‘Sinn Fein & The Spooks: What YOU Need To Know’ by Donal Lavery

The greatest compliment ever paid to me in my life was by a friend who once said that the Bible should be rewritten to include the name “Donal” as one of the Prophets, given that the anglicised variant “Daniel” already encompasses it. While I think it a very generous thing to say, I can’t reconcile my agreement with it – I have been wrong about things and I’ve made mistakes. But they were mistakes made because I believed what I was saying at the time. That aside however, there is one thing I am absolutely and completely certain about, which every man, woman and child should have some knowledge of across this island – that is, the reality of our “democracy”.

I don’t believe Ireland is a democracy so to speak. We are a partitioned nation, against the wishes of the majority, and you have an unrepresentative class in Dublin and London who have consistently usurped the wealth and will of the Irish people to exercise their own sovereignty in life. As one British Minister said during the conflict on the reason they are still in Ireland, “we don’t want some sort of cold-water Cuba on our doorstep; giving the British working class ideas.”

But I want throughout the course of this article for each of you to go on a journey with me. Let’s say Michelle O’Neill, and I hope she does, leads candidates into this Westminster election. And let’s say she wins a landslide majority, against a Tory Brexit and in favour of Irish reunification. And let’s say as well, that the British government, under international pressure, calls an immediate border poll on the issue. Just for a second accompany me along the possibility that in such an instance, Sinn Fein defy the odds and capture the hearts and minds of the Irish people with a plan for a New Ireland – where the only division is that of class; where wealth and resources are redistributed according to need. An Ireland in which the pensioner in Ardoyne gets their surgery on time instead of dying on a waiting list or the student in Dublin is afforded proper housing instead of slum dwellings.

So, having won the referendum, there needs to be an election for a new national government. And in such circumstances, riding the tide of patriotic fervour and emotive sentiment, you have a replay of 1918 and Sinn Fein win a landslide majority for a National Government to oversee the expressed wishes and needs of the Irish people. You have a triumphant manifesto of the left-wing kind, which echoes the voices and hearts of all the dead generations – empowered on the sole basis of One Man, One Woman, One Vote.

That’s ideal to any right thinking person, for all right thinking people are in favour of Keynesian economic methods. But what about when it comes to implementing it? Taking the wealth of the affluent to grant to the poor? That’s when the real civil war in Ireland will begin. The first civil war happened because the bourgeois clique within nationalism hijacked the republican movement and usurped the Irish Republic in a coup d’etat against the democratic wishes of the Irish people, settling for a capitalist Free State. But the second such ploy, will happen when the Irish people win political democracy via reunification and go about trying to have economic and industrial democracy in redistributing wealth from rich to poor; from manager to worker.

When that moment occurs, every vested interest will be against us; the banks, the Civil Service, the Military, the Free State/Establishment parties, the media and global market forces. The British state will do what it always has done to control the internal affairs of the best customer, deploying their operatives within the various political, media and establishment circles, to undermine and collapse an elected government. We will be in a Gethsemane circumstance, walking that path, “ourselves alone”. In which case, any responsible Irish government will have to go to the country in an immediate general election, for a renewed mandate to carry out the policies of the first Dail.

What happens next is really dependent on you. The duty of each citizen, since the era of Magna Carta, has been to inform others of their rights and mobilise to protect and advance those rights under God. So you have to finish the story on the basis of one question – Who governs Ireland? Is it the men and women you elect, hire and fire, at the ballot box? Or the people in the shadows with no accountability, who you don’t elect and can’t remove. They often use the sound bite that when the power of love overcomes man’s love of power, the world will be at peace. But that removes the onus from you – for if ordinary working people were as crafty and single minded about protecting their interests as the Establishment are in protecting theirs, this country would be unrecognisable from the circumstances we live in today.