work, the budget isn’t enough for public services here… If we were funded, as we should be, we would have a very, very different arrangement. We would be having a very, very different conversation. But for decades now we’ve been underfunded, Andy Burnham. If he wants to take the opportunity he talks about, if he wants to do things differently, then fund us differently.”

That’s not the language of a movement demanding a united Ireland. That’s the language of a devolved administration asking for a bigger settlement from the Treasury. The problem, in her own words, isn’t partition. It’s the budget. Fund us differently, she says, not end this arrangement, not give us the referendum, but fund the arrangement better. Stormont, in her own account, doesn’t fail because it’s British rule administered by Irish hands. It fails because the cheque is too small. Fix the cheque and, by her own logic, you fix Stormont.

That’s the tell. Thirty years of “united Ireland” as the headline, and when the moment comes to actually press a British Prime Minister on his own doorstep, the ask isn’t unity at all. It’s money. It’s better funding for the very institution Sinn Féin once ran on a promise to smash. You don’t blame Westminster’s budget if the constitutional question is still the one that matters to you, you blame partition. She didn’t. She blamed the settlement, and asked for a better one, from the government whose authority over the North she’s supposed to be trying to end.

And sit with the phrasing itself for a second, because it’s odder than it first sounds. “We would be having a very, very different conversation.” Different how? Said in answer to a question about Burnham and the border poll, the natural reading is that better funding would change the constitutional conversation, not just the day-to-day running of Stormont. If the case for unity stood on its own, independent of the budget, you wouldn’t reach for funding as the thing that produces “a very different conversation” about it. You’d say the money is one fight and the constitutional question is another, entirely separate one. She didn’t say that. Pressed, live, unscripted, she tied the two together herself. That’s not proof the party doesn’t want a united Ireland. But it is evidence that when the moment came to answer for it, the reflex wasn’t the constitutional case. It was the invoice.

So, what’s the alternative?

Here’s mine. The alternative is a movement that tells its own people the truth about where the border poll actually stands under the law: that “appears likely” is a phrase with no fixed threshold, decided entirely at the discretion of a British Secretary of State, with no external body holding real power to compel it. The alternative is a leadership that stops trading in claimed private victories and starts publishing what was actually said, in whatever room it was said in, so the people footing the bill for thirty years of patience can judge for themselves whether patience is still the right word for what they’re being asked to do.

The alternative is admitting, out loud, that Irish unity has functioned for a generation as an electoral proposition rather than a governing objective, a thing to be promised at every Ard Fheis and delivered at none of them, and that admitting this is not defeat. It’s the first honest sentence in a long time.

I don’t have a document with a date on it. I won’t pretend to. But not having one doesn’t disqualify the question, and it never did, that’s exactly the sleight of hand the question is built to perform. You don’t need a rival five-year plan to notice that the people currently in charge of the only plan on offer have spent thirty years not delivering it, and calling every unanswered promise a step closer.

I’m twenty-seven. I haven’t spent thirty years standing at that door. But I was raised by two people who did, who paid for their place at it in a cell and on a wing, and who were still being told the same door was about to open right up until the day they stopped believing it. I don’t need thirty years of my own to see it. I only need to have watched it happen to them, and to still be asking, in front of whoever’s still listening, why the door hasn’t moved. That’s not nothing. That’s the alternative. It was always available. Sinn Féin just needed everyone too tired, or too loyal, or too frightened of the question, to ask for it.

So I’m asking.

Thirty-two since the ceasefire was called a victory. And here we are again, watching the same trick get played, just better dressed than it used to be.

Burnham says the referendum’s off the table. Fine. At least that’s honest. A British Prime Minister doing what British Prime Ministers do, holding onto what’s his. I don’t expect anything else from him. That’s not what should sicken anyone.

It’s the other half. Michelle O’Neill stands up and tells you she confronted him, forcefully, and that he backed down. Backed down. Where’s the statement. Where’s the retraction. Where’s anything at all except her word that it happened, while thousands nod along because they need it to be true too badly to ask her to show her work.

I think about the men who stood in halls in the ‘80s telling volunteers that anyone suggesting the movement was headed for a constitutional path was slandering it. Shame, shame, shame, they said. And then seeing them same mouths, a few years later, walk that movement into Stormont without blinking. You don’t get to do that to people twice and still call it leadership. That’s management. Managing what you’ll let them expect. Managing what they’re allowed to ask.

This is the same management, updated for now. Claim a win nobody witnessed. Let the ones who need to believe it, believe it. Wait for the news cycle to move before anyone checks what actually changed. Nothing did. Nothing will, not while the institutions stay open exactly the way London needs them to, with the party that’s supposed to be ending partition sitting inside those institutions keeping the lights on.

Twenty-eight years of being told it’s close. I know exactly which door never opens. Standing near something forever isn’t the same as getting it done.

How a party that once fought to remove the British built its entire strategy on a clause the British wrote, the British control, and the British have now told us in writing they have no intention of ever using.

Sinn Féin tell people freedom is coming. Not through struggle, not through building anything, but through a box on a ballot paper that a British Secretary of State may, at their own discretion, one day decide to print.

They call it the border poll. They talk about it the way the old movement used to talk about the Republic itself, as though it were inevitable, as though history were doing the work for them. Nobody in that leadership will tell you the plain truth of the thing: this mechanism has never once delivered what they are promising. Not here, not anywhere, not ever. And the people holding the pen have already told us why.

