Interview with Odrán de Bhaldraithe

rs21 member Kate Bradley interviews Odrán de Bhaldraithe, author of Neglect in the North of Ireland (2023). They discuss the systemic impoverishment caused by continued British occupation of the North of Ireland, the politics of Sinn Féin, the race riots in Belfast and Britain in 2024, and how Irish culture and language can play a role in republican movements in a modern multi-racial context.

1. Your book Neglect In The North of Ireland (2023) is a searing critique of British rule of the North of Ireland since the Good Friday Agreement, and an argument for a revival in revolutionary organising to move the North out of its current contradictions that hold British rule in place. In your chapter on economic neglect, you cover the ways that systems in the North – health, housing, education – have been systematically underfunded and rendered ineffective since the Good Friday Agreement. Could you provide a couple of the most indicative examples/statistics?

I think the most telling stat at the time of writing the book was a predictive one by the Fiscal Council that estimated that the health budget could eventually account for as much as 77 per cent of contemporary block grant totals. At the time, the block grant was £13.001 billion and the health budget was £6.451 billion of that. Those figures have since risen to £18.2 billion and £8.79 billion respectively. That health accounts for so much of the budget reflects what a mess the health system is in here. One stat that might illustrate just how bad things were at the time of writing the book was that 48.1 per cent of people urgently referred by their GP with suspected cancer began treatment within 62 days; this was against a target of 95 per cent. The further rot that has set in since the book means that the latest figure for this is 32.9 per cent.

Another issue at the time of the book that still exists today is that the North’s wastewater infrastructure is so embarrassingly outdated that housing cannot be built in significant numbers to answer ever-increasing demand. At the time of writing the book, the latest stat for annual new dwelling completions was 6,446, while the social housing waiting list had 43,971 households on it. As of Q4 2024, those stats stand at 6,026 completions in 2024 and 48,325 households on the waiting list.

2. To what extent do you think this defunding and underdevelopment of the welfare state is a mirror of neoliberal policy elsewhere, and to what extent do you think it’s particular to the North of Ireland due to British colonial rule?

What makes the situation colonial is that the underdevelopment is the result of neoliberalism-by-decree. I think anyone reading this will be well aware of the democratic deficits at the heart of the so-called western democracies, but the North does not even have that facade. Theoretically, people in the South or in Britain could vote in a party that begins to undo the damages of neoliberalism – and we all know about the things standing in the way of this becoming a real possibility – but this supposed possibility doesn’t even exist in the North. What we have in the form of the Assembly is essentially a county or borough council, tasked only with the management of the funding Westminster provides. A band of Maoist insurgents could win 100 per cent of the seats here and it would make no difference. Nobody here is in charge of the material conditions.

3. You discuss the border poll mechanism a lot in your book, explaining why it denies the North of Ireland self-determination in any real sense. Could you explain this briefly for people who haven’t read the book?

Basically, the Good Friday Agreement contains within it the commitment from the British Government to convene a referendum on unification – commonly referred to as a border poll – in the North “if at any time it appears likely” that the majority of people within the North favour reunification. The Southern State in Ireland also commits to the holding of a simultaneous referendum for reunification in its territory.

There are two major ways in which this denies Irish self-determination. The first is very simple: the only person with the power to convene a border poll is the British Secretary of State for the North. There is no definite criteria, no threshold that has to be met for the Secretary of State to do; it has been said that such criteria does exist, but the Secretary of State is under no legal obligation to publicly announce what’s involved and any of them that have been asked to do so have refused. I would argue pretty simply that it appears we are operating on the whim of the British Government – the colonial power in Ireland – with absolutely no power to compel them to call a border poll, no matter what the circumstances. If a republican party took every Dáil seat in Dublin and every Assembly seat in Belfast, what’s to stop the Secretary from saying the criteria hasn’t been met? How are we to know? How could an agreement for a border poll be accepted by so-called republicans without the establishment of clear legal criteria for the holding of the poll? There is nobody or no group of people in Ireland who can compel the calling of a border poll; only the modern day Lord Lieutenant can do. I would call that a fairly clear denial of self-determination.

