Rundale

Patrick Bresnihan

Thank you Katie for inviting me to be here today. I feel genuinely so honoured to be part of the Afri Famine Walk, and to walk alongside so many inspiring people.

I read a book a few years ago called Ireland, Colonialism and the Unfinished Revolution, by Bill Rolston and Robbie McVeigh. I’m sure many of you have also read it, or at least know Robbie who is a long-time friend and supporter of Afri.

The book was published in 2022 and was partly inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis. This happened during an arrest after a store clerk suspected Floyd had used a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill.

The killing of George Floyd led to massive social mobilisations and protests across the US but also across the world. It sparked a reckoning with the legacies of slavery, of colonialism and empire. And Ireland was no exception. There was a resurgence of debate about Ireland’s place in the British empire and its relationship to whiteness and race.

Robbie and Bill’s book was something that many of us had been waiting for. We were tired of reading revisionist debates on whether Ireland had been colonised or not, or how much Ireland had benefited from British imperialism, as though these complex realities could be weighed out and measured. There was no equivocating for Bill and Robbie. Ireland could only be understood through the lens of colonialism and imperialism – not just as an historical fact but as a continuous present. And at the heart of their book is An Gorta Mór.

Robbie calls it the British starvation, rather than the Irish Famine, because while the British empire was not quite at its height, it was the wealthiest country in the world, with colonies stretching from the Caribbean to the South Pacific. Ireland was not only part of that empire but also part of the union. And yet, 1 million people were allowed to die, another million forced to emigrate. How do you explain that scale of suffering other than through the logic of colonialism.

The unfinished revolution in the title of the book describes a situation we find in every formerly colonised part of the world. Formal independence from colonial rule was only ever partial. For Bill and Robbie, of course, the primary form of the unfinished revolution in Ireland remains partition – the fact that the six counties are still part of the United Kingdom, and not the Republic.

But, as they acknowledge, it is about more than borders and territory. What is the nature of the 26 county Republic today? What does it stand for?

This gets to the question that their entire book orbits around, a question I have been carrying around with me ever since, like a compass orientating my thinking and politics. ‘Are you with Republic or Empire?’.

Republic, here, is anti-colonial and anti-imperialist, it rejects the hierarchy of white and non-white, finding popular cause with the majority world that has also been subject to racist, colonial and imperialist domination.

Empire, on the other hand, maintains that hierarchy and domination, protecting the interests of the white, imperial core countries against the majority world.

For Robbie and Bill, the question ‘Are you with Republic or Empire?’ is not academic. One isn’t for or against republic or empire because of birth, nationality, gender or even class. It is a political choice – always a political choice.

They couldn’t have predicted just how urgent the question has become, and more urgent with each passing day.  The pogroms in Belfast being the most recent instance of racist violence that is now finding common cause across the border, loyalists and Irish ethnonationalists aligning with empire over republic. 

But when I was writing this I was thinking more about Yves Sekila.

A few days after he was killed by five security guards outside Arnott’s department store in Dublin city centre, a vigil took place. A video captured one man who I believe was also from the Congo, speaking with great passion to the camera: ‘We know the heart of Ireland’, he says. ‘This is not colonial France or UK. This is Ireland, a Republic’.

I don’t know much about Yves Sekila but from what I could find out he was brought to Ireland in 2004 as a young teenager by his aunt and uncle. When they separated he went into foster care at the age of 16. He then moved between periods of work, homelessness, and prison before being killed at the age of 33 for allegedly stealing perfume.

What did Yves Sekila imagine Ireland would be like when he moved here from his home in the Congo at the age of 13, a time when Ireland was already on its way to becoming one of the wealthiest countries in Europe?

Of course it is not just Yves who has been unable to live and die with dignity in a wealthy Ireland. I read in the paper last week of a new housing estate in Carlow that was meant to be entirely social housing. At the last minute the developer put half of the 48 houses out to the private market to ‘make the project viable’, as he put it. One of those on the waiting list was a mother whose child has severe asthma. They had been living in a rental for five years that was damp and full of mould.

I could stand here all day reciting such stories.