Part 1: The Clause They Never Read Properly

Section 1 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 is the legal skeleton of the Good Friday Agreement’s “principle of consent.” The wording Sinn Féin canvassers never quote in full is this: the Secretary of State must call a poll only “if at any time it appears likely to him” that a majority would vote for a united Ireland.

Appears likely. To him. That is the entire bar. Not a petition, not a demographic census, not a body of evidence anyone else gets to inspect. One British minister’s private judgement, unexplained, unappealable in any meaningful sense, sitting as the sole gatekeeper on Irish self-determination.

Nationalists who challenged this in the courts were told exactly what to expect from it. In the McCord litigation, a petitioner tried to force the Secretary of State to publish the criteria for calling a poll. The courts refused, treating it as a political question the judiciary did not want to touch. There is no obligation on London to explain itself, no timetable it must keep, and no consequence if it simply never acts.

And now we don’t even have to speculate about how that discretion will be used. In January 2024, as part of the deal to get the DUP back into Stormont, the British government published a paper stating in black and white that it “sees no realistic prospect of a border poll leading to a united Ireland,” and that on its own assessment the conditions for one “are unlikely to be objectively met.” That is not a prediction. That is the hand that holds the pen telling you, in an official government document, that it does not intend to write.

Part 2: The Man Who Signed It Told You Not To

In 1986, before he ever sat across a table from a British government, Gerry Adams stood up and told the movement that no Irish republican could support any treaty that institutionalised British claims to a part of Irish national territory. In 1998, he signed exactly that treaty.

That isn’t a footnote. That’s the founding contradiction of the entire strategy Sinn Féin now asks people to trust. The Good Friday Agreement is, on Adams’ own 1986 terms, the very document he said no republican could ever support, because it does precisely what he warned against: it institutionalises British government claims over the six counties, in law, indefinitely, unless and until a poll that same British government controls says otherwise.

Part 3: The Never-Ending End Game

Since the ceasefire in 1994, the Sinn Féin leadership has been telling its own base that unity is close. Not once, but on a rolling schedule, decade after decade, always just over the horizon.

Martin McGuinness told supporters unity would come by 2016. Martina Anderson, in January 2022, told people “we are in the end game of the partition of Ireland,” and that self-determination was already won. Mary Lou McDonald, in 2025, told a commemoration crowd the conversation was “live, happening in real time,” and that referendums had to be prepared for “this decade.”

Every one of those dates has come and gone. None of them delivered a poll, still less a united Ireland. What they delivered was another decade, another leader, another promise pushed further down the road, while the party that makes them sits as the largest in an institution built specifically to manage partition rather than end it.

There is a pattern here, and it is not accidental. A movement is told it is winning right up until the moment it stops asking whether it actually is.

Part 4: What the Same Leadership Won’t Even Try

If you want to see how much weight Stormont’s mechanisms actually carry when Sinn Féin tries to use them, look no further than Derry. The party holding the largest mandate in that institution has never been able to secure so much as a referendum on removing the imposed “London” prefix from the city’s own name, a vote that would be won by a landslide, for fear of provoking a unionist backlash.

If a Sinn Féin-led Stormont cannot deliver a referendum on a city’s own name against that kind of resistance, ask yourself honestly what chance the same structures give a referendum on ending partition itself, a vote with immeasurably higher stakes and a unionist veto written directly into the Agreement that established it.

Part 5: What Sinn Féin Is Actually Asking People to Trust

Strip the strategy back to what it really is. Sinn Féin is asking the people of this island to trust that the state which partitioned Ireland, garrisoned it for a century, and personally wrote the rules under which its own removal would be judged, will one day act in good faith to dismantle its own settlement, despite having now said in an official document that it doesn’t believe the conditions for that will ever be met.

There is no precedent anywhere for that trust ever being rewarded, and there is now a signed government paper telling you not to hold your breath.

A demographic majority is not a mandate. Watching the census shift is not a strategy. And treating some hypothetical future poll as the finish line lets the real work, building the actual social, economic and political case for a united Ireland now, go undone while people wait on a British minister’s mood.

Conclusion: The Work That Was Never Meant to Be Outsourced

Freedom on this island has never, at any point in eight hundred years, been handed down through a mechanism the occupying power designed, controls, and can simply decline to use. There is nothing in the record to suggest this will be the first time, and everything in the record, including the words of the very leadership pushing this strategy, to suggest otherwise.

The republican position doesn’t need to borrow its legitimacy from a clause in British legislation. It has its own foundation, in the unfinished work of 1916, and in the reality that the occupation of the six counties has not ended just because a party that once claimed to oppose it now administers it from Stormont. Sinn Féin has traded the certainty of struggle for the uncertainty of a British minister’s discretion, and called it strategy.

It isn’t strategy. It’s waiting. And waiting has never once put the British out of this country.

- Séamus Fitzsimons

If you’ve been watching the rise of Ireland’s modern far right, you’ve probably noticed a bizarre trend. Groups pushing ethno-nationalist, anti-immigrant agendas are increasingly wrapping themselves in the tricolor, singing republican rebel songs, and using Provisional IRA (PIRA) slogans like Tiocfaidh ár lá.