The second is that it’s a denial of Irish self-determination by allowing two simultaneous referendums rather than one. The only time Ireland has ever expressed a political will as one coherent body politic, it was in the 1918 British general election, and the sentiment expressed in the majority was for the establishment of an Irish republic. The partition of Ireland was Britain’s response to that sentiment, undermining Irish democracy by isolating the areas in which republican sentiment was its weakest. Thus, the Northern and Southern states were created. Allowing for two referendums is another undermining of Irish democracy because both the comprador government in Dublin and the colonial one in London know that a nationwide referendum would pass easily. The idea of two referendums should be rejected by anyone who calls themselves a republican out of the principle of our enduring conception of Ireland as one nation despite over a century of partition trying to force us to believe otherwise. As Liam Ó Ruairc wrote, republicanism “holds that the people of Ireland have the right to self-determination as a unit without external impediment”. Signing up to a partitioned border poll that can only be ordered by the British Government is a complete betrayal of that principle. 

4. Over the last five years, many leftists have celebrated Sinn Féin gaining electorally in the North for the first time. They became the largest party in Stormont in 2022, which you describe as “the symbolic end of republicans being denied a seat at the table”. However, in your book you write about Sinn Féin’s increasing abandonment of its original aims since gaining power in the North. For readers who aren’t aware, can you summarise your critique of Sinn Féin since they gained more electoral power?

My main critique of Sinn Féin is that they have abandoned their principles, quite simply. The border poll is just one example of that. The building of the modern day Sinn Féin electoral machine starts with the campaign to make Bobby Sands an MP while he was on hunger strike. Sands was a brilliant political mind, who was one of many who spent his time in Long Kesh prison studying the prominent anti-colonial revolutionaries and writers of the day: Ho Chi Minh, Fanon, Guevara, and Gramsci. He himself wrote of the need to build an Ireland “free in mind and body, separate and distinct physically, culturally, and economically”. In the brief time he had between prison stints, he dedicated himself to that vision and he was as likely to be organising traditional music sessions, helping to found Irish-language primary schools, as he was to be taking part in armed struggle.

In the years following his death, Sinn Féin followed his example: culturally through their Roinn Cultúrtha, which set up Irish language and traditional music lessons throughout their strongholds; physically through the armed struggle; and economically through their advocacy for socialism. As the years have gone on, all of this has faded away. The armed struggle is obviously gone; Irish culture is really quite strong in republican areas such as the one I live in, but its organisation is disparate and depoliticised; and Sinn Féin couldn’t be farther from socialist these days. One example that really sticks in my craw is how republicanism used to be the leading movement of anti-EU sentiment in Ireland, but since Brexit Sinn Féin have cynically reversed their position and started using EU membership for the North as a reason for Irish unity. This is the same EU that, with Fine Gael in tow, imposed crippling austerity in the South, which created the conditions which led to Sinn Féin coming to prominence in the South. Not only is it unprincipled, but it’s bad politics that doesn’t understand how they got to where they are now.

Despite all this, they still attempt to maintain the image of revolutionary politics, in part by doing things like laying claim to the legacy of people like Sands who wouldn’t recognise them if they were alive today, and in part by lending rhetorical support to international movements such as the drive for Palestinian liberation. But even in this, Sinn Féin speak out of both sides of their mouth; their alliance with Palestinians is the maintenance of good relations with the Palestinian Authority, but when they were called upon not to go to The White House for St Patrick’s Day 2024 (which is customary for Irish politicians, a handy summation of how they, including Sinn Féin, conceive of Irish politics) while Biden armed the genocide in Gaza, they went anyway. They didn’t go this year in protest at Trump’s comments about ethnically cleansing Gaza, but it was too little, too late in my book.

5. Do you think Sinn Féin’s failings are an inevitable part of being in charge of a state “trapped in its own existence”, as you call it? Is the party’s base able to mobilise more radically while their leadership is in power?

One principle Sinn Féin have not abandoned is that they maintain the utmost of party discipline. I think this is the most admirable thing about them; it’s just a shame that this discipline is now used to quell dissent against the direction they’ve been taking since the beginning of the peace process, but especially in the last ten years when they have sensed an opportunity to enter into power in Dublin.

What I mean by this is that the party’s base is still capable of mobilisation, and the party is very capable of mobilising that base, but it is very much a top-down mobilisation and any radical mobilisation will either see people leave the party or have their efforts defeated.