These are common problems that should turn into common politics, the fight for a republic of equals and a republic of care. Instead, the everyday insecurity produced by political decisions and the commodification of social goods, produces anger and resentment that is easily channelled against the weakest and those most easily ‘othered’. 

The man who spoke so well on Henry street was making the point that in Ireland, a republic, we should know how to take care of people like Yves Sekila, or at least know how not to brutalise and kill them. But we know that the story is more complex.

I was looking through the RTÉ archives recently to find footage of the Dunnes stores strikes – which also took place on Henry Street, back in 1984. A reporter interviews people in Dublin city centre and several respond ‘never mind about the people living over there [in South Africa], we need to look after our own’.

‘Are you for republic or empire?’

The question doesn’t just apply to how we treat people living here. It also applies to how we relate to the rest of the world. If the Republic was fought for on the promise of liberty and equality for all, this extended beyond the boundaries of the island.

After the carnage of WWII, a confident 26 county Republic asserted its commitment to decolonisation, self-determination and freedom from war within a new international system. In a speech to the UN in 1960, Frank Aiken, Minister for Foreign Affairs, spoke of Ireland’s “historical memory” of domination. “A memory”, he said, “which gives us a sense of brotherhood with the newly emerging peoples of today, a memory which makes it impossible for any representative of Ireland to withhold support for racial, religious, national or economic rights in any part of the world.”

In January of this year, when the US kidnapped the sitting head of state of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro and his wife, and politician in her own right, Cilia Flores, the Irish government did not condemn it.

When the US and Israel attacked Iran on February 28th, killing 120 school children in Minab, it took the government over a week to release a statement naming it as an illegal war. Worse, in February and March, as the US built up to the attack on Iran, over 6000 US troops passed through Shannon airport. 

Cuba remains under illegal US embargo, an entire population without access to basic medicines or fuel, a people literally being forced into submission by a foreign power, and yet nothing from government politicians.

And of course, Israel continues to bomb Gaza – 119 Palestinians killed in the month of May, the deadliest of 2026. 19 of these were children. Israel continues to extend its occupation of Lebanon and the West Bank. We have heard strong words from the government, but so little action and so much equivocation. They can’t even call off a football match.

‘Are you for republic or empire?’

I can’t finish with us only thinking of empire. As the man at the vigil on Henry Street reminds us, we should always invoke republic.

Since last May, I have been lucky enough to be involved in the Neutrality Roadshow, an idea hatched by Niamh ní Bhriain and Fionn Wallace. The roadshow has travelled all over the island of Ireland, hosted in pubs and community halls like this one. The aim has been to raise awareness about Irish neutrality and the implications of the government’s efforts to remove the triple lock.

What was most inspiring about the Roadshow was witnessing the deep subterranean currents of the republic running through the country, nourished by an older generation of anti-war activists, a diverse Republican movement, radical environmental struggles, an anti-colonial language revival, and a Palestine solidarity movement that is active the length and breadth of the island.

In Ballina, one man told us about his time in an Israeli prison after he had been arrested on the Freedom Flotilla in 2011. He and the other Irish contingent were due to be sent home but they refused to leave the prison until the Yemeni photographer who was with them was also sent home. This stand-off went on for weeks until the Israelis relented and the Yemeni man got home safely.

We have seen similar solidarity and compassion with the recent flotillas. After her brutal treatment at the hands of the IDF, the President’s sister, Margaret Connolly, said: ‘We must change the world and make it safe and kind, and not have some people treating other people like dogs.’

I’m really happy to say that my son Ted is here and is going to do the walk with us. He is just 9. He told me not to give a boring talk – I hope it wasn’t too boring.

I am trying to get him to read a book that my mum wrote in the mid 1990s called ‘The Alphabet Network’. It is set in Ireland in the mid-21^st century which is one of the few remaining places that has clean water and fertile soil. We learn that this is because of the Alphabet Network, an underground organisation of like-minded people who protected Ireland in the past from being sold off and destroyed. In the story, the network is re-activated because the government is once again trying to sell off the land and the resources. It’s a great story. I think of Afri and all those close to Afri as part of our Alphabet Network fighting for a just, inclusive republic.

Thank you.