To anyone who actually knows Irish history, this is bizarre. To make Irish republicanism fit into a right-wing, xenophobic box, the far right has had to engage in a massive act of historical revisionism.

They are trying to claim that the PIRA was a “strictly nationalist, blood-and-soil” movement that had nothing to do with socialism.

For anyone who’s read a book or knows anyone who was a volunteer. Luckily for me my father who was a Blanketman and on the No-Wash. They know that’s an utter lie.

1. The Myth of the 1969 Split

The far-right’s favorite talking point is the 1969 split, when the Provisional IRA broke away from the Official IRA. They claim the Provisionals did this to “save” Irish nationalism from the “Officials’” Marxism.

The Reality: The split wasn’t about capitalism vs. socialism; it was about action vs. inaction.

In 1969, Catholic neighborhoods in the Six Counties were being burned out by loyalist mobs. The Dublin-based leadership of the IRA was so bogged down in academic Marxist theory that they failed to provide weapons to defend these communities. The Provisionals broke away because they wanted to return to “physical-force” nationalism to defend their people. They didn’t reject left-wing politics; they rejected leadership that preferred reading books to defending neighborhoods. Within a few years, the PIRA explicitly adopted a democratic socialist platform.

2. A War of Class and Civil Rights

The far right wants you to believe the “Troubles” were fought over pure identity. But the PIRA was fueled by a working-class struggle.

The conflict erupted because Irish Catholics were living under a system of state-sponsored discrimination. They were denied fair housing, denied jobs, and denied equal voting rights by a conservative, unionist elite. The PIRA’s fight was fundamentally tied to economic and social justice for an oppressed working class.

3. International Solidarity vs. Right-Wing Isolation

Modern right-wing nationalists are isolationists who oppose global solidarity. The PIRA was the exact opposite. They viewed themselves as part of a global tapestry of left-wing, anti-colonial liberation movements.

• They actively aligned themselves with Nelson Mandela’s ANC in South Africa against Apartheid.
• They supported the PLO in Palestine and Basque separatists in Spain.
• When PIRA hunger striker Bobby Sands died in 1981, the revolutionary socialist government of Iran renamed the street the British Embassy stood on to “Bobby Sands Street.”

The PIRA didn’t hate foreigners; they hated British imperialism.

4. The Intellectuals of the H-Blocks

When PIRA prisoners were locked up in the H-Blocks, what do you think they were reading? They weren’t reading right-wing, conservative literature.

Bobby Sands and his comrades spent their years in prison smuggling in, reading, and debating the works of left-wing revolutionary thinkers like Frantz Fanon, James Connolly, and Che Guevara.

Legendary Belfast PIRA commander Brendan Hughes made it clear what they were fighting for before he died, explicitly stating that the ultimate goal of the struggle was a “thirty-two county socialist republic.”

Why is the Far Right Doing This?

The modern Irish far right has a major problem: they have no genuine historical legacy in Ireland. Historically, right-wing movements in Ireland (like the Blueshirts in the 1930s) sided with the wealthy establishment, the Catholic Church, and the status quo.

Because they lack their own historical icons, the far right is trying to steal the working-class romanticism and rebel street-cred of the PIRA.

But you cannot separate the nationalism of the PIRA from its socialism. To the men and women who fought, a 32-county Ireland wasn’t just about changing the flag over Stormont – it was about tearing down a capitalist, imperialist system and building a socialist republic.

Don’t let internet revisionists rewrite the history of the people who actually lived it.

Brendan Hughes once said that the only thing that changed after the Good Friday Agreement was the color of the uniforms and the size of the politicians’ bank accounts. He called it the “Armani Suit Brigade.” Today, twenty-seven years after we were promised a “New Ireland,” that brigade has just awarded itself a 27% pay rise.

While the men and women in Stormont jump from £53,000 to £67,200, the view from the ground in West Belfast and beyond tells a story of a different “Peace.” It is a peace of damp walls, empty cupboards, and unmarked graves.

The Mathematics of Betrayal

They tell us there is “no money.” They look at the nurses on the picket lines, striking for a wage that simply keeps pace with the bread on the table, and they preach “fiscal realism.” Yet, realism apparently doesn’t apply to the Hill.

In Belfast, 100,000 children are living in poverty. To them, “the laughter of our children” isn’t a political slogan - it’s a hollow echo in overcrowded houses where 40% of families are packed into rooms too small for dignity. When 51% of households don’t own a car, the distance to a hospital or a job isn’t measured in miles; it’s measured in the impossibility of getting there.

The “Got Fuck All” Dividend

Hughes’ famous rebrand of the GFA as “Got Fuck All” has never felt more accurate.

• Fuel Poverty: Over 40% of adults are fuel poor. Nearly a third of our households have sat in the dark or the cold in the last two years because they couldn’t feed the meter.
• The Breadline: While an MLA pockets an extra £14,000 a year, 7% of our neighbors cannot afford fresh fruit or vegetables.
• The Housing Crisis: There are 10,307 households in Belfast living in “housing stress” - trapped in a 37-month wait for a home while mould and damp rot the lungs of the next generation. We are told we need 2,200 social homes a year; we get barely 1,500.

This isn’t a failure of “resources.” It is a failure of intent.

The Cost of Survival

The statistics of our streets read like a war report, but the enemy isn’t an army today - it’s neglect. Death rates in West Belfast are 60% higher for men than the regional average. Why? Because poverty is a slow-motion execution.