Not only do I think this was inevitable, as Ruairí Ó Brádaigh predicted in 1986, I think it’s what the real aim of the Good Friday Agreement was. Liam Ó Ruairc called it a pacification process rather than a peace process and I think that’s the right way to actually understand this. The British Government didn’t care about peace in the North; it cared about neutering the Irish revolutionary tradition, which is what it did with the Anglo-Irish Treaty in the 1920s and it’s what it did with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

6. In your chapter on political neglect, you provide a useful history of how Catholics have been dominated and oppressed under British rule for the last century, with that oppression carried out through (amongst other things) disenfranchisement, labour discipline and violent repression. However, you also discuss how there has been increasing integration of Catholics into the union since the Good Friday agreement, and so unionists in the North of Ireland are trapped in a contradiction: whilst Westminster is quite happy to adhere to a ‘non-sectarian’ approach to their underdevelopment of the North, moving towards a generalised class-based oppression, this undercuts the power of unionist forces to continue to dominate Catholic and Republican people. This creates a political impasse: are unionists developing new strategies and politics to deal with this contradiction?

As a republican, I’m obviously not party to behind closed doors strategic discussions within unionism, but from what I can see from the outside: not really. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) appear to me to be content with their position as managers of this decline, happy to muddle through the contradictions that things like their support for Brexit have brought to the fore. As a party, they are still a bit cowed at the minute after their then-leader Jeffrey Donaldson was charged with rape and indecent assault against a child. For now they seem happy to dig in, deny funding to things like Casement Park or gaelscoileanna, and muddle on.

The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) find themselves in a position somewhat analogous to the so-called left of Israel, I think. They want to portray themselves as the liberal wing of the settler colonial project, but conditions have hardened to make such a wing largely redundant. This was an inevitability after the Good Friday Agreement; the border poll piece of the agreement made Northern politics appear to be a race either to or away from the border poll, meaning that the movement of the electorate towards the more hardcore of their designation – Sinn Féin and the DUP – was always going to happen. 

The interesting tendency within unionism to watch will be those represented by Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) and those further right, these unattached spokespeople like Jamie Bryson and Moore Holmes who essentially represent the view of that embittered settler rump described below. I think there’s a larger rupture coming here. The contradictions and the immiseration of the current settlement are becoming too acute, I think, and I expect there to be a relatively large rupture within unionism over the next few years. It’s hard to figure out what this tendency wants in any practical sense as they seem to me to simply want to go back to the pre-Troubles Orange State, which is obviously impossible. Sometimes they seem to flirt with direct rule, but as I describe in the book, the British government tends to be inclusionary in its governance of the North, which totally negates the reason for these people’s imagined Rhodesia’s existence. As Sinn Féin continue to dominate the republican/nationalist electoral bloc, which they are bound to because there is no realistic opposition to them, I expect this tendency to gather steam and force a change of direction in unionism.

7. In August 2024, Belfast had particularly intense race riots, with many migrants having their businesses and homes attacked. Why do you think the riots were particularly bad in Belfast, and how has the left mobilised against this since the riots?

I think the riots were particularly bad in Belfast because there is a mobilised and well-armed far-right that exists in Belfast that doesn’t exist elsewhere in Ireland. In 2020, it was estimated that there were 12,500 members of loyalist paramilitaries in the North, the majority of those would be in the Greater Belfast Area. In times like this, when there’s no IRA to pretend to be fighting while they shoot civilians instead, the loyalists paramilitaries mostly operate as criminal cartels – dealing drugs, killing each other, etc.

I think this is one of the areas where people on the left fall down badly in their analysis of the North. A lot of people only conceive of these loyalist paramilitaries as anti-social criminal gangs, a scourge but not anything to seriously consider in political terms. These are hardcore groups of the furthest right who have significant numbers lying in wait to be activated and have proven themselves to be willing to commit any and all levels of violence. These are not depoliticised nihilistic criminals; it’s just that the existing political situation forces them to act like that the majority of the time, but when the chance comes, and the chance came during the riots, they are ready to spring into action to affect the political change that they are geared towards. These are people with more in common with Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging in South Africa or settler gangs in Palestine than even their more moderate unionist brethren down the road from them; they are the dangerous rump of a settler colonial ideology, backed to the hilt by their handlers in British intelligence and allowed to operate freely because of that. There’s a reason why these pogroms that were carried out on the day were in unionist areas and why these people were stopped when it came to, say, walking down the republican section of the Ormeau Road.