We see it in the drug-related deaths that have tripled in a decade, hitting the most deprived areas 4.5 times harder than the leafy suburbs where the politicians live. We see it in the 294 lives lost to suicide in 2025, a disproportionate number of them young men from the same streets that were once the frontline of the struggle.

The Gilded Cage on the Hill

Whether they wear the green ribbon or the orange sash, the result is the same. They build cycle lanes and parks while the people they represent are being evicted by the Housing Executive with the support of the PSNI. They talk about “investment” while 40% of Belfast’s unemployed are concentrated in the same neglected wards.

Brendan Hughes warned us that Stormont was a “big room” designed to institutionalize the rebellion. He knew that once you give a man £67,200 a year, he stops being a leader and starts being a landlord.

The Sons of Róisín didn’t die for a 27% pay rise. They didn’t die so that “Revenge” could be measured in the hunger of 50,000 children living in material deprivation.

Stormont hasn’t just failed; it has succeeded in exactly what it was meant to do: create a protected class of politicians who are comfortable enough to ignore the damp creeping up the walls of the working class.

The laughter of the children? Go to the food banks, go to the overcrowded flats, go to the funerals of the young men lost to despair - and tell me if you hear anyone laughing.

By Seamus Fitzsimons

There’s a lie that runs through every working-class nationalist estate in the North. It’s whispered in kitchens, repeated at doors during election canvasses, passed down like gospel from parent to child. It sounds like this:

“Vote Sinn Féin. I know they’re not perfect. I know they’ve let us down. But if you don’t, the DUP will get in.”

I’ve heard it my whole life. Maybe you have too. It’s presented as pragmatism. As holding your nose and doing what’s necessary. As the only sensible choice in a system rigged against us.

But I’m here to tell you something that needs saying out loud:

It doesn’t matter who sits in the big chair. The system eats you either way.

And if you’re still voting for Sinn Féin because you’re scared of the DUP, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been done to your community - by both of them - for the last twenty-seven years.

The Mask Slips

Recently, a local West Belfast MLA named Danny Baker posted a photograph of himself standing on a newly completed road in West Belfast. He looked proud. He listed the figures like trophies:

Four-laner: £1.2 million

Cutts junction: £2.4 million

Lagmore (when finished): over £1 million

McDonald’s pedestrian crossing: £500k

OLQP pedestrian crossing: £250k

Thornhill Court/Cherry Road resurfacing: £500k

Nearly six million pounds. For roads. For crossings. For cycle lanes.

And in the same week, we learned that MLAs had awarded themselves a 27% pay rise. From £53,000 to £67,200. While nurses strike. While public sector workers are told there’s no money. While families across this constituency sit in the dark because they can’t afford to top up the electric.

Baker called the traffic a “nuisance but well worth it” for the investment.

I looked at that photo and I thought: Who the fuck wants a road more than a home?

Because while he was standing on that tarmac, beaming for the camera, this is what was happening in the houses behind him:

• 40% of households in West Belfast are overcrowded. Families doubling up. Children sharing beds. No space to breathe, to study, to simply exist.
• 51% of households don’t own a car. So who exactly is that £1.2 million road for? Not the people who can’t afford petrol. Not the people who rely on public transport that barely runs. Not the people who can’t get to work, to hospital appointments, to school events because the system wasn’t built for them.
• 50,000 children in West Belfast alone are living in poverty. Not “struggling.” Not “managing.” In poverty. Going to school hungry. Going to bed hungry. Growing up without the warmth, the food, the small dignities that other children take for granted.
• Death rates here are the highest in the region. 60% higher for men. 43% higher for women. Eleven out of thirteen wards are in the top 10% for poor health. We are dying younger because of where we live.

And Danny Baker posted a photo of a road.

He’s not a champion. He’s a caretaker of decay, smiling while he polishes the surface and ignores the rot underneath.

The Same System, Different Managers

But here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Because Danny Baker wears a green jersey. And for a lot of nationalist voters, that still matters. It matters enough that they’ll vote for him even when they’re angry. Even when they’re disappointed. Even when they’re sitting in a cold house wondering where the money went.

Because the alternative is the DUP. And the DUP are the enemy. The DUP wave the flag for the crown. The DUP would sell our communities down the river without a second thought.

I understand that fear. I grew up with it. I know the history. I know the pain.

But here’s what I also know:

The DUP never pretended to love us. Sinn Féin does.

And that makes their betrayal infinitely worse.

Because when the DUP cut your benefits, you expect it. When the DUP vote themselves a pay rise while you struggle, you’re angry but you’re not surprised. They’re the “enemy.” That’s what enemies do.

But when Sinn Féin does the same thing? When Sinn Féin sits in government and approves evictions? When Sinn Féin holds the health portfolio while suicide rates climb and waiting lists stretch into years? When Sinn Féin takes that 27% pay rise and then tells you the budget is tight?

That’s not enemy action. That’s betrayal. And it cuts deeper because it comes wrapped in the flag you were raised to trust.

Let me ask you something - and I want you to really sit with it:

When the Housing Executive kick families out onto the street, with the Crown Forces arresting the occupants, who was in government?

Sinn Féin.

When your electric bill doubled and your wages stayed the same, who was in the Executive?

Sinn Féin.

When your kid’s school goes without proper funding, when the mental health services collapse, when the waiting lists stretch into years - who was holding the portfolios?

Sinn Féin.

And when 294 people took their own lives last year - men your age, from streets just like yours - who was running the Department of Health?

Sinn Féin.

So spare me the “at least it’s not the DUP” routine.

Because I’m looking at the results. I’m looking at the poverty figures. I’m looking at the homeless count. I’m looking at the overdose deaths. And you know what I see?

The same outcome.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Let’s talk about what “investment” actually looks like in working-class communities. Not the roads. Not the cycle lanes. The real investment - or lack of it.

Across the six counties, 335,000 people were living in poverty in 2023/24. That number hasn’t gone down. It’s not getting better.

Over 40% of adults are classed as fuel poor. They spend more than 10% of their income just on energy. Twenty-seven percent of households went without heating or electricity at some point in the past two years because they couldn’t afford it.

Nine percent couldn’t afford to keep their homes warm. Seven percent couldn’t afford fresh fruit and vegetables every day.

Around 50,000 children are living in material deprivation. No proper warmth. No decent food. No small things other children take for granted. Children in poverty are 5.5 times more likely to go hungry.

The housing list in Belfast sits at 12,726 households. Of those, 10,307 are in housing stress - overcrowding, poor conditions, homelessness. The median wait for a home is 37 months. More than 4,140 people have been waiting over five years.

In 2024/25, 5,079 people presented as homeless in Belfast. 3,292 were accepted for full support. Only 318 social homes were completed in Belfast that year.

In 2022, 154 people died from drug overdoses. Drug-related deaths have more than tripled in the past decade. Men in deprived areas are 98% more likely to die from drug causes than they were ten years ago.

That same year, 203 people died by suicide. In 2025, it was 294. Seventy-seven percent were men. Suicide rates in Belfast are 40% higher than the six-counties average. Thirty-one percent of suicides occurred in the 20% most deprived areas.

And while all of this was happening, while families sat at kitchen tables deciding whether to heat or eat, while children went hungry, while people died - Sinn Féin sat in government. Sinn Féin held the portfolios. Sinn Féin award themselves a 27% pay rise.

They are not our champions. They are our landlords. And it’s time we stopped paying rent with our votes.

The “Lesser Evil” Trap

I understand why people vote the way they do. I understand the fear. I understand the history. I’m not here to shame anyone for trying to protect their community.

But I am here to ask: At what point does the “lesser evil” just become the evil you’re used to?

Because that’s where we are now. Twenty-seven years into a “peace process” that was supposed to transform working-class communities. Twenty-seven years of Stormont. Twenty-seven years of Sinn Féin growing in power, becoming the largest party, taking the top jobs.

And what do we have to show for it?

Not a United Ireland. We’re further away than ever. Reunification isn’t even on the table. The border polls aren’t coming. The conversation has moved on, and we’re still here, still poor, still waiting.

But we do have evictions. Austerity. Food banks. Overdose deaths. Suicides.

That’s their legacy. Not a united country. A divided, broken, desperate people - still waving the flag for the party that left us in the dirt.

The DUP need Sinn Féin to keep nationalist voters in line. Sinn Féin need the DUP to keep unionist voters in line. And both of them need working-class people - on both sides - to stay poor, stay scared, and stay voting for the “lesser evil.”

Because the moment we realise the evil is the same? The moment we stop choosing between the green whip and the orange whip or any whip and start asking why we’re being whipped at all?

That’s the moment they lose.

The Laughter of Our Children

There’s a phrase you hear at Sinn Féin events. At gravesides. At commemorations. It’s spoken with passion, with conviction, with the weight of history behind it:

“Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.”

I’ve heard it my whole life. I’ve felt moved by it. I’ve believed in it - but not from them.

But now, when I look around West Belfast, I have to ask:

What children are we talking about?

The children going to school hungry?
The children living in overcrowded homes with damp creeping up the walls?
The children with asthma because the mould was never fixed?
The children who will grow up in poverty, just like their parents, just like their grandparents?

Is that the laughter? The hollow sound of a community slowly being suffocated while the politicians cut ribbons and take pay rises?

Because that’s not revenge. That’s surrender. Dressed up in a green jersey and sold to us as progress.

The DUP will never love you. Everyone knows that. But Sinn Féin? They know how to say the right words. They know how to stand at the graveside and talk about sacrifice and struggle and the future.

And then they go back to Stormont, take their 27%, and leave your child to laugh on an empty stomach.

That’s not betrayal. That’s worse than betrayal.

That’s using your own history to pick your pocket.

What Real Investment Looks Like

Imagine, for a moment, what nearly six million pounds could have done if it had been spent on people instead of tarmac.

It could have started building the social homes that 10,307 families are waiting for.

It could have funded mental health services for the men most at risk of suicide.

It could have kept food banks stocked so no child went to school hungry.

It could have insulated homes so families didn’t have to choose between heating and eating.

It could have provided addiction support for the 154 people who died from overdoses.

But it didn’t. It went on roads. On crossings. On cycle lanes. On things you can photograph and point to and call “investment.”

Because roads don’t complain. Roads don’t vote you out. Roads don’t ask awkward questions about why, twenty-seven years later, nothing has really changed.

You can’t photograph a family that isn’t evicted. You can’t cut a ribbon for a child who isn’t hungry. You can’t stand on a stage and take credit for a suicide that didn’t happen.

So they build roads instead. And they call it progress.

And too many of us let them.

Time to Rise

I am telling you to spoil your vote. I am standing here with a revolutionary party. But I offer you no easy answers, no perfect manifesto, no empty promises dressed up as hope.

I am telling you this, and I need you to hear it:

Spoil Your Vote.

Fear is the chain they’ve kept around your ankle since before you were born. Fear of the other side. Fear of what happens if we don’t fall in line. Fear that keeps you walking into a polling station every few years to choose between the green boot and the orange boot, while both remain firmly planted on your neck.

They have bled you dry with that fear. They have starved your children with it. They have evicted your neighbours with it. They have stood at gravesides and mourned your dead while voting themselves pay rises in the very chambers where your future was sold.

No more.

We are not subjects. We are not votes to be harvested, counted, and forgotten until the next election. We are not collateral in a game played by people who have never known the weight of an unpayable bill, the ache of a hungry child, the shame of a home that is killing you slowly.

From this moment forward, we owe them nothing.

They want you to believe there is no alternative. That the choice is always between them and them. That the system is too big, too old, too powerful to ever be changed by people like you.

They are lying.

The system exists because we allow it. The parties exist because we vote for them. The poverty exists because we have been convinced that poverty is all we deserve.

And that ends now.

Not with a new politician. Not with a new election.

It ends when we look at each other - across estates, across towns, across the divide they’ve spent centuries policing - and recognise that our enemy is not the person beside us.

Our enemy is the system that profits from our division.

Our enemy is the fear that keeps us obedient.

Our enemy is anyone - Sinn Féin or DUP or any party - who sits in comfort while our children go hungry.

They have built a prison and called it democracy. And we have been walking into it willingly, every election, for twenty-seven years.

No more.

We will not be managed. We will not be pacified with roads while our homes rot. We will not be silenced with flags while our people die.

We answer only to each other. To the community that raised us. To the children who deserve more. To the dead who deserved better.

And to those who have ruled over our poverty, who have worn our history as a costume while picking our pockets, who have stood in the chambers built on our struggle and voted themselves richer while we grew poorer -

Your time is ending.

People are beginning to remember what you spent twenty-seven years trying to make us forget:

The people are the cause, and the cause is the people.

The Legacy

Danny Baker will drive down that new road. He’ll see the fresh tarmac in his rearview mirror and feel proud. He’ll think of it as his legacy.

And behind him, in the houses that road leads past, families will sit in the cold. Children will go to bed hungry. Men will stare at four walls and wonder if there’s any point carrying on.

They’ll look at that road. They’ll look at the politicians who built it. And they’ll think:

“You could have helped us. You chose not to.”

That’s the real legacy. Not the tarmac. Not the crossings. Not the cycle lanes.

The silence behind them.

The community that was left to rot while the people in charge polished the surface and called it investment.

Twenty-seven years since the Good Friday Agreement. Twenty-seven years of Stormont. Twenty-seven years of Sinn Féin telling us things would change.

And we’re still waiting.

The DUP will never be our friends. We always knew that.

But Sinn Féin were supposed to be our allie.

And that’s why their betrayal cuts deepest.

They didn’t just fail us.

They used our history, our struggle, our hope - to sell us a road while our homes crumbled.

And too many of us are still clapping.

It’s time to stop.

It’s time to rise.

On November 14th, 1973, just after being sentenced to life for the IRA bombings in London, the sisters and six other Irish Republicans made a stark decision. They would refuse food. Their demand was not for freedom, but for dignity: repatriation to a prison in Ireland.

The protest was grueling. Within days, four prisoners dropped out, but the Price sisters, along with Hugh Feeney and Gerry Kelly, persisted. For months, they were force-fed, a brutal process designed to break their will but which only hardened their resolve. They were fighting for a return to the soil they called home.

Then, the news came.

“You are going home — well actually, Armagh Gaol.”

The female Governor of Durham Gaol delivered the statement. For Dolours, it was enough. “That’s close enough for me,” she replied, immediately beginning to dump her possessions into paper sacks. Her sister Marian burst into her cell. “We hugged till we had almost strangled the breath from each other,” Dolours wrote. “We smiled like we had not done in two years. We were full of joy.”

The journey was a whirlwind. Rushed out of Durham in a daze, Dolours even hugged the male Governor, a act that shocked her later, they were flown to Ireland. From the air, Dolours cried at every “green piece of soil” she saw. Her sister Marian remarked sarcastically, “Cry now. This is Ireland!” Awaiting them on the tarmac was a “hoard of British army paparazzi,” their flashbulbs lighting up the evening.

But the true reality of their new regime began in a beat-up old van and within the walls of Armagh Gaol.

In reception, they were met by the chief screw, a “queer looking woman with protruding teeth” they would later nickname ‘Big Suzie’. The handcuffs, which had tethered them to their English wardens, were removed. One of them, a Mrs. Russell, cried, treating Dolours like “the daughter she never had” before being pried away.

Then, the first sign that everything was different: “The screw did not lead us to a cell and lock us in, the practice we had become used to, and instead she sat on a window sill.”

Left to their own devices, the sisters prodded each other along the wing. They saw girls sitting around a Superser heater in an area that “would have been the suicide wire in any other prison.” A hush fell. Whispers spread: “Is it them? I think it is. Couldn’t be.”

Then, chaos erupted.

A girl dashed into a cell and returned with two others. One, Eileen Hickey, put her arms affectionately around them and directed them towards a cell. “A moment’s silence and all hell broke loose. A thundering herd of girls were hoofing it up the landing and face on top of face appeared round the door.”

A fry was ordered. As Marie McC and Marie Dillon went to cook, the noise became overwhelming. Yet, no screw shouted for silence. This was a prison run by the prisoners themselves. Eileen Hickey, who was the prisoners’ OC (Officer Commanding), spoke in a “low, soft voice” and calmed the crowd, promising there would be time to meet the new arrivals later.

For Dolours, the meaning was crystal clear. This was not just a transfer; it was a triumph.

“It was a victory, the girls saw it as a victory, damn it, it was a victory; scream all you like, girls!”

They ate the fries, and “nothing had tasted finer in the past two years.” The screws did not provide cells or lock them up until eight o’clock, and only then after they had been formally dismissed by their own staff.

That night, they fell into the military routine of the Republican prisoners: “Fall in, attention, at ease, dismissed.”

“We were where we belonged,” Dolours wrote, “we were with the Republican girls in Armagh Gaol and a little tear rolled down my cheek as the long dreamed for started to become a reality.”

They talked until dawn. The following days brought a new rhythm, cell inspection, making toast with a fork over the Superser, and the inescapable craft-making led by the formidable Kate McKinney. “Armagh was a bit like boarding school without teachers,” Dolours observed. “The prisoners ran the show.”

The hunger strike that began in the grim confines of an English prison had reached its poignant conclusion not just in a different cell, but in a community. It ended with a shared meal, a thunderous welcome, and the profound, hard-won peace of finally being home.

Remember that magical feeling on Christmas morning? Your ma and da, unknown to you, working tirelessly to create a moment of pure joy. Now, picture volunteers working to bring that same magic to children who have a parent in prison. Their mission is simple: to ensure a child whose world has been fractured still feels remembered and loved.

These are the individuals now being systematically targeted. To an outside observer, the news might be of text messages from a hidden number or a frozen bank account. But for people in these communities, this is just a new layer of fear painted over the old one. The heavy knock on the door in the dark never stopped. People are still taken away. The state didn’t replace its tactics, it added to its arsenal.

For those who remember the Troubles, the pattern is chillingly familiar. The goal is the same: to attack an entire community structure at every point.

The prisoner in the cell and the volunteer with the wrapped gift are two sides of the same coin. One represents the resistance, the other represents the solidarity that sustains it. The state understands that to break one, it must break the other. Then, it was the black taxi stopped at the checkpoint. Now, it’s your bank account frozen by a distant treasury. Both are checkpoints. One controls your movement, the other your livelihood. Both aim to isolate and demoralize. Then, the weapon was the rumor and the smear in the press. Now, it is the same, amplified by sensational headlines and a digital paper trail designed to criminalize compassion itself. - Séamus Fitzsimons

The old war learned new tricks. It kept the battering ram and added the text message. For a new generation, this digital and financial intimidation is their first taste of the conflict. For their parents and grandparents, it is a grim confirmation that the campaign never truly ended, it has simply expanded its list of targets.

They have always understood that their most formidable enemy is the unbreakable network of mutual aid. The committees that organised material support for the families of prisoners then are the same spirit driving the welfare work that ensures those families today are not forgotten at Christmas. They are not separate endeavours, they are the same lifeline. And that is why they are both treated as a threat.

The state’s campaign of intimidation, from the text message to the dawn raid, is a testament to its own failure. It reveals a strategy reliant on fear, because it lacks any moral authority.

But these tactics are ultimately futile. Their power is negative. It can harass, it can freeze accounts, it can create hardship. Yet, it is incapable of the smallest positive act of humanity. It cannot deliver a gift. It cannot build community. It cannot offer comfort.

We can. We do. And we will continue.

Our resilience is not a reaction to their actions, it is a precondition of our existence. Their campaign will inevitably subside, as it always has, into another chapter of its own defeat.

Our work, however, remains. Unbroken.

Let me tell you a story about a vote. A story you might have seen flash across your screen. 47 to 33.

In any other arena, this would be a landslide. Forty-seven against a Minister, thirty-three for him. And yet, the Minister remains, unscathed, protected by a set of rules.

Now, feel the reaction. The outrage. The political statements declaring “This is not democracy!” For a moment, the public and the politicians were united in a shared, visceral feeling: This isn’t fair.

Hold onto that feeling. That sharp, stinging sense of injustice. Because Brendan Hughes lived his entire life inside that feeling. He didn’t just feel it, he understood its source. And he warned us this day would come.

He wouldn’t have been surprised by the 47 and the 33. He would have seen it as the logical outcome of a “package that was put together by the British”, a system designed not for justice, but for control. He wrote that the Good Friday Agreement was a “counter-revolutionary strategy” designed to “get the IRA off the stage.” Its institutions were never meant to serve the people, they were meant to manage the conflict and absorb dissent into a powerless bureaucracy.

“It is not a peace process, it is a pacification process,” he wrote. The new political class, he argued, had become “careerists” and “collaborators”, “administering British rule in Ireland.” He was right…

When the veto was invoked, when the majority was silenced, the political class got a taste of the system’s true nature. They experienced what Hughes understood from the start: that the structures were built to protect the state, not the people.

Their outrage now is what Hughes would have recognized as the hypocrisy of those who “have settled for a few crumbs from the table” and “wrapped the green flag around themselves” while participating in the “illusion” of power. For decades, they administered the machine, while that same machine was crushing those who refused to acknowledge its legitimacy.

They feign shock at the rules only when they are the target. For us, stepping outside the state’s predefined boundaries has always meant being treated not as a dissenter, but as a “terrorist.”-Séamus Fitzsimons

This is the core of Hughes’s warning. He knew the state would always draw a line. On one side, “acceptable opposition” - the kind that plays by the machine’s rules. On the other side, “the threat” - those who hold fast to the principle that the state itself is an “illegitimate state.”

The politicians now crying foul have spent years policing that line. They are not outraged by the line’s existence, they are outraged that, for a moment, they were pushed towards the wrong side of it.

Gerry Carroll’s call for the people to “mobilise” is the language of the street, the language of resistance. But Hughes would have questioned its ultimate aim. Is it to replace a minister within the machine? Or is it to challenge the “illegitimate state” itself?

The system, Hughes knew, was a comprehensive structure of power. You could not, in his view and mine, condemn its actions in one breath and administer its rules with the next without becoming part of the “pacification process.”

So, as we watch this spectacle of selective conscience unfold, we are not witnessing a new discovery. We are watching the playing out of an old, brutal truth that Brendan Hughes dedicated his life to exposing.

The political class may have just had the penny drop. But the Dark already knew. He saw the entire design.

Let them have their moment of manufactured outrage. Let them pretend they have just discovered the monster.

Our struggle was never for a better deal within the machine. It was and still is, as Brendan Hughes never ceased to believe, for its end. And that is a belief no veto can ever silence.

A Betrayal Forged in Peace, Paid For With Our Pride

The rain falls on the Falls Road with a familiar, dreary persistence. It’s the same rain that fell thirty years ago. It washes the same streets, past the same murals of martyrs, and onto the same faces, now a little more worn, a little more weary. In the cramped kitchens and the crowded pubs, a conversation is happening - a conversation that Brendan Hughes would understand perfectly. His words, spoken decades ago, don’t need to be summoned like a ghost, they are alive in the bitter reality of today.

In the 1990s, as the Good Friday Agreement was being forged, Hughes issued a stark warning from the republican heart of the people. He saw the scaffolding of the new peace being erected and asked the only question that ever truly mattered: “So, what of the working person?”

He watched as ‘our’ police force was dry-cleaned, ‘our’ Stormont whitewashed, and ‘our’ Republican Movement shed its skin. He declared that for the working class, the GFA meant ‘Got Feck All.’ He raged against the rogue builders and the poverty wages, asking what had happened to a ‘fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.’

Today, on these very streets, we have the answer. His question has become our daily reality, and the situation has not stayed the same - it has gotten worse.

The talk now is of the price of butter and bread, of rogue landlords - some now exposed as being connected to those in Sinn Féin - charging £2000 a month for a house on the Falls Road, a price that is itself the insult. It’s about the young woman forced to choose between that crippling rent or a desolate hostel. This is the modern face of the exploitation Hughes condemned.

The “quiet, grinding war” he foresaw is now a desperate siege. This is a system where one in three children in West Belfast lives in poverty. Where foodbank's are constantly emptied by the sheer volume of need. Where housing lists grow ever longer, and suicide numbers soar in direct correlation to the despair. Where communities are being consumed by a flood of drugs, and in the vacuum left by this failed state, we see the rise of anti-social behaviour and the ugly spectre of fascism.

The repression has diversified, just as he feared. The blunt instrument of the state has been replaced by the sharp, financial sting of the vulture landlord and the cold calculation of a political class that has become the manager for the poverty creators.

And now, the final, bitter proof of the surrender. On Today, Sunday 9th November 2025, Michelle O’Neill, the colonial first minister of Sinn Féin, will stand and commemorate the very British Army that murdered our people. She will adore and honour the poppy with pride - that symbol of a global empire built on massacre and blood, the wake of which stretches across the world. She will do this while that same state occupies our island, acts with impunity, and is granted amnesty for its war crimes on our streets. While republicans face state harassment for honouring our own patriot dead, Sinn Féin - bowed, broken, and bought - will kneel to our occupier, begging for the crumbs from the master’s table. They have become the good slaves they once swore to fight.

Hughes asked if the Unionist communities had a similar experience, challenging the PUP and loyalist socialists to prove their mettle against the same exploiters. That challenge still stands, unanswered, drowned out by the waffle about flags or he said, she said at Stormont.

James Connolly was right, Hughes reminded us, that Ireland without its people meant nothing. And in that spirit, Hughes’ own vision remains the only one that fits our present crisis: the need for a true workers’ republic, where it is a crime to exploit people and where the people have control over their own destiny.

Brendan Hughes’ critique was not a relic. It was a prophecy. We are living in the world he warned us about, and it is increasingly getting worse. The struggle is no longer about what was promised then, but about the simple, burning demand that has been denied for generations.

In other words, a society where there is …

JUSTICE.