I live in west Belfast, an entirely republican area, and I will say at that time there were reports of a local immigrant, Muslim-run business being attacked, and the amount of people that came out to support that man was very heartening. It was easily in the few hundreds at a few minutes’ notice. I’m not sure if you could call that a mobilisation of the left because it’s not as if people there were surveyed on their politics, but it was a local, community response that was very encouraging. 

8. Though rioting crowds were mostly unionist in their insignia and banners, there were some tricolour flags amongst the rioters. The BBC jumped on this to imply that the race riots represented a coming-together of formerly sectarian forces – “divided by politics, united by racism”. What tendency, if any, do you think the tricolour represented at the riots? 

Establishment mouthpieces like the BBC would like you to think that these events marked a newfound working class unity in the North based upon racism, but the reality is that simply isn’t true. For the most part, the people in those crowds waving tricolours came from south of the border and represented a tendency that can be understood as a kind of Free State nationalism, a right-wing reactionary movement within the confines of the 26-county southern state that apes the imagery of traditional Irish nationalism/republicanism. This isn’t to say that none of the people with tricolours in that crowd were from the North but the bulk was made up of these people from the South, who are perfect bedfellows for the unionists in the North because they agree on many things. The Southerners’ obsession with the “protection” of the South’s border is just an inversion of the “protection” of the North’s borders espoused by the unionists, and of course gives the lie to the idea that these people are nationalists in any sense of the term that can be understood in the Irish context; they have no wish to reunify the country, only to control what they already have. These people share in common the belief that there should be a race/nationality-based hierarchy of provision within their respective political territories and that their states’ answer to increasing population should be austerity and a refusal to invest in development, thereby guaranteeing investment returns for landlords, property speculators, etc.

In the South these people have been put to good use to undermine Sinn Féin, whose watery anti-austerity rhetoric had them doing well in the polls. Sinn Féin’s lack of principles meant that when this reactionary movement forced through a crisis last year, Sinn Féin buckled, started speaking in anti-immigration terms and haemorrhaged support. That is Sinn Féin’s fault, but the play was obvious – this disparate new movement is led by landlords like Gavin Pepper, solicitors like Nick Delehanty, former British soldiers like Rowan Croft, and Catholic reactionaries funded by American dark money. The maintenance of the status quo was in their interests – even the vague, weak threat Sinn Féin pose to it was too much – and so when Sinn Féin took the bait, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were returned in last year’s general election and the far right got what they wanted. While the eejits on the streets may come from working class areas like Coolock, this is no movement of the working class.

9. How integrated are anti-racist struggles into the Republican movement in the North, and vice versa?

I’m not sure if I would say that anti-racist struggles are integrated into the republican movement insomuch as I would say that anti-racist principles are integrated into republicanism, which then makes the movement the vanguard of such anti-racism. Now, a tendency also certainly exists in the North, as with anywhere else, of these more liberal types of anti-racist organisations, but they tend to steer clear of republicanism for fear of “sectarianism”. You can see in incidents like those would-be pogromists trying to get down the Ormeau Road that it’s normal everyday people, who have experience of organisation on the basis of their republicanism, that can be mobilised quickly and effectively. That is one place where Sinn Féin do deserve credit as they were active and quick on the ground that day. It’s their ability to do these things that makes it all the more regrettable that this considerable organisational power isn’t put towards achieving political goals more in line with the principles of their professed ideology.

10. In your chapter on cultural neglect, you speak about the role of Irish cultural revival movements in the battle against Unionist politics. How does migration into the North of Ireland from other countries (e.g. by refugees) impact on the role of the cultural politics of Republicanism and the left?

I don’t think it should have an effect. Culture is obviously just a tool that can be put to use to serve any political ideology, but my conception of the use of native Irish culture like the language, music, and GAA sports of hurling and Gaelic football as part of an Irish republican political project is because these are the spheres of culture that we in Ireland can control and determine their direction. In other words, it is the extension of self-determination to the cultural realm. This isn’t true of the English language, pop music, soccer, rugby, etc. These are all things that are prevalent in Ireland but also in much bigger countries, which by sheer numbers confines us to a bit-part role.

I don’t think the presence of people from different ethnicities should impact that conception. Obviously, any national culture can be used in an exclusionary manner, but I think we have been largely quite good at integrating those people into our cultural pursuits, whether that’s language, music, or sports. The sports are the ones that currently have the biggest stronghold around Ireland I would say, and there are plenty of players from non-Irish ancestral backgrounds now playing in the GAA. Not too long ago, a child in my street who is an ethnic Kurd asked me what GAA club I play for, and started booing when I told him, because he plays for a different one. Few things have made me so happy. That’s how social capital works; if something is popular in your locale and confers a kind of prestige upon participants, then it will attract people regardless of their backgrounds. 

I think a key way to make sure that we attract even more people from migrant backgrounds would be to tie this cultural vision to an economic and political one, like what Sands talked about. If people with no ancestral ties to this kind of culture can understand it as part of a liberatory project that will improve their material circumstances – as the communal leisure time within an all-of-society movement that seeks to integrate and value them, and the cultural influences they will inevitably bring with them – then I think we’re onto a winner. 

11. You end the book on a call for renewed revolutionary activity in the North that isn’t wedded to Sinn Féin or electoral politics within the union. What sort of organising work do you want to see more of?

The most successful era of revolutionary politics in Ireland was 1913-1923. This was an era that would not have been possible were it not for the founding of the Land League in the 1870s, the GAA in the 1880s, Conradh na Gaeilge in the 1890s, and the failure of parliamentary politics to secure Home Rule. The economic ground-up politics of the Land League being followed by the cultural ground-up organisation of the GAA and Conradh meant that once it was clear that the Irish Parliamentary Party could not deliver upon any type of freedom for Ireland, there was a generation of people who understood that they could self-organise on both economic and cultural and force concessions. Once the urban working classes were organised by people like James Connolly and Jim Larkin into large unions like the ITGWU, a critical mass of the country was organised into various bodies committed to changing Ireland’s political situation at the time.

We all come to be realised as political subjects in different ways, as Paolo Freire would have it, and eventually the contradictions of a national movement will result in class conflict. This is the type of organising I want to see – a totalising vision of Ireland that sets the country out as “free in mind and body, separate and distinct physically, culturally, and economically” as Sands said. The economic must take priority, however, which I think is where the Troubles-era republican movement fell down a bit. Of course, the members of the movement were working class as the movement’s strongholds were places like west Belfast, the Markets, Derry city, but because it wasn’t organised amongst the workers, the damage they could do to economic targets was largely limited to bombings. The Provisional IRA couldn’t force economic paralysis the way Connolly’s ITGWU, Irish Citizen Army and Irish Socialist Republican Party could through their strike action. The revolutionary period of 1913-23 begins with the Dublin Lockout, and without cultivating that kind of capacity again, I’m afraid republicanism will be limited to parliamentarianism. Whether it’s through entryism into existing trade unions or the creation of new ones, I think there needs to be a real effort to cultivate workers’ power aimed at republican ideals rather than the piecemeal economism that the unions in Ireland currently adhere to.

People sniff at the idea of cultural organising and write it off as pandering to the middle classes but I think that the republican movement’s historical role is the mobilisation of a critical mass of the country for national liberation; only then can the inevitable class conflict become more acute and force those middle classes – and I include myself in that grouping – to pick a side. 

1913-23 ended in defeat, with the victory of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Irish counter-revolution, but it is still the most successful revolutionary era in Irish history in terms of forcing concessions. The challenge now is to build a movement that can go further and finish the job. There are various organs through which people can bend the State to their will – be that a trade union, An Dream Dearg, the GAA – and it is important that these types of agitations become coordinated and organised around their shared goals. 

What I’ve just described is an unbelievably difficult task, but that’s the task you accept if you call yourself a republican. I’m not too aware of any modern leftist movement that has figured out the way to operate successfully in the modern day, which is such a daunting task given every state’s surveillance and intelligence capacity, so I’m open-minded when it comes to tactics. I’m not open-minded when it comes to principles, and I think that what I’ve outlined, which aligns with the principles of Sands, Mellows, Connolly, et al is the only way for republicanism to dig itself out of the deadening impasse it currently finds itself